I'm just wondering about the "threatened" part. Dimon says "We were asked to because we were told, I think correctly so that if the nine banks there, and some may have needed it, take this Tarp we can get it to all these other banks and stop the system from going down." Doesn't sound like he was threatened, or even needed persuading.

Threatened may well be too strong. Not given a choice is probably closer to the mark.

I strongly suspect that what he meant here was that he accepted the reasoning for asking all the big banks to participate. Not that he agreed that JPM needed the funding.

With Lehman down and ML and MS likely to go on the Monday, I can quite well imagine that everyone there accepted that a large, collective response was the only realistic option.