Writing a profile about someone who is not cooperating with your story starts to feel a little bit like an exercise in stalking. I did not actually stalk Ina Drew, the chief investment officer who resigned from JPMorgan Chase following the bank’s $6 billion loss, as I reported on her for the magazine last October. But I did think about her for many of my waking moments throughout the summer of 2012, as I reported the story. I also showed up at her home once. I rang the doorbell, and met her husband, a tall, genial-looking man who told me that she was not available and would not talk to me, not that day and not anytime soon.
“You haven’t met Ina?” a former colleague of hers had told me on my cellphone, as I was making the drive to her home. “You gotta meet Ina!” I had started to feel the same way, since I had been researching her youth, her early trailblazing career in finance, her last, fragile days at JPMorgan. I was surprised to find out just how hard it is to put together a cohesive portrait of someone you have never met or caught on video or heard on tape. She was tough, people told me, but warm; she had a baby-doll voice, but cursed like a sailor. She was smart enough to guess right more often than not about the market, but could come across as ditzy, prone in her youth to fender benders and tone-deaf jokes. I made her friends do impersonations of her voice so I could glean her accent, her tone; I still did not have the sense I had met her or even glimpsed her in action hovering around the frame of some movie.
Drew ran a popular morning meeting at the chief investment office for years, but also, I knew, hated to speak in public in unfamiliar settings. Whatever her failings, I found myself feeling nervous for her when I heard she would be grilled at the Senate Committee hearings on Friday about JPMorgan’s losses. I also wondered: How close to what I had imagined would she be? Sometimes you spend months preoccupied by a book, and then cannot enjoy the movie because you think the producers have miscast the lead. Whose casting work would I complain about if I felt that way watching Drew?
I had guessed that Drew would be careful and apologetic at the hearing, graciously and expansively bearing responsibility. Throughout the crisis, Jamie Dimon at least made a lot of noise that sounded as if he were taking full responsibility for the fiasco, Janet Reno-style, and it had worked for him so far; I assumed that Drew would adopt the same approach, and had maybe even been coached to do so.
Drew started out by talking about her career at JPMorgan Chase, how devoted she was to the business for decades. The job, she said, with grim emphasis, was, “my life’s work.” That was the first cue that Ina Drew would not be offering elegant, high-minded apologias — to the contrary, she set the stage for the testimony that would follow, all of it building the theme that she had been wronged, rather than gone wrong. “Clearly mistakes were made,” Drew said — implication: not by her — though the fact that they happened on her watch was “the most painful part” of her professional career.
Drew started out by talking about her career at JPMorgan Chase, how devoted she was to the business for decades. The job, she said, with grim emphasis, was, “my life’s work.” That was the first cue that Ina Drew would not be offering elegant, high-minded apologias — to the contrary, she set the stage for the testimony that would follow, all of it building the theme that she had been wronged, rather than gone wrong. “Clearly mistakes were made,” Drew said — implication: not by her — though the fact that they happened on her watch was “the most painful part” of her professional career.
Time and time again, Drew threw blame on the risk-management team and underlings who “significantly understated the true risks in the book.”
Even if Drew had no idea about what was going on (a contention that Carl Levin, the head of the committee, seemed to have a hard time believing), the story she told raised questions about how well her office functioned. At no point did Drew say what her critics might: that in a different office culture, or one where Drew was assumed to understand the complex trades in the synthetic credit portfolio that went wrong, those deceptions might not have occurred; that if she had stronger people on her own risk-management team, the team in London might not have felt so free to make the mismarkings of which they were accused. Maybe some different leader might have inspired more loyalty in a far-flung team overseas, or had more realistic expectations for how many windfalls one team could be expected to have, or made more room for people to jump rank and blow whistles.
But Drew was not there to make concessions. She said, essentially, that she had been lied to and had relied on the expertise of those who worked for her, and she had resigned “though I did not and do not believe I bore personal responsibility for the losses in the synthetic credit book.” Whatever pertinent information she had about the fiasco as it unfolded, Dimon knew it, too, she made clear.
Drew was tough. She seemed indignant. And she showed the very quality that may have been part of her downfall, as everyone always said of her all along: she was defensive. In general, Drew had an excellent instinct for how to manage risk; in her testimony Friday, she took some risks in being so defensive, but she seemed to walk away relatively unscathed. When a television reporter asked Drew how it went as she headed out, Drew said one word: “Good.” She gave up little; perhaps she gained some satisfaction. To the extent that I had pictured her at all, she was just what I had pictured, only more so.
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