Jamie's right

The WSJ reports that JP Morgan's CEO is skeptical of the broker/dealer's newly published capital ratios:

"I challenge those numbers," Mr. Dimon said, throwing a verbal roundhouse at rivals Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

He went on to question whether the methods the investment banks used to calculate a measure of financial strength known as the Tier 1 ratio were the same as those used by commercial banks.

In fact Dimon wasn't tough enough. He went on to say: "I'm not sure that those investment banks are using true Basel II type numbers, but we don't know the detail." In fact we do know that the SEC capital requirements are definitely not true Basel II type numbers. So Lehman's "Tier 1 ratio", say, at 13%, doesn't mean what you might think it does. Caveat lector.