54 TheEconomistMarch 14th 2020
1I
t had becomea running joke on Wall
Street that whenever Jamie Dimon was
asked, after beating cancer in 2014, how
much longer he intended to stay at the
helm of JPMorgan Chase (jpm), he always
replied: “another five years”. Sometimes he
said it with a twinkle in his eye; at other
times the response was tetchy. The matter
became more serious after March 5th,
when the 63-year-old underwent emergen-
cy surgery for a rare heart condition. The
bank said afterwards that he was “recover-
ing well”, and that two trusted lieutenants,
Gordon Smith and Daniel Pinto, had
stepped in to run the bank until his return.
The question of how long before he steps
down, and who will replace him, is now a
more urgent one, though.
For a man not known to underestimate
himself, even Mr Dimon cannot imagine
he has much more to achieve as a banker.
Over 15 years he has built jpm into the
world’s most reputable bank. It is Ameri-
ca’s biggest by assets and also its most prof-
itable: in 2019 it broke the world record for
bank earnings in a single year. It is thedominant player on Wall Street, while also
running a formidable retail bank.
Mr Dimon is his firm’s best-known boss
since its bulbous-nosed namesake, John
Pierpont Morgan, lorded it over Wall Street
in the late 19th century. The straight-talk-
ing son of second-generation Greek immi-
grants who settled in New York, he has
brought a down-to-earth (some would say
brusque) authenticity to what was once
one of America’s most buttoned-up, blue-
blooded financial firms. (jpmspokespeo-
ple have long joked that their main job is to
make sure he doesn’t swear in public.) He is
known for encouraging openness and in-
spiring loyalty.
Even as jpmhas continued to grow into
a dizzyingly sprawling financial giant, and
as Mr Dimon has weighed in on a range of
public-policy issues beyond his ken, from
health-care reform to inequality, he has
avoided much of the public vilification di-
rected at his peers. At various times he has
been touted as a possible treasury secre-
tary, and even as a dark-horse presidential
candidate. It is hard to imagine any othermoneyman being in a position to consider
canvassing for popular support.
Mr Dimon made arguably the most im-
portant decision of his career in his twen-
ties, when he turned down a cushy job at
Goldman Sachs to help create a vast finan-
cial firm with his mentor, Sanford Weill,
then boss of American Express. Mr Di-
mon’s impatience to run Citigroup, the in-
stitution they built together, at the tender
age of 42, ran up against Mr Weill’s unwill-
ingness to relinquish the top job. He uncer-
emoniously fired Mr Dimon in 1999. In the
year that followed Mr Dimon turned down
a raft of job offers, earning himself the
moniker of “the most famous unemployed
man in the country”. He was waiting for his
moment. It came in 2004 when he pulled
off a merger between Bank One, the Chica-
go-based bank he had run for four years,
and the more illustrious JPMorgan Chase.
It was a sign of his steely determination
to reach the top that, with a beady eye on Mr
Weill, he said the merger would “give Citi a
run for its money”. Under Mr Dimon, jpm
has achieved far more than that. At the time
Citigroup was considered the greatest
American bank. It was twice as valuable as
its newly merged rival; it had the biggest
pile of assets of any bank globally; and it
had earned an average return on equity
(roe) of 19.2% over the previous five years.
jpm had registered a paltry 8.9%. It was
seen as a lumbering laggard (see chart 1 on
next page).
How times have changed. jpmhas sinceThe house that Jamie built
NEW YORK
Under Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase has become the world’s most admired bank.
Is his work done?Briefing JPMorgan Chase