Byron Dorgan: “I wanted to note during this discussion some commentary this week about something that is quite extraordinary. We saw…”

“I wanted to note during this discussion some commentary this week about something that is quite extraordinary. We saw news reports this week about a perfect game that was pitched in the Major Leagues recently by a pitcher from the Oakland Athletics named Braden. In all of the history of baseball, it was the 19th perfect game ever pitched. But it is not the only perfect thing that has happened recently. We have news reports now that the four biggest banks in America have scored a perfect 61-day run, never having lost money in 61 days. That is like a perfect game, batting 1,000. It is all of those things. How is it that the four largest banks in the country could, for the first quarter of the year, make money every single day? Is the system rigged? A columnist named Jonathan Well pointed out that if you managed a highly leveraged, diversified investment fund and have become so skilled at it that you had a 70-percent probability of winning on any given trading day, the prospect of your winning 63 times in a row would be about 1.75 billion. Even if you had a 95-percent chance of winning every day because you were so skilled at picking all of the right investments, you would have about a 3.9-percent chance of doing it on 63 straight trading days. And yet four of the largest banks in America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citi, scored a perfect game. How did that happen?”