John Oliver: Did J.P. Morgan Just Get the Idea to go Into Sex Trafficking?

"The Daily Show" sub-host frets that the mega-bank may have gotten the messages mixed at a Senate subcommittee hearing

John Oliver thinks that J.P. Morgan and its "Too Big to Fail" ilk may have gotten the wrong idea from a Senate Banking Subcommittee hearing this week.

Attorney Randall D. Guynn was attempting to justify the financial service industry's manipulation of commodity-hoarding laws by noting that people in ancient Mesopotamia used physical commodities like grain and salt as currency.

That prompted Saule T. Omarova, associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina and an opponent of the financial gymnastics taking place, to note that just because banks had at one point in human history profited from the slave trade doesn't mean they should be involved in human trafficking.

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"You know that someone at J.P. Morgan just saw that and went, 'wait we’re not financing human trafficking? Have you seen the profit margins on Romanian sex slaves?'" Oliver said.

The battle of historical analogies was prompted by a New York Times report this week that Goldman Sachs was having drivers shuffle aluminum from one warehouse to another in order to control the price of the good by keeping it out of the marketplace.

Oliver noted that allusions to early civilizations might not be applicable.

"If your excuse for everything is, 'well, Hammurabi did it,' then I think you're on shaky ground," Oliver quipped.

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