Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says he was not surprised that Donald Trump won the election: “People were angry at whatever they called the state – the ‘swamp.’ Ineffective government. That people wanted kind of more pro-growth and pro-business policies, that they didn’t want to be lectured to on social policies continuously. I think it’s the lecturing part of it. It’s social superiority, it’s the ‘My way or the highway.’ I traveled all over the country; I felt it wherever I went.”
I asked, “There’s a sense of gloom out there about the economy. Do you understand that?”
“I do understand it, ’cause I think there are a lot of legitimate concerns that Americans have. For example, ineffective government, they’re angry about it. They’re angry about immigration. There’re people with legitimate issues.”
Despite lower unemployment, a calming of inflation, and a soaring stock marker, even he says he’s “cautiously pessimistic” about the economy. And as head of the largest bank in America, it matters what Dimon has to say about things.
Listen to him on Bitcoin, which he’s referred to as “a Ponzi scheme” and “as useless as a pet rock”: “We are going to have some kind of digital currency at some point. I’m not against crypto. You know, Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. It’s used heavily by sex traffickers, money launderers, ransomware. I just don’t feel great about Bitcoin. I applaud your ability to wanna buy or sell it. Just like I think you have the right to smoke, but I don’t think you should smoke!”
Since he took charge of the bank 20 years ago, the company has doubled its number of employees to 320,000, and grown its assets by nearly $3 trillion. Which probably would surprise his grandparents, who came to the U.S. from Greece with little money in the early 1900s.
Dimon spent much of his childhood in an apartment building in a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, sharing a room with his two brothers. Revisiting the street where he grew up, Dimon noted, “I broke my arm on those monkey bars over there.”
CBS News
I asked, “Did you ever dream when you were growing up, in a million years that you’d be running one of the biggest banks in the world?”
“No,” he replied. “My dad was a stockbroker. So, I was sometimes conscious of that part of the world. But I had never met a CEO until I was in college or something like that.”
He grew up to be one of most successful CEOs in the country, processing $10 trillion a day.
His bank is thriving and healthy, but Dimon, now 68, has had two major health scares. The first was throat cancer a decade ago.
He says it’s in remission: “But I know a little bit more,” he said. “People who have been told they have cancer know a little bit more than other people. That’s staring you right in the face and it may actually happen. You become a little more deliberate, a little more thoughtful. You don’t want to have regrets.”
He also had a heart scare in March 2020, at the beginning of COVID. “My heart, I just, I mean, the pain was extraordinary. I thought I heard it rip. It was an aortic dissection. I had a tear in the aorta.” He was told he might not make it.
I asked, “Going in for surgery, you know, at least you think in your mind, ‘I’ve lived the life I should’ve lived so far’?”
“Yeah. Not enough of it, but yeah,” Dimon laughed.
He woke up after seven or eight hours on the operating table: “The doctor told me I was one of the only people he’s ever seen wake up immediately after surgery like that. I waved at my kids, who had been sitting there the whole time. And then, I was back asleep in the ICU.
“Waking up in the ICU, I mean, like, when you’re a man who’s never had to rely on other people really, and all of a sudden you have tubes everywhere and you can’t do anything yourself, and you know, you got tubes in your heart and tubes in your lungs and tubes down your jugular…”
He was in the hospital for a week, back at work a month later, and soon traveling the world, which he does, he says, 40 percent of his time.
We met him in the executive suite on the 43rd floor of the bank’s Manhattan headquarters. From there, he can see where he grew up – and to the left, the nearly-twice-as-high, dazzling new JPMorgan headquarters going up next door, which he says will be taller than the Empire State Building.
With all the big things he deals with, it’s interesting that one of the things Dimon is most proud of is opening branches in lower-income and underserved communities around the country. Visiting one branch in Harlem, he noted, “Mortgage documentation is really hard to do. So, in one of these community branches, a guy stood up and he said he finally bought a home that he’d lived in for 30 years. He said there’s no way he could have gotten that mortgage if one of our mortgage loan officers didn’t call him every day for months, taking him through it, making him feel comfortable, getting the forms. He got our homeowner’s grant. And it works.”
This isn’t a not-for-profit; these local branches make money for the bank.
CBS News
But what about the other end of the spectrum? Asked about the increasing wealth of the very rich and what might be “out of whack” with the system, Dimon replied, “I think you have to be very careful to say, ‘What’s outta whack?’ You want a healthy economy, and a really healthy economy lifts up all citizens. You want to help all Americans? Grow the economy. You can wail at the moon. That’s not going to grow the economy. And if there are unfair things that created some of that wealth, they should be fixed.”
“But I’m not hearing you say, ‘There’s something wrong here that there are these billionaires growing like poppy.’ I mean, what is it? The tax laws?”
“If I was king for a day, I would probably change a bunch of the tax laws, too, which I’m not gonna give you specifics on. It won’t reduce it as much as you seem to think it should be reduced.”
“No. But I’m interested that you’re not saying, ‘This is wrong. This is not working.'”
“I think the wrong part is that the bottom 30% didn’t do better, not that the top 0.1% did so well.”
“Why not?”
“They may be unrelated. What we need to do to fix it for everybody …”
“But you haven’t said what’s wrong at the other end?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong at the other end,” Dimon replied.
Dimon himself is a billionaire. We asked him about the richest person in the world, Elon Musk. “He’s clearly an extraordinary talent,” Dimon said. “I mean, to look at Tesla and SpaceX, yeah, well, we should make government more efficient. Is this the way to do it? I don’t know. Do I want them to succeed? Absolutely.”
But it’s odd to have a man who’s so wealthy, with so many important companies that matter to our economy and even to our national security, now sort of insinuating that he can influence right-wing politics in Europe. It doesn’t sound right, does it?”
Dimon said, “I’m not responsible for his behavior, so let him do it. But when you say it’s odd, it’s not that odd. It’s been going on in this country for a long time. If you go back to Lindbergh, there’s been more interfering in cross-Atlantic politics than you would think.”
“Are you distressed by it?”
“No.”
“Take it in stride?”
“Take it in stride.”
“Somebody called him an oligarch, an American oligarch.”
“Yeah, that’s name-calling.”
Dimon has been in banking for more than 40 years, which leads to the inevitable question: When will he retire? “Last time I was asked, I said, less than five years. But when you say retire, I’m not going to retire like that. I may write a book. I may teach. I may work with my kids, if they want. I would never pressure them to work with me.”
“I didn’t hear you say, ‘I might become chairman and, you know, just give up the CEO part.'”
“Oh, that’s likely. That’s likely to happen. Again, that is up to the board, not up to me. But if it makes sense, I may be chairing for a couple years.”
He says he does not know whom his successor might be. But one thing he does know: “I love my job. I love what it does. I like our people. It motivates me. Like a lotta people, by Friday I’m exhausted. I want to go home, I want to have my martini and go to sleep! But I do love my job. I think it’s great to have a purpose in life. You know, paint your Picasso.”
WEB EXTRA: Watch an extended interview with Jamie Dimon
For more info:
Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Ed GIvnish.
