Jamie Dimon Talks About Regulation, Remote Work, and What Keeps Him Up at Night

Jamie Dimon, who has led JPMorgan Chase for nearly two decades, had plenty to say when he sat down for a conversation with Stanford Graduate School of Business interim dean Peter DeMarzo last week. “I am thrilled to be here and I’ll try to answer everything as honestly as I can,” Dimon told a packed Cemex Auditorium in what may have been the understatement of the afternoon.

DeMarzo opened the session, sponsored by the Business, Government & Society Initiative, with a question about the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and First Republic Bank in early 2023. What caused these seemingly successful institutions to fail? Regulators were caught off-guard, according to Dimon, and bankers neglected the clear vulnerabilities on their balance sheets. “It shouldn’t have been a surprise. I wasn’t surprised. The Fed was surprised,” he said. “When the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked,” he quipped, paraphrasing Warren Buffett. “And so you saw.”

Neither the collapse of SVB nor First Republic (which JPMorgan acquired) posed a serious threat to the banking system, Dimon maintained. “ I mean, two little banks basically go bankrupt, it’s a whole big kerfuffle,” he said. “We should have built a system that’s more resilient than that, and it’s not…. We should go back to the drawing board and build a system [where] if the bank fails, it’s not a big deal.”

Noting research by Stanford GSB professor of finance Amit Seru that found many U.S. banks were in similarly precarious positions — DeMarzo pressed Dimon on the need for risk management and resiliency. “The capital is not the issue,” he responded, rejecting the notion that a more robust financial buffer might better insulate banks during crises. “Again, if you look at these things, it was more about liquidity than it was about capital.”

Dimon was especially skeptical of stress testing, calling the Federal Reserve’s Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review “a full-of-shit test.” Continuing his critique of financial oversight, Dimon bemoaned the “byzantine” federal regulatory structure, which he’s often compared to spaghetti. “I’m not arguing that all regulation is wrong, but you gotta take a step back at this point,” he said. “We set up multiple regulators — there are seven responsible for mortgages, five responsible for exchanges, three responsible for this…. They can’t even agree among each other what to do, so it literally cripples them.”

Not only is the web tangled, but regulators have continuously layered new rules into the system without considering their broader consequences, he argued, inadvertently pushing financial activity into private markets. “ We’ve gone from 8,000 public companies in the early 1990s to 4,000 today. Eight thousand should have gone to 16,000,” Dimon said. “Private equity has gone from like 1,000 to 10,000. This is not a statement for or against private equity. The question is: Is that a good thing?”

When it comes to fintech, social media, and consumer protection, a little regulation wouldn’t hurt, Dimon said. “The consumers are being screwed all over the place, okay? But it’s not from the banks,” he insisted, noting that most of the digital fraud affecting his customers originates on social media. “We beg social media to stop… but they do nothing about it.”

Rather than look at consumer protection holistically, he said, policymakers have increasingly shifted liability onto banks. “Our government does [consumer protection] without regard to outcomes. They do it because it’s ideology. And the real world isn’t that way. People should really analyze these things and say, ‘What do we want?’”

Shifting gears, DeMarzo asked Dimon whether he believes President Donald Trump’s approach will succeed in lowering prices and interest rates. “ I think he’s right to be very pro-growth,” Dimon answered. “Good growth is not inflationary. It’s good for the people. It’s good for all different income classes. And I think he’s right to be for deregulation.”

On the other hand, he cautioned, “‘America first’ is fine. America alone — if we end up alone because we’re tearing the world asunder, we will have made a mistake.”

In light of the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back DEI policies, Dimon — unprompted — defended JPMorgan’s efforts to diversify its workforce. “It’s not going to really change the outreach. It may change some names,” he said.

Asked about AI, Dimon predicted that it will be as transformative as electricity or the internet. “ It will affect every single job out there: Don’t put your head in the sand,” he warned. JPMorgan has spent — and saved — about $2 billion applying AI in 450 applications, from improving call center operations to hedging equity portfolios. “The way I look at it is, it is that big. Just do it.”

Dimon wasn’t budging on remote work, which he’d lambasted in audio leaked from a recent internal meeting. “ Where did you get your Amazon packages from? Your beef, your meat, your vodka? Where did you get the diapers from? You got UPS and FedEx and manufacturers and agriculture and hospitals and cities and schools and nurses and sanitation and firemen and military, they all work [in person]. It’s only these people in the middle who complain a lot about it,” he said, to laughter.

“I’m being quite serious,” he continued. In addition to being a net loss for corporate culture, these arrangements particularly harm younger workers. “It doesn’t work in our business,” he concluded. “For us, we’ve made a decision.”

“What’s one thing that keeps you up at night?” DeMarzo asked. Without hesitation, Dimon pointed to geopolitics. “I look at the economy as the weather. I don’t worry about the economy. It goes up, it goes down, and I don’t really care…. I think we’re at a crossroads, which is about the future of the free and democratic world. That, to me, is the only important thing.”