Dimon has now joined the Lou Club As I watched Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, on TV this week, I was reminded of my time in the Lou Club. That was the name given to students at my high school on Long Island who had been suspended from classes for misbehaviour and who could be found on a bench outside the principal's office awaiting justice. The name derived from the fact that a kid known as Lou was invariably on that bench. Lou wasn't his real name; people just called him that, and I never knew why. But the reason for his prominence wasn't in doubt. He was nuts; the last time I saw him was at a party on graduation night where he hit another boy in the face with a beer can, removing an amazing amount of flesh in the process. I gained entry to the Lou Club one time for an embarrassing offence: a repeated failure to provide my school with my father's office phone number. My only excuse is that I speak of the days when young people avoided interrupting their fathers at work and mobile phones with address books didn't exist, so I didn't really know his number. Sure, I could have written it down. But I didn't and landed in the Lou Club. I wasn't comfortable there. I avoided eye contact with others as much as possible before being summoned into the assistant principal's office. Then it got rough. The assistant principal gave me a dressing down fit for a felon: "You should be ashamed of yourself," "You can't go on behaving this way," "You have to shape up," etc. The funny thing was that I had been in that same office the previous day to read the end-of-the-day announcements over the public address system, as I often did. The assistant principal knew me; you could even say we were friendly. But now that I was on the list of suspended students he pretended otherwise and delivered a scolding that sounded sincere but was suspiciously short on details. I'm not sure he even knew what I had done. When he had finished yelling, he simply said: "Get out of here." You would expect something more thorough from our leaders in Congress. But we didn't get that on Wednesday when Mr Dimon appeared before the Senate banking committee to discuss a big trading loss at JPMorgan. Like so many of the hearings that have followed the financial crisis - with the notable exception of Michigan Senator Carl Levin's grilling of Goldman Sachs executives - it was like a trip to the assistant principal's office, a ritual with little educational value. The key moment for me came when the committee chairman, Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota, said: "I ask the clerk to put five minutes on the clock for each member." That's hardly enough time to get to the bottom of things. By way of comparison, I would note it took Bob Dylan more than six minutes to conclude the one-sided conversation of the song "Like a Rolling Stone." To pin down the determined Mr Dimon as he darted from such subjects as JPMorgan's Basel I tier one common ratio to its Basel III tier one common ratio you would need a less hurried inquiry. But it wasn't to be. Instead, we got an extended photo op, complete with sound bites polished for the local news. Consider the keeping-it-classy comments of Sherrod Brown, the Ohio senator. "You have some 19,000 employees in the Columbus (Ohio) area who are also my constituents, so we have a mutual interest in your institution running safely and soundly," he told Mr Dimon. I don't want to see consumer lenders in Columbus losing their jobs because cowboys in London make too many risky bets. And now, the weather! It could have been worse, of course. Bankers complain about their treatment at these Capitol Hill events, but they are nothing like the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. I haven't heard of any Wall Street traders who are being forced to work under assumed names because in a moment of youthful exuberance they bought tranches of super-senior collateralised debt obligation. But the inquiry this week could have been more substantial. I'm thinking of something like the Watergate hearings of the 1970s, which combined deep investigative dives with wide-ranging discussions of our national purpose - and in the process inspired young people of the time, such as yours truly. What we got on Wednesday was a reminder of that old saying that life is a lot like high school, which left me feeling much as I did that day in the assistant principal's office - ready for higher education and anxious to be somewhere else.