In May 2012, he described himself as "barely a Democrat" stating,  After Obama won the 2008 presidential election, there was speculation that Dimon would serve in the Obama Administration as Secretary of the Treasury. Obama eventually named the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, to the position. Following the acquisition of Washington Mutual by JPMorgan Chase, Obama commented on Dimon's handling of the real-estate crash, credit crisis, and the banking collapse affecting corporations nationwide, including major financial institutions like Bank of America, Citibank, and Wachovia (later acquired by Wells Fargo). Dimon has had close ties to some people in the Obama White House, including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dimon was one of three CEOs—along with Lloyd Blankfein and Vikram Pandit—said by the Associated Press to have had liberal access to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Nonetheless, Dimon has often publicly disagreed with some of Obama's policies. On the May 15, 2012, episode of ABC's "The View", Obama responded to a question from Whoopi Goldberg regarding JPMorgan Chase's recently publicized $2 billion trading losses by defending Dimon against allegations of irresponsibility, saying, "first of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we've got", but added, "it's going to be investigated". In December 2016, Dimon joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues. In the case of the 2012 JPMorgan Chase trading loss, according to a US Senate report published in March 2013 after 9 months of investigation, Dimon misled investors and regulators in April as losses rose dangerously to $6.2 billion on a "monstrous" derivatives bet made by the so-called "London Whale" Bruno Iksil. According to Carl Levin, chairman of this panel, JP Morgan had "a trading operation that piled on risk, ignored limits on risk taking, hid losses, dodged oversight and misinformed the public". Dimon dismissed press accounts of possible losses in Iksil's book as a "tempest in a teapot" on April 13, 2012 when he knew that Iksil had already lost $1 billion, which led Levin to say "None of those statements made on April 13 to the public, to investors, to analysts were true," and "The bank also neglected to disclose on that day that the portfolio had massive positions that were hard to exit, that they were violating in massive numbers key risk limits."