Dimon Challenges Bernanke on Wall Street Rules

“They threw out the first ball, now can they play the game?” said William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in an interview yesterday. “How persuasively can Dimon and others make their case?”

Dimon, head of the most profitable U.S. bank, took an unusual step in pressing Bernanke in a public forum on June 7 on whether regulators have gone too far in reining in the U.S. banking system and are slowing economic growth. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent in May as the S&P/Case- Shiller index of property values in 20 cities showed that U.S. home prices slumped in March to their lowest since 2003.