Acquired - The Jamie Dimon Interview

0:00David, we completely blew it. We went into Jamie Diamond's office, had our little meat and greet. We did not ask about the dual pistols. Yeah. From the dual Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which JP Morgan owns and keeps in their headquarters, and we blew it. We didn't ask to see them. We'll just have to come back. When they finish the new building, I'm sure they will be in the executive floor. We can go get a viewing of the, you know, piece of American history.

0:30All right, speaking of American history, let's do it. Let's do it. Welcome to the summer 2025 season of acquired. The podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today's episode is the story of a rising star on Wall Street in the 1980s who worked with his mentor to merge and acquire their way to the top of the financial world in the 90s who then got fired unexpectedly By that same mentor who cast about deciding what to do next and then in 2000 accepted a job turning around a poorly run Midwestern bank. Then over the next 25 years he would orchestrate one of the most remarkable runs in banking history and really all of corporate history. This is the story of Jamie Dimon and how he created the modern financial behemoth JP Morgan chase out of the beleaguered component parts of bank one.

1:56JP Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual and First Republic. Jamie is now the longest serving CEO of any major Wall Street bank and is viewed as kind of the great stabilizer of the American financial system, especially during the 2008 financial crisis. He now sits atop the largest bank in the US with an over $800 billion market cap, which is more than twice their nearest competitor. They are the only bank within spitting distance of the sort of big trillion dollar tech companies that we've covered here are unacquired and to really put a finer point on the dominance, they are the most valuable company east of the Mississippi in the United States and the only company east of the Mississippi worth more than half of trillion dollars. Incredible. So the question, of course, is how did he do it? I mean, banks fail. Financial firms often have spectacular blowups and large organizations, period, financial or not can often get so bloated that they slow down to a crawl.

2:55So what did Jamie Dimon do differently? Well, today's episode, we have Jamie with us, himself, to tell the story. We recorded this live in front of 6,000 acquired fans at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. So you'll notice it's a different format than our usual episode. We're always trying to figure out what version of acquired works live with an audience, and this is our latest iteration.

3:17The Radio City show also had a second act, a late-night talk show where we had conversations with the CEO of the New York Times, Meredith Cobot-Levian, and the chairman of IAC, Barry Diller, plus some cameos from around the acquired cinematic universe. And we cannot wait to share all of that with you at a later date. Well, if you want to know every time an episode drops, check out our email list, acquired.fm slash email, come join the Slack and talk about this with us afterwards, acquired.fm slash Slack.

3:46If you want more required between each monthly episode, check out ACQ2, our interview show, where we talk with founders and CEOs, building businesses and areas we've covered on the show. So with that, this show is not investment advice. Dave and I may have investments from companies we discuss. And this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only on to our conversation with Jamie Dimon. Well, this feels appropriate. You guys dressed up for me. You dressed up for us too. Thank you.

4:14Last year we had you on the video board at Chase and you were looking very summary there. You look great tonight. Yes. Well, we know you're a big history buff and we consider ourselves historians evolve all else. So what we'd like to do here tonight is walk through the 20-year story with you of sort of how you turned JP Morgan Chase from a bank among many to the most systemically important financial institution in the world. Are you game? Sound good?

4:44Sounds great, thank you. We want to start in 1998. You and your mentor, Sandy Wilde, have just spent the past 13 years building the modern financial institution conglomerate. Really, the blueprint for what JP Morgan Chase is today, except it's not JP Morgan, it's City Group. And everybody on Wall Street in the entire world expects that you are going to be named CEO of City Group.

5:14in short order. This is 1998. This is not what happens. Instead, you get fired. And you have to restart your whole career, everything, your whole life, from scratch. Sorry to start here, by the way. But before we get into what you do next, what was the model that you and Sandy built at Citigroup? Okay. First of all, I am thrilled to be here. I want to congratulate these guys for building the acquired.

5:42It's a great intelligence addition to what we need to learn in society. And so I would say it wasn't quite the model because if you look at what we did at commercial credit primaries, then travelers and mercs, we were a financial conglomerate.

5:56We bought lots of companies and lots of different businesses, we fixed them up, we turned around, we made money, and then we merged it with Citibank, which obviously was a huge bank. And you know, my view is we should skin you down and kind of shed the parts that aren't that important to the rest of the company and keep the things that strategically belong together together. It was one of my small disagreements with Sandy about the future of the company. But it was big, it was making a lot of money, it was quite successful at the time, and then I got fired.

6:26So, how are you feeling in that moment? When I got fired? Yeah, that moment. Well, my wife is here, and I was hosting 100 people recruiting kids in my apartment in New York City, same apartment I have now. And they called me, we haven't imagined me to Sunday at 4 p.m. that night. And Sandy and John Reed called me and said, can you come a little early? We got a bunch of stuff to talk about. I was the president chief operating officer. I said, I can't. They said, well, it's really important, so I drove up there.

6:55And I sat down in the room with Sandy and John and they said, they want to make a few changes. And they have three of them. And they said, one we want to make this person in charge of that. I was okay, but it makes sense to me. The second one, they wanted to make someone in charge of the Global Investment Bank, which I was running. I thought it was another stupid decision. And the third, they said, everyone, you resign. And I said, okay, because at that moment, I knew it was all arranged.

7:23The boards had voted. The press release was written. The management team was coming up. So I waited, you know, for the management team to come up. I wished them the best. I said, you guys have a chance to build one of the great companies. They all thanked me. Sandy said he wanted to do the press with me. I said, yeah, but I'll do it from home. So I went home. Went to see my kids. They were like, one of my daughters here too. They were like, 12, 14, 12 and 10. And I walked in the front door. And I tell them, I was fired.

7:51And the youngest one says, daddy, do we have to sleep on the streets? I said, no, no, we're okay. And the middle one was always obsessed with college for some reason. I still go to college and he said, yeah, and the one who was here was the oldest one said, great, since you don't need it, I have your cell phone. And then that night, about 50 people came over.

8:13All the same people I just met, all the management team, bringing whiskey, and it was like, you're on wake. And there's one really tall guy that came in, a very good friend of mine, and my daughter looks up and says, who are you? He says, I work for your daddy. And he says, not anymore, you know? And that was it. I was okay. You know, I was like, I told Pios, you're my net worth, not my self worth, that was involved.

8:37And for anyone who doesn't sort of already know Jamie's story, you were the rising star. I mean, you were, the city was the biggest bank, you were the era parent. I mean, this was like unfathomable and for you to take it this gracefully, you know, it says a lot. So, you're sort of wandering in the woods as I best I can kind of reconstruct it for about 18 months, is that right? Figuring out what's next? Yeah. I took me a while to exit and sign agreements and get out.

9:07They were kind of mean. But then I stepped into office and it was late. We went for a nice long vacation and stuff like that. When I got back in September, so I was six months later, I started going to work here. I had nothing to do if I went from, you know, to nine to five and started calling people and thinking about what I'm going to do. It was in the Seagulls buildings, so I could go for lunch downstairs every day. At the four seasons? At the four seasons. I explored everything. I saw my own merchant bank. I could have retired just teaching, just investing.

9:36but I was 42. And you took a call about running Amazon, right? Did he? You took a call about running Amazon, didn't you? I went to, I loved, I went to visit Jeff Bezos, who was looking for a president at the time. He and I hit it off. We've been friends ever since. He's an exceptional human being, but it was like a bridge too far. Even though that movie just came out when Sally met Harry. I was thinking, my God, I'll never wear suit again. I'm a living the houseboat. Yeah. This would be really great.

10:00What an alternate universe we'd be living in. It would have been an alternate universe, but I'm still good friends with Jeff, so I got at least one good thing out of it. And then I got serious, you know, and I was offered jobs to run, you know, big, other big global investment banks. Hank Greenberg, a grant AIG called me up and said, you should come join us. I was thinking, I'm gonna go from Sandy Wild to you. I mean, not that my head exam, it's just something like that. And then I didn't know the AIG story. Yeah, well, that happened years later, too.

10:30Now, I got a phone call from a headhunter about Bank 1. And I was also, you guys, a lot of you probably know Ken Langeone and Bernie Marcus are the Blank ran at home Depot. I loved them. But at my first dinner with them, I went to see the land. So I have to make a confession. And to you guys called, I'd never been in a home Depot. And we were actually wondering, David and I were debating. Yeah, we were talking about that. My friend, my friend maybe go up there and get some equipment and plants and stuff like that.

10:58But I love their culture, their attitude, they want me to do it. Kenlon Goen says, I still should have gotten you. I wasn't going to pay you enough. Of course, I had nothing to do with anything like that. And I had bank one. But bank one was my habitat. I was used to financial companies, services, banking. It wasn't quite global. It was a little global at the time. And it was a troubled bank. And I decided that life is what you make it. It was hard in my family. I had to move, I think, for Anyone who's going to move kids that you know that I think they were 14 12 months It's hard some context on bank one for folks who are not familiar It's not in New York. It's a large bank, but it's a trouble bank. Yeah, it's based in Chicago large David. It's a it's a $30 billion market cap bank city group where you just had been before was a 200 billion dollar bank There's 21 billion at the time because it had you you have the right numbers, but it's split and so if you look back as much 20 20 billion something like that. Yeah

11:54And City was 200, but I didn't worry about that. I was like, you know, in life, you make things what they are. I don't like complaining about over spilled milk. You know, you just put on your pants, you get going and see if you can make out of it. But you, it sounds like you had opportunities to stay in New York to run bigger, more glamorous things. This is when I was going to run the company.

12:13The other ones would have been some investment banks. I didn't really trust some of the people who were talking about that. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that I explored. I took phone calls, some small companies, some big companies, there's a couple of subprime mortgage companies who called me. And I was like, absolutely not. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. And so I just thought this was a chance, you know. And, you know, if the family is willing to move, we got a nice...

12:38took us a while. We lived in a rental for a while, but got a nice brownstone. And we end up loving Chicago. Chicago is a wonderful city in a lot of different ways. And I guess that is what you make it. And I put half my money in the stock at the time. I tied my, I was going to be the captain of the ship. I was going to go down with the ship.

12:57You know, I made it clear to everyone. I was here permanently and it'll be what it is. And so I got to work like literally the next day. Did we do the math right that right before you joined Bank 1, you bought $60 million of stock? I did. I mean, I've never heard of someone taking a CEO job and saying, I'm going to invest half my net worth in this company now. Yeah. And I thought it might be overvalued a little bit because there's...

13:21People thought it might be sold or something like that, but I didn't care about that. If you work at a company and the new CEO comes in from out of town, and you're going to have a lot of shareholders, and I knew a lot of the shareholders, I was going to know a lot of the shareholders. I wanted to know, I was in a hundred percent. Lock stock and barrel. There was no question, I would never sell that stock, and I'm going to go down with the ship or go up with the ship. And they also knew I was making decisions that I thought were right for the long-term health of the company.

13:48not for a short term type of thing. So, what did you find when you got there? Day one on the job, you start investigating. Is it better or worse the same than you thought? You know, there had been an analyst called Mike May, who had done a report. I remember one of the great lines of the report, even Hercules, couldn't fix it. It had been an amalgamation of bank one, first Chicago national bank of Detroit. They'd never put the companies together. So they had multiple statement systems, processing systems, payment systems, you know, SAP systems.

14:17They had different brands, you know services coming down. We were losing accounts. They were closing branches. It was a mess. But you know, it was all of its systems, people, ops. But again, I just, you know, I just, I met the management team. I, it's hard. You know, I walked in. I met six of the directors. I, there were 21 directors. Eleven hated the other 10. Yeah, I mean, even, wait, wait, wait. There were 21.

14:44Board members 21 board members from the merge multiple acquisitions They they were tribal ended up hating each other. I knew that when I went in cuz I knew one people and you know I spoke to a lot of people did research in the bank But again in life you get handed these things that is not perfect You know even today people want to be handed something perfect is not perfect and I was so I met six the directors. I walked in When I got off at the job, I shook all their hands. I told them I'm going to do the best I do. I'm telling the truth, the whole truth, nothing but truth, the good, the bad, the ugly. We're not going to bullshit. We're going to try to build a great company. I'm going to need your help. And then they said, they left. So now I'm on the executive floor. I don't even know where to go. And so I knocked on someone's door the head of HR. I said, I do need an office, and I really need an assistant.

15:32And they were going to give me the chairman's office in the corner. I said, no, no, I want to be right in the middle so I can see people and stick my head out. And then I went to meet the management team. I went to this, they put them all in this conference room, a nice white plush carpets. I walked in with a cup of coffee and they said, Jamie, we don't drink coffee here for obvious reasons. So I looked at them, I looked at the coffee, I looked at them, I said, you do now.

16:01And then I just started me with them all, and the systems were terrible. The company's losing money. I didn't know all the businesses really well, so the credit card company had collapsed. That's probably the business I knew the least. But again, it didn't matter. I was going to try to fix it. It had some good assets and things like that. So I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, LaGora.

16:28the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus.

16:57They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with.

17:15Lagora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

17:29And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves when they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor they win 70% of the time LaGora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries and crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months truly insane numbers and that is the real test

18:21Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. When we were chatting a couple of weeks ago, I'm preparing for this. We asked you in context of JP Morgan, like, what are the critical things in your mind that has made JP Morgan what it is saying. The first thing you said was risk and was risk and the culture around risk and the fundamental risk. Understanding by management of risk. When you got to Bank 1, I think this is where you first started putting into practice the culture around risk. What was the risk culture at Bank 1 and how did you change it? I've always been very risk conscious and risk conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means

19:18Properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes And so when I got there, you know, I just started meeting people and going through I quickly realized that bank one had more US corporate credit risk than city bank did and they the way the account is for it was unbelievably aggressive. And so they had less capital, less reserves, less this. They were calling these things profitable. They were basically losing money. And loans in a lot of business, you have to be very careful about the credit business. And once I found out that, I kind of panicked a little bit. And I went through every single loan in the books. I marked them all down, put up more reserves, told the board about it, and then wanted to earn more revenues per dollar of risk.

20:03So, for example, in the middle market business, we had for every loan NII, we had like 80 cents and 20 cents. Net interest income for that. Net interest income from the loan, and 20 cents of other revenue like payments. But the time we merged with JP Morgan, we had 40 NII for the loan, and 60% NII from other type of things like payments. And one, you're being paid for the risk, and one, you're being paid little for the risk. And I always stress tested, and I showed the board that we have a recession, and we were about to have one.

20:32How much money we'd lose in credit? So I hired a woman called Linda Bamman who said, OK, if you're going to let me do credit, you're going to let me sell the loans. They said, yes. I mean, let me hedge loans, yes. Can I do 10 billion? I said, yes. She said, OK, I'll join. And we probably reduced the balance sheet by 50 billion because, and then we did have a recession, but we were kind of OK by them with one big bad one, which is united, which went bankrupt. And we basically owned it for a small period of time. There seems to be kind of a fundamental Jamie Dimey.

21:01Jamie Dimonism, which is, don't blow up. I mean, a lot of other people have gotten decent at pricing risk, but everyone else seems to be willing to get closer to the line than you. Where did you sort of develop this? Don't blow up at all costs? Around risk is always an ecosystem. You've always heard it. Everyone's doing it. Everyone's okay. This is going to work. This time is different. And the history tells you, learn to teach you a lot. And I always say you treat it. And my dad was a stockbroker.

21:31And so I bought my first document as 14. In 1972, the stock market hit a thousand. It hit a thousand in 1968. I was already helping a little bit with stuff. By 1974, it was down 45%. All the limousines in Wall Street were gone. Restaurants were being closed. You know, markets move, violently.

21:54And then, you know, we had kind of a recovery. In 1980, had a recession. 82, you had a recession. In 1982, it was lower than been in 1968. And then in 1987, the market was down 25% and one day in 1990, all these banks, JP Morgan, City, Chase, Chemical, were all taken to their knees by real estate losses. And they were all worth about a billion dollars. I mean, I think City was three billion at the time and the other ones were about a billion dollars. And then it had the 97 also real estate related thing. You have the 2000 internet bubble, you know, and then you have the great financial crisis. And I could, if you go through history, there's tons of these things. Andrew R. Sorkin is in here and I just read his book. He's nice enough to send it to me on 1929. And man, history does rhyme. Too much leverage, too much risk. Everyone thinks it's gonna be great. No one thinks it can go down a lot. You know, that stock market went down 20% one year, 30% next year, 20% next year, and one point is down 90%.

22:52You know, shit happens. It seems like your philosophy is that the worst thing will happen. So just plan for it. Don't say, oh, we're good as long as this crazy insane, you know, for Sigma event doesn't happen. You're like, no, that will happen and happens often. Yeah, so when I look at it, I always ask, like when I do stress testing a risk for high yield, I remember getting to JP Morgan and going through the risk books.

23:18and their their stress test was that high yield would move 40% the credit spread that's good and at the time was it 400 or whatever it was that means five five 60 okay and I said no our stress test is gonna be worst ever worst ever was 17% and they said they'll never happen again the markets more sophisticated one oh eight it at 20% and you couldn't have sold the bond there was no market so you know those things do happen and the point isn't that you're trying to guess the point is you You can handle them so you can continue building your business. And so I always look what I call the fat tails and manage that we can handle all the fat tails. And not the stress test the Fed gives us, but all the fat tails. Marcus down 50% interest rates up to 8% credit spreads back to worst ever. Of course your results will be worse, but you're there. And the thing about financial services, leverage kills you. Aggressive accounting can kill you, which a lot of companies do do.

24:15And, you know, the goal should be, and also, confidence, if you lose money as a financial company, I always knew this too. The headlines are, you know, people read that, and they're relying on putting their money with you, they look at that difference. They lose trust. They lose trust. And that's which cause you've seen runs on banks, and you've saw this recently, because people take their money out. There's a thing that you just said, which is that you might do worse, but you're there.

24:43There's sort of this tradeoff that you make where you're less profitable in the short term, but at least you stick around. If you look back at the companies that you've run, big one, JP Morgan Chase, is that true in the good years that you've actually been less profitable than those who are kind of risk on? Yeah, a little bit. Are you saying that, you know, if you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were in 30% equity. Most of them in bankrupt. We never did that much.

25:11Okay, but an oh eight no nine we were fine and they weren't and so But you want to build a real strong company with real margins real clients conservative accounting where you're not relying on leverage and it's very easy to use levers to you know to jack up returns in any business You know and but in banking it could be particularly dangerous, so it seems like a core part if not the entirety of this distilled into your operating strategy is the Fortress balance sheet. When did you first hear about the Fortress balance sheet? I've been talking, I go way back to Primeraq, I used to talk about that. You're going to be able to survive the tough times. Probably the 1990s and like I said, I grew up my father and I went through those market things. I remember how hard it was on people in Wall Street but the Fortress balance sheet is that you run a company serving clients well.

26:06You have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I'm as conservative in accounting you can find. I don't up front profits when I can spread them over time. Accounting, of course, accounting, when I say this, you can drive a truck through accounting rules. Accounting itself, you know, that certain things are considered expenses, but they're good. They're an investment for the future, but they're cold and expensive. And then revenues, if I make bad loans, they are bad revenues. They will kill you. But for a while, they look pretty good.

26:33It's all those things, margins, clients, the banking business, the character, the clients you have will reflect on your bank. So the first thing is who you're doing business with, how you're doing business, and also making sure your compensation plans aren't paying people for stuff which is stupid or unethical, and you always have to review these things to make sure you have them right, because they change all the time. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta.

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28:15The whole environment. And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

28:44All right David catch catch us up to the merger so you run bank one for four years from Chicago And then in 2004 you merge with JP Morgan Chase in what is termed at the time a merger of equals I think JP Morgan tastes referred to it is that Bank one shareholders get 42% of the combined company I mean I think people don't realize how much of JP Morgan Chase is bank one today. That's why it's a little irritating to me when they say you've been running it since I was running JP Morgan. I'm running 40% of the company for the whole time. When I got to bank one, and I'm not working around the clock, I already knew that a logical strategic merger might be JP Morgan. I know all these companies, and that's the other thing about Fortune's balance sheet. You also have real strategies that survive the test of time. You're not flipping and flopping.

29:36And then I'm sitting there, and of course the tape comes, JP and we're going to chase to merge. So we're worth like 25 billion, they're now worth like 80 billion or 90 or whatever the number was. I'm like, well there goes that dream. But four years later, our stock was up to, you know, doubled or something like that. There's actually come in, and it was in the target range.

29:56And I'd been meeting with Bill Harris and the current chairman of JPMorgan at the time, we were talking about it. We both knew it made business sense. They were kind of looking for a CEO. So we were, we had been talking probably for a year and a half before that. They're looking for a CEO. Did, did they give bank one shareholders 42% because they were looking for a CEO? There were two lawsuits, okay. So we got the premium.

30:23They got the name and location and I I effectively had kind of control from day one because inside the merger agreement And this is almost unheard of when we get the premium is that to not have me become CEO 18 months later 75% of the board would have to vote me out and the default was yeah, and the board was eight bank one people and eight JP Morgan people And I knew a lot of the JP Morgan board members too, who respected me. And Bill Harris, I'm very close. But that was the agreement. They got sued for paying too much to buy me. I got sued for not taking enough. You get sued. You can't win anything. I think every shareholder is probably. But it worked out. Before we get to 2006.

31:13When you were going through that process and even maybe a couple years before you and Bill were talking you're starting to think about JP Morgan as a partner I'm curious did the brand did the name JP Morgan factor into your thinking at all. Did you view that as an asset? I mean JP Morgan brand is a Tiffany name I didn't value it in the deal and what we when I looked at I gave my board I think it's I think the first is run your company well and people thought I was gonna start doing deals immediately. I was like no we suck We haven't earned the right to run someone else's company yet. We're running a good company. We can merge with somebody. But the first thing I looked at was business logic. And that every business, we had a consumer business. They had a consumer business. We had a credit card business. They were both terrible. They had a credit card business. They had a big investment bank. We had a big US corporate bank that needed some of those investment bank users. We both had a wealth management business. I knew we could save a lot of cost saves. So the business logic was impeccable.

32:11Then the ability to execute. Like, can you actually get it done? Because you've all seen a lot of deals where they fall apart. They don't have management. They don't consolidate the systems. They have infighting. It kind of happened in city. And so you don't effectuate. And then there's the price. So I knew we had a Tiffany brand. But it didn't value because it really didn't work out. I don't think it would have mattered that much. Interesting. All right, so I'm going to fast forward us a couple of years. It's 2006. You're officially Chairman and CEO of the combined JP Morgan Chase and 2006 on Wall Street is like go go go go baby. It's like you know 1980s all over again. I think you had the same incentives as everyone else but you behaved very differently. Am I missing something? Did you have the same incentives or did you pull JP Morgan back hard on the risk side in 2006? I did. So there were cracks out there in 2006 may remember the quants.

33:08to start with your quant problem in 2006, we definitely saw a subprime getting bad. And that's, I pulled back on subprime. I wish I had done more, because if you look what I did, you say, okay, we saved half the money, but you were to save more. You still have some losses. But we also had, I'm gonna say less, maybe a third of the leverage of the big investment banks, and a lot more liquidity. So in 2006, I started to stockpile liquidity, and, you know, looking at this situation, I was quite worried. The leverage, if you remember this, but the leverage, because of accounting rules in Basel III, Basel I, investment banks, particularly the banks, the big investment banks, went from 12 times leverage to 35 times leverage. And it was go-go. So, for every one of those, bridge loans, the whole thing, like, in 07, the bridge book of Wall Street was $450 billion. Today, it's $40 billion.

34:06JP1 can handle the whole 40 billion today though we're not the 40 billion today and they were much more leverage deals and a lot of them fell apart collapsed and then of course and that was before you had the collapse in the mortgage market which really took down a lot of these banks but you did have the same incentives and you had the same access to information that a lot of these other folks did but you didn't blow up what explains this because usually behavior follows incentives Yeah, well first of all if you work for me, I would tell you I don't care if the incentive is don't do the wrong thing and And don't do the wrong thing to the client if you treat yourself if you're the client, how would you want to be treated and I I'd gotten rid of I mentioned that one risk thing there were multiple risk things like that They were being paid to take the risk. Oh, you were telling us about the auto loan business Yeah, but they would be being paid but the second I put in all these new risk controls all the sudden you weren't making money by taking that leverage

35:04Because I was looking at how much capital it can actually be deployed if things get bad and so I was looking at earnings through the cycle and then but very importantly all of these investment banks were doing side deals private deals three-year deals five deals I got rid of almost all of them. This is for comp almost all of the senior bankers. So today at JP Morgan Chase there are no you know we do do things but and I know some of my partners in the room here but we all know about it there are no wings There are no nods, there are no side deals. There's almost no one paid on a particular thing because if you're paid on a particular thing, you can do the wrong thing. And meanwhile, you're not helping the company manage this risk or something like that. So, we change the incentive programs. And I'm quite conscious about incentive programs that they don't create misbehavior, but it's also very important if you're in a company and you say the incentive programs do it, you should tell the company.

35:54This incentive plan is not incentive to write behavior versus be the customer. And a lot of it was leverage. So if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books, if you have 30 times leverage and you're getting 20% of the profits, you'll go to 40 times leverage. It's literally at 25% to your bonus. And so I got rid of the profit pool of 20% and the leverage. And I lost some people too in the meantime.

36:21you know, JP Morgan as part of the system had the same incentives, but you changed the incentives for team within the company. Okay, all right, we gotta go to 2008. March, March, 13th, 2008. Thursday, 2008. It's Thursday night. You get a call from Bear Stearns CEO. The stock closed that day at $57 a share. It's like 150 a couple of months before. Three days later.

36:49Got to remember it like yesterday. I was working on Park Avenue in Wall Street. I remember that night. Two dollars a share. You're buying Verresterance to tell us the story. I was at Abrah on 47. It's been my parents and my parents favorite restaurant and my whole family was there. It happened to be my birthday. I don't know when we get the emergency birthday.

37:09Alan Schwartz was the current CEO. We'd seen their stock go down. I knew they had some real problems because we saw the hedge funds and some of the things that were taking place there. And he said, Jamie, I need $30 billion tonight before Asia opens. Which I said, I don't know how to get $30 billion for you. And have you called Paulson? You're called Tim Geiter. So we all called. I called up the management team. I went back in.

37:34I probably had a bite and say goodbye. I went back to the office. Probably had a hundred people come in that day, that night. They all got dressed. They went back to work. It's emergency. We now rang all the bells for emergency. Bear Stearns went bankrupt. Spokes the Fed about, let's just get them to the weekend. We had one day, and we needed a Saturday and Sunday, and we concocted this loan, so we couldn't lend the $30 billion.

37:56And the Fed technically could lend the $30 billion, but the Fed could lend to us technically, and I could technically use the collateral of bear stern so that, so we got the literally one day loan. And then the next day I had, we had thousands of people come and do diligence. And we went through every loan, every asset, every balance sheet, all the derivatives, all the lawsuits, all the HR policies, like real due diligence, a two or three day period, and bought the company at that night, $2 a share. Hank Paulson was saying, why are you paying anything for it?

38:25I said, well, I do have to get shareholder votes. And I wish we can. But you need bear shareholders to. It was a public deal. And the worst part of it is I was going to get the lawsuits from the bear holders. And I knew that you didn't pay enough. But you could let it go bankrupt. It wasn't like an industrial company can buy in bankruptcy. It would have been gone. And the crisis would have just unfolded. So. OK, two questions. One, what would have happened if it went down? Two.

38:55Afterwards, did you think it was over? No. So we already had, so those March, you know, what happened with Lehman, it was an uncontrolled failure. There was money locked up everywhere. People panicked. They started pulling money up everything. That would have happened with bear. So it did stop that. And I would have thought that it gave other people other time to clean up their act.

39:16So literally six months later, I would have thought some of those firms were much had more liquidity, more capital, and a little bit more prepared for might be happening. We already had the stress in the system. You saw it already. It was going to mount. It wasn't going to go away. There were tremendous losses coming. So we bought it and probably did help. And hindsight didn't stop the crisis from unfolding. We bought it.

39:41and then like a couple, like a week later, we changed the $10 a share. It had been at $120. And the way to think it was 300 billion of assets and a $12 billion tangible book value, we wrote off the whole tangible book value in the, when we bought the company, to pay, we had to liquidate the loans, we had to hedge stuff, we had severance costs, loss of costs, and we basically used all that. So we paid a billion dollars for a company that had been worth $20 billion.

40:10Recently the building we're in now was worth a billion dollars on the balance sheet for zero and we got the fact we got some very good people and we got some good businesses But it was a extremely painful process. I've seen estimates that in the fullness of time after Really dealing with unwinding all the stuff there It cost you $15 to $20 billion. It cost you $20, anyway. It was the 12 billion we wrote off. That didn't cost us. We didn't really pay for it. And then the government sued us on the mortgages, which I was quite offended by. And I really was. I thought it was a problem. Well, this is the government. Whatever government you did a deal with, that's not the government now in the road to size. I don't care. We're going to come after you anyway. So what we kind of saved is just a lot. We bailed a lot of people out.

40:58They made us pay $5 billion on the bad mortgages that bearish tons are done. And that's what made me make this statement. I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't put it this way. I don't know how to say this. I wouldn't really trust the government again. I got to ask a follow-up question to that. Is that a structural thing? Just the way that we're set up with a new administration every four years?

41:32Yeah, they don't feel obligated to what the prior administration did and you know contract even some contracts were violated in this thing which I won't go through Literally contract. I mean it would have been torches interference that had been company company, but they basically you know since you Operate under their laws, you know, they can basically take you down so you you know, I went see Eric holder trying to settle those mortgage stuff which we settled. They put my lead director. He expect me to come and be pounding my chest and and I went in and said, Eric, I am here to surrender. I cannot fight and I cannot win against the federal government. You know that a criminal indictment can sink my company. I will not do that to my company or my country. I'm here to surrender.

42:19Before I surrender, I want you to know the circumstances by which we bought WAMU and Bear Stearns, because 80% of what they were asking for related to Bear Stearns and WAMU, not shaped to Morgan Chase. And I went through the whole thing. You know, he said, thank you. I'll take a consideration. But they never gave me the counting. So I don't know what they did. And so it is what it is. It was quite painful. But it's got to move on. We'll move on from here. We won't keep you.

42:47We'll move on for this specifics. I do have one more thing. Whether you would have done it again wouldn't have, you know, very clear. It was not a great deal on paper for JP Morgan. But as we look at it now, the reputational value, the reputation of JP Morgan now is unlike any other in the industry. Part of why you're worth $800 billion is that reputation.

43:16a lot of what created that reputation was was that we can i you know if you yes i know i say when trust the government if the government called me up they did they didn't again if they come again said we need your help to save our country of course i'm gonna i'm a patriot that way i just i would just try to come with some ways to avoid the punishment by the next president All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

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45:55It's very hard that remember we bought Wammu a week after Lehman went bankrupt and And most boards wouldn't have touched that at all because the whole system feels the whole system was in trouble but Wammu put us in California parts of Nevada Arizona not Arizona Georgia Florida which we weren't in so think of these really healthy states And they had, you know, 2,300 branches, and they had huge mortgage problems. But we looked at it over and over and over. So we knew there are mortgage books called. And we wrote it off. We bought it for $30 billion discount to tangible book value, because they had debt. And we left the debt behind.

46:40And so, and that 30 billion was approximately what the mortgage loss was going to be. So we bought the company, think of we bought a company clean, we wrote off all that stuff, the books were clean, and then we did something unheard of too. The next day or two days later, I went in the market raised another 11 billion dollars of equity, which I didn't really need, but again, this is my conservatism. I was like, you know what? This could get even worse, and I don't want to be short capital liquidity.

47:06So we raised that to make sure our balance sheet was just as strong as it was after WAMU that it was before WAMU. And you already had the reputation to pull this off, right? I'm imagining, in the worst month of the financial crisis, who can go out and raise $11 billion of equity? Yeah. People trust you. But yeah, we knew a lot of shareholders and you earned your trust over time with shareholders and we explained, we gave them a quick little presentation over the, you know, Yeah, and a lot of them stepped up and said this is great. They also know we can execute it because we're behind the bear's turns. People forget the work is the next day you got 50,000 people consolidating, you know, 5,000 applications, branches, compensation programs, you know, settlement programs, you know, payment systems, it's a lot of work. But we obviously have the capability to do that and we have the capability to do a WAMU. I think we finished the WAMU consolidations in nine months, all of them.

48:04so that within nine months that we're all in the same systems, which allows you to start doing a better job in customer service and things like that. So this fortress balance sheet strategy and raising this equity capital and, you know, having additional margin of safety and conservative accounting, in retrospect, it seems like the obvious right strategy for running a large financial institution, why wasn't everyone else copying it, have people changed and does everyone else run their banks like this now? I think people...

48:32But the people are more conservative today. I think regular is more conservative today. But again, I go back to people get involved in aggressive accounting. They don't look at stressing their own bank in a real way. You know, you saw people take too much interest rate risk, too much credit exposure, too much optionality risk. Or sometimes it's new products. So if you look at the financial services, very often it's the new products that blow up. It takes a while. They haven't been through a cycle.

48:59And you had that with equities way back in 1929, you had it with options, you had it with equity derivatives, you had it with mortgages, you had it with Ginny, even Ginny Maes at one point blew up, even though the government guaranteed. You had it with Clont and with Elton. And how would you plan it? How would you plan it? How would it happen with leverage lending? And then people then become more rational how they run these balance sheets and how they think through the risk. So I have to ask you, is this private credit today? Is this private credit today? I don't really think so.

49:29I don't think it's $2 trillion. It's grown rapidly. That's an issue. But what happens, the other thing about markets, there's some very good actors in it who know what they're doing. Customers like the product. So I always say, well, the customers like it. But there are also people who don't know what they're doing. And it's grown rapidly. So there may be something in there that would become a problem one day. I don't think it's systemic. So that's $2 trillion. The mortgage market, when the time it blew up was, I'm gonna say, $9 trillion. And $1 trillion was lost.

49:59This is, you know, and it was, and it was, I know, I- It's really dollars was also more than a trillion dollars back then. Yeah, a lot of these priorities are not levers like that. But that doesn't mean it would be problems, but it's slightly different. But you get, but you look at the whole system, there are other things out there that, you know, are levers that, you know, can cause problems. Of course, people take secret levers in a way that don't necessarily see it. What are some of these in your mind that are potentially problematic today? Well, look, I look at, When you look at asset price, they're rather high. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, but if today PEs were 15, as opposed to 23, I'd say that's a lot less risk. A lot less to fall, and you have some upside. I would say 23, there's not a lot upside, and there's a long way to fall. And that's true with credit spread. And we look at, we stress test everything. We do like 100 stress tests a week.

50:51you know, and to make sure we can handle a wide variety of things. And then the biggest risk to me is cyber. I mean, I think this cyber stuff is, you know, we're very good at it. We work with all the government agencies. They would say the chain wears up. We spend $800 million here or something on it. We educate people. We just do. But it is, you're talking about grids and communications companies and water. And even part of the military establishment, the protections are not what you need.

51:20If we ever get any kind of war where cyber is involved and China is very good at it and so is Russia, but Russia is mostly criminal, which is slightly different. All right, I'm gonna pull us back to the story. We're gonna fast forward to 2023. We're not really good to talk about, yeah, Russia. It's not what we do on a quiet, but I think Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic both fail. You're there again.

51:47Did you see it coming? What lessons did you learn from how 2008 went that you could apply in 2023? Obviously you bought first for public. There's a Silicon Valley bank. Both Silicon Valley bank did some very good stuff. But they both had something unique that we didn't know at the time. I'm going to call them concentrate deposits.

52:08Not uninsured because people mistaking that concentrated and so a lot of venture capital would have a Silicon Valley bank and kind of first for public is some of these large venture capital companies Called their hundreds of them maybe a thousand told their constituent clients that they invested in who all banked the Silicon Valley and first for public the banks aren't safe get out and They all remove their deposits in Silicon Valley bank. I think they had 200 million deposit 200 million in one day And that caused the problem, but they also had other problems. They didn't have proper liquidity. They didn't have their cloudal post of the Fed, and they had taken too much in straight exposure. And the in straight exposure was hidden by accounting. It was called held to maturity, but you don't have to mark even treasuries to market. And I always hated held to maturity because, but it gives you better regulatory turns and stuff like that. But when that held to maturity, the tens, if you said, what's the tangible book value of one of these banks, you said it was a hundred.

53:04Well, all of a sudden, it was 50, you just marked that one thing in the market. And now you're into judgment land. At what point, if you saw a bank where just that one mark had the tangible book that I dropped to 40 or 30 cents in a dollar, would you panic? I would have said, that's too much risk. And the regulators helped this because they said rates are going to stay low forever. So these banks put a lot of 3% mortgages. And when 3% more is when rates went up to 5%, you know, worth 60 cents in the dollar.

53:33or 50 cents, and that was it. And so, both those have, they took too much issue to exposure, known to management, and it was known to the regulators. And, you know, infixible. So, you know, we knew about, a little bit about Silicon Valley Bank. We were trying to compete in that area, so we learned a lot afterwards about how to do a better job for that ecosystem of venture capital. We have a whole campus in Palo Alto now. We fired 500 innovation bankers, we cover venture capital companies. We're not as good as they are yet.

54:01We're going to get there because we're organized like differently. And we knew first republic. We were watching it. I had called Janet Yellen that I said that companies in trouble and one or two others. If you want to, we'll take a look. We could probably buy it and eliminate the problem. They waited a little bit too long. It's kind of a little melting ice cube. But you can imagine the day we bought it, you never heard about it again. We hedged all their exposures in a couple of days. And you know, we merged everything. We wrote everything down. But we did get some good stuff from it. We actually got some good people.

54:30You know, the normal thing in acquisition is they're terrible to get rid of them or they failed. But we also looked at what they did, how they dealt with clients, something that they'd be clients here. They did a great job with high net with clients. Single pointer contact, you know, conscious services. So now if you go down Madison Avenue, you see things called JP Morgan Financial Center. That's your first JP Morgan branded consumer effort.

54:53because it's kind of based on that. When you walk in there, we know you're small business, we know you're mortgage, we know you're consumer banking, we can get you travel, we can do a whole bunch of different stuff. So we're very high-level services. I think we have 20 of them now, but I'd love it. And if it works, you know, 20 years will have 300. And so these things are opportunities, and I hope it works. You know, you don't always know they're going to work for a fact, but so far, so good. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn

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56:36What are the things in your mind that led to this success? Well, okay. I mean, I don't know. First of all, you could be skipped over a strategy a little bit. And this is an important fuel that we have. What we do is the same thing that a community bank does other than investment bank, global investment banking.

56:55Okay, so if you walk into a small community bank, they know your business account, they know your consumer account and they usually have a trust company. They just call it trust. They'd manage your private affairs. They'd set up a trust for you and they'd do something like that. And their CRM is up here. They don't need a sales for a CRM because they know everyone's town. And they didn't do big-time global investment banking. But the strategy, those businesses fit together. They feed each other, and so does investment banking.

57:22A lot of our middle market clients use investment banking products. A lot of our consumer clients use some FX. So all of our businesses feed each other. There's no extraneous. We've got everything that didn't fit a strategy. And then you start building client businesses and client services, fortress balance sheet, fortress accounting, all those various things. And I've always talked about. So it's holding a portfolio of things that actually feed each other. They actually fit. Whereas, you know, city had Convert consumer finance that didn't fit life insurance that didn't fit property cows that didn't they eventually got rid of them all Sandy just wanted to do more of them You know he bought American generals did a truck leasing for God's sake I mean and here once you get involved these things is hard for people understand the risk in each one of these businesses when but all of ours fit I don't like hobbies. I don't like things You know we may and we've made plenty of mistakes because you have to try and test things and then you're always investing for the future that investment is always people

58:21branches and technology. And that's true with their investment banking people or consumer bank people are opening consumer branches or I think Doug Patton was here in Troy Roy back and run the global investment bank but they've opened you know commercial banking branches all over Europe. And I think you would tell me I mean it's it's going great you know and it's feeding all other parts of the company so just sticking to your knitting constantly investing you know not overreacting to the market you know markets are like accordions And then sometimes, you know, if you're strong, when others aren't, you have a chance to buy things you want to buy. And then always look at the world from the point of view, the consumer. What do you want? How do you want to get it? Can we provide it to you in a way that makes sense for us, too? You know, not going for the last dollar and not nothing like that. And so building teams of people, you know, our people are curious and smart. They have heart, they have soul, they give it damn about.

59:15you know the guards in the company and the receptionist and the you know it's not just about the big-time bankers and people pounding their chest and we don't try not to put up with that and we have big-time bankers they are exceptional you know and but the company serves the clients and we have and I think the clients know that when you really dig in to start analyzing JP Morgan's financials you kind of see this one thing that jumps right out at you which is the efficiency ratio for every dollar that you make compared to your competitors, you get to keep 15 cents more of that dollar as profit. It's not hard to see how that compounds and how that allows reinvestments and why is your efficiency ratio so much better than competitors? It is literally continuously investing and gaining business at the margin and not stopping and not stopping and the thing about margins too is that we have that margin while investing a lot.

1:00:13It's much easier to have that margin and just, you know, we can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches to save a billion dollars next year. We can do a lot of things. Your margins will go up. Your growth will go down. Your long-term margins will probably get worse. So we kind of look right through the cycle, and we look at the actual economics that we do, not the accounting of what we do. And, you know, we have, you know, we've built it over time. You know, we have great people and great products, and there's some secret sauce I'm not going to tell you about. We do investor day.

1:00:42And we tell everyone everything. And I'm sitting there watching my, I never do presentations. I'm watching them do the presentations. I'm saying, Oh, God, we've just given way too many secrets here. But, but. So there's secrets as to why they are efficiency. Well, you know, I saw how it shouts here before, you know, and I'm not supposed to say that, but. It's okay. It's okay. But no, but what do you look when you built over the years, you know, the consistency, the curiosity, the heart, you know, branch by branch products. It's just.

1:01:12Always doing that, knowing you're going to make mistakes, but building the culture that just kind of plows through that. And you all know, I do use sports, sports is a great analogy. If you have a sports team with a bunch of real jerks on it, are they going to be a great team? Almost never.

1:01:29The team members aren't giving it their best every day during practice. Every day of practice you worked hard. People are not giving their best. You're going to have a great team. It's not that different in business. The difference in business you can BS about it all the time. You can make up stories. But in sports you see it on the playing field.

1:01:47Do they have the team? Do they play together? They don't even have to be friends. They have to practice, know their teams. And so I do think companies have that. It's like a sauce that works. And you've seen a lot of different companies, you know, not just JP Morgan Chase. So, all right. We've got one last question for you. If you look back to 2008, which was a long time ago now? To 2008, which was a long time ago now. All of the other leaders that were involved in that era have long since retired. I mean, I think many folks within JP Morgan Chase have long since retired since then. It seems like you're working as hard as ever and in it as much as ever. Why are you still here? What keeps you going? Yeah. So I want to thank my wife who's here too, who suffered through all this with me all these years and probably couldn't have done it, couldn't have done it without her.

1:02:48I don't know, but I do believe my grandparents all Greek immigrants. There we go. My grandparents all Greek immigrants who didn't finish high school, but there's a Greek ethic. And you only realize you're learning from your parents, from the ground up and Judy's parents. My wife's parents were the same, which is have a purpose. It could be art, it could be science, it could be military, it could be business, it could be, it could be just being a great parent, a great teacher.

1:03:16but have a purpose and then do the best you can. Give it your all. Don't be one of those people who's complaining all the time. You give it your best and then treat everyone properly, everyone. Including like if there's a bully beating up on someone, you had to stand up for the someone. You were not allowed to allow a bully to do it. So how you treat people what you do. In my hierarchy of life, the most important thing is my family. Still is.

1:03:46The second thing is my country, because I think this country is the indispensable nation, that brought freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise, which we have to teach everywhere we go about how important it is, because I don't think people fully understand it sometimes. And then my purpose, because you know, my feelings don't want me home every day. And this is my contribution to this company. I can help cities, states, schools, companies, employees. And I get the biggest kick out of that. And so, That's what I do. And as long as I have the energy, I'm gonna do it. I can't imagine, I don't play golf. You know, my daughter, one of my daughters said, Dad, you need some hobbies. And I said, I do. We, hanging out with you, family travel, barbecue and wine. We now like whiskeys. And I love history. I think history is the greatest teacher of all time. Hiking. I can't play tennis anymore because of my back. But those are my hobbies.

1:04:40I don't buy fancy cars and stuff like that, but this gives me purpose in life beyond family and beyond country. Plus, I think this helps the country. You know, I get to do a lot of things for our country that I just think are quite meaningful from this job. And so when I'm done with this, I don't know how to teach and write, I may write a book like Andrew or Sorkin did. I'll do something, but I gotta do something. Now, I'm not gonna just twirl my thumbs and smell the flowers.

1:05:06There are a lot of people who have floated your name for political or policy roles over the years. There is only one job that could possibly impact the country in a bigger scale than you're currently doing. Do you agree? Right now, yeah. Well, that's probably a great place to be. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us. David Ben, these guys are great, by the way, so thank you.

1:05:43Well, that is it for our conversation with Jamie Dimon listeners. Thank you so much to all 6,000 of you who came to watch in person. It was so cool. So cool. As always, a huge thank you to Arvin Navarotnam at Worldly Partners for his excellent write up on the Jamie Dimon years of JP Morgan, which is linked in the show notes. If you liked this episode, go check out other recent episodes like the start of our Google series, which is off to a scream and start.

1:06:11Our Rolex episode, which is another one of our biggest ever, and then our interviews. Steve Balmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz, and if you're new to the show, I think all of those are great places to start. After this episode, if you are still looking for more and you're like, I've already listened to all of those other episodes, we have a second show for you, ACQ2. The most recent is an episode with Jesse Cole, the founder and the CEO, founder and owner. Yeah. Yeah, he wears a lot of hats, all of them are yellow.

1:06:40at the Savannah bananas. For something completely different. Yes, and if you want to talk about this with the acquired community, come join the Slack acquired.fm slash slack. And with that listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.