← In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen
In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen
Live podcast with Jamie Dimon, CEO JPMorgan Chase: Corporate culture, risk and the global economy
00:38:46
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign wealth Fund. Today I'm in really good company because I'm here with the one and only Jamie Dimon. He runs the largest bank in the world. 20 years at the helm and his annual shareholder letters are mandatory reading for everybody in the financial sector. We recorded this live on stage at our investment conference in Oslo. We are proud investors in J.P. morgan. Jamie, welcome to In Good Company.
- [00:29]
B
J.P. morgan's origins trace back to 1799 to a company founded to supply water to a growing New York City. It quickly evolved into a bank and shaped its lasting legacy over the next two centuries. It grew alongside the economy, financing railroads, supporting industry and expanding with global trade. But its role became most visible in moments of crisis. In 1907, as panic spread through the financial system, J.P. morgan helped organize a response, stabilizing markets at a critical moment in exposing the need for a central bank. Through the Great Depression, it endured one of the most severe economic downturns in modern history. In 2000, the merger of JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan created a new kind of institution. And in 2008, it stepped into the center of the crisis, acquiring Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Built on generations of decisions and culture, today, JPMorgan Chase stands among the largest and most influential financial institutions in the world.
- [01:38]
A
Welcome. You are there. Well, warm welcome, warm welcome. When we look at these pictures showing the history, the first question has to be what? What is the culture that has made you able to be so successful now after 200 years?
- [01:58]
C
First of all, welcome everybody. Thrilled to be here. He is persistent, by the way. When he asked me about coming 2025, I said I can't. He said, what about this date in 2026? So here I am. But I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. Cultures are my whole life I was always cautious about. We talk about culture because you could say words. A lot of companies say employees, customers, and they don't mean it. So the real way you develop a culture, you're just driving it with grit and courage. Like every meeting, everything you do, every trip you make, every person you hire, every person you fire, that it really is about doing the right thing for the customer. Eventually obviously do they got to take care of your employee. A lot of cultures on Wall street, as you know, it was about money. How much money can someone make? And you know, some of the, some of the things in Wall street are built on their compensation schemes. They're not serve a client scheme. And so I've just been relentless when we first did the J.P. morgan Bank One merger in 2004, I had a book, how we do business. And Bill Harrison, who was the chairman at the time, said, you got to send it out. I was like, no, let's do it first. Let's let people experience the detail, the diligence, the Fortress balance sheet, all these things. The follow up, the open meetings that you have to speak up. It's not even a choice, hopefully so. And if you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture.
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A
You say you have to fight it every day. Yeah, what, what are the kind of things you do in meetings?
- [03:26]
C
So you got to get out. So we do in the meeting or in a bus trip or a road trip that you're talking to your people, everyone knows that you're only trying to do the right thing for the company. So no one at the company could say they would insult me as long as they say, because I think it's in the best interest of the company, the client, that I didn't bring my list, but that we used to take a trip. I come back with a long list of stuff. Matter of fact, my management committee doesn't like when I come back from a trip because they know I'm about to lay on them, why do we do this and why do we do that and why do we do this? And this is across technology and just about everything else you do. But even in that room, I tell people, my management team, the agenda is your agenda. Don't say to me you didn't put it on the agenda. You have to say, that is everything important on this list and actually puts the burden on the other people to say, well, you skip this or what about that issue or something. So every business has a follow up list. Every business, when you travel around the world, knows each other and it's hard work. I mean, it's harder than I thought. But looking back, you actually do build a common culture.
- [04:32]
A
Why is it so hard?
- [04:34]
C
Because you have to be relentless. I mean, if you, you know, when I go around, I mean, I don't let, I try not to let even one little thing skip my attention. So if there's a, you know, if I read a customer complaint and someone says to me, why are you paying attention so minor. I say, well, I'm paying attention to that because we might be doing the exact same thing to a million people. It's not that minor, you know, or, you know, it was a teller who told us something that shortened how long it takes to open an account. I've been in buses with management teams and they don't want to hear from the teller or the branch manager, you know, what's going on in the branch because they find it insulting. Whereas I look at them, I realize they probably shouldn't have that job.
- [05:14]
A
What's the thing you still have on your sheets which you haven't managed to solve?
- [05:17]
C
I have a list of calls I need to make. A list of people who owe me something. That's the most important one. And that one is really.
- [05:25]
A
Well, I for sure owe you one now after this.
- [05:27]
C
No, no, not owe me like that. Like I've asked a question. I'm waiting for a follow up. I want to know why this happened or why that happened. Do we fix this customer complaint? It could be on anything. Then I have a list of things I need to think about. I have a list of things which are going to go on another list. But I just jotted it down because so it's follow up. Dates, calls, immediate issues. I probably burned through that list once every two or three days.
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A
Yeah.
- [05:55]
C
By Kyle. I carry a little folder which has one by each business. Much more detailed, like very detailed.
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A
You say in your. By the way, you write a fantastic letter every year and the letter which recently came out. You talk about bureaucracy and the way you have to fight it. How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization? Because you are now a huge organization, right?
- [06:17]
C
Yeah. I really believe this bureaucracy complacency and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else. And by you could be a small company and have it. You could be a big company and have it. You can have it in your branch, you cannot have it in other branch. As always, the manager, stupid. I mean almost always. The way you fight it is with me all the information is shared beforehand. So there's no secret. I remember going to companies and this wouldn't share that part of the company if it isn't shared properly. I generally just cancel the meeting. If someone comes in and says Nikolai wants X and I don't believe that that's right. I say, well, why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to him. Everything, no matter how small. Get on the road, go see clients. Clients are a gift because look, they're demanding, they should be. But they also tell you in our case what our competitors are doing better. Why we didn't get something. If we don't do this in that country, you're not going to give us a big piece of business. Because how important it is for you. And I uniquely know it might cost $30 million to build a payment system took up to a country. But it's easy to say, well, we're going to do it now. I just found out why the staff isn't doing it. So when you have a meeting, people often don't know who's running it. That's a mistake. When you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying, that was a great meeting, we'll pick it up again next week. It's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with, okay, David, you're going to do X. Talk to these people. Not hierarchical. It's just you could, you know, cut across the company. You talk to hr, you know, consumers got the most people. This change in their program is going to affect, you know, their branches. Talk about, come back, make a recommendation. I always ask, if you're king for today, what are you going to do? Because people walk in and they admire a problem. You ask them what they're going to do, they say, well, I look at this, I say, no, no, what would you do? And honestly, for a lot of people, it's just almost crippling to try to answer that question and so have the right people in the room. Very often people making decisions, like, people think, you go back to your office and you think, no. Usually you iterate over and over and over and it gets you to the right place.
- [08:30]
A
Why should.
- [08:31]
C
If you don't have the right people in the room, it will not happen.
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A
Talking about the right people in the room, you said teams should be small, like Navy Seals, right?
- [08:38]
C
Very little politic. Meaning. Also, we don't do a lot of super presentations. We just run into how great you are. Like, I think you should celebrate all the time. But when you're in a management meeting with me is, what does the other guy do better? Stripe kicked our butt. PayPal kicked our butt. Okay, I can go one after another. So no matter how good we think we are, I point out who's doing better. And, you know, we're the number one FX trade in the world, but we're number seven in Vietnam. Why is that? And so you really drill down and you find out what you're not doing well, what people aren't collaborating on, and then you have to get rid of the jerks. And if you don't, no one believes you.
- [09:13]
A
And that takes, who are the jerks? What makes a jerk?
- [09:16]
C
It's all about them. They admire a problem. I say, they're good bureaucrats, too. They're great at process, but they like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome and also I like the inputs. We talk about business, you talk about the output. Your output is your performance, your branch, something like that. But what was the input? Did you train the person properly? Did you build the right technology? Why didn't you put a branch? Why don't we put more bankers in Oslo? Why don't we put more. The input will drive the business for 20 years. The output's just a result of what you did all that time. And so but the sharing part eliminates a lot of it. Not only in rope a dope meetings and you know, and like I said, they're good bureaucrats but some people, it's always about them. They simply beyond the fact that they want. They always talk about the next job, the next thing and pounding their chest. Obviously men do that more than women. But you see these disease behaviors and I have to earn my trust and respect every day too. It isn't like I walk in a room and somehow you have to trust me. You don't, you're gonna be watching closely. What does the boss do? What does he say? Does he really mean it? Does he follow up? And hopefully I'm trusted by people and they know just it's okay to say anything to me. It doesn't bother me whatsoever. I said to regulators, prime ministers, bankers, tech people just try and do a better job. That's it. My board, and this is important for governance, my board. I've been doing this since I got the bank one in 2020 meets without me. Every single meeting I asked them to do it because, you know, I'm a little forceful, I have my opinions. But every time there's a big decision, I have the other senior executives come and say, tell them what you think and they say what they think. And so they might disagree with me in a people decision or some risk decision or something like that. But after that I leave the room and the board meets 100% without me. And usually the lead director usually gives me a call afterwards. Or David Novak, when he's lead director, he would give me a handwritten note like he'd say a little coaching, what I could do different, what I want to hear about, what they're concerned about. And it made me do a better job. I was never worried about it. They're allowed to talk to any and all senior management and no one. I have never done a presentation at the board, at least not since JP Morgan, that I can remember. I asked and they do it all. And I let them do it. I make comment afterwards, but I don't do preambles. I don't say that this person going to talk about A, B, C, D and E and then say, why don't you talk about A, B, C, D and E? I said, go ahead, shoot and keep it fast. A lot of the presentations are verbal. So if you went in there, you'd heard the person say, hey, in investment banking, we did great in fixed income. Let me talk about how we're going to expand bankers in these eight cities with these various things. We think over time they'll deploy so much capital and so much this. Here's the risks associated with it. We looked at other options, A and B, but we picked this one C. So you just A verbal and the board loves it.
- [12:12]
A
By the way, I asked the CEO of one of the other big American banks what made J.P. morgan really special. And he said, well, it's about, it's about the firm, it's not about the individual people. How do you install that?
- [12:24]
C
I think that you know what it is and is right. Look at it, look at it. We all know sports teams and when you see a sport team jiving, or you guys look at football or American football or your football or basketball, any sport team, you know, when the team's working, they're doing the job, they learn their plays, they all want to win, they pass off, they. And you know when there's someone on that team who is just rooting for everybody and business is the same thing except you can bullshit about it. Literally. You got, we did a great job with the best person. The reason we didn't do as well as Goldman did is because of A, B and C. I always say, yeah, that's because they're better generally. But you know it when you see it. And you know that person who's ruining it, that's the team. And you know, I just wear the jersey. I'm like the, I'm not even the senior coach. I'm like the general manager. You know, we have people running the businesses who actually like, they're the quarterbacks, they're making the decisions. But if you look at the team, they communicate all the time. I wrote in my letter about jmore is like a neural network. So live over here. She can call anyone. She knows people all around the world to help our clients and they'll get an immediate answer. And you know, it could be different balance sheet, different currency, different problem. A local revolver, a great idea for an M and A that Someone wasn't thinking about. And that neural network, you can't replace it, by the way. I won't be able to replace it. At least not for a long time.
- [13:42]
A
You say the teams need to operate a bit like Navy seals?
- [13:44]
C
Yeah.
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A
What do you mean by that?
- [13:47]
C
I think you have to have the best of both. You got to have small teams that are fully authorized, dedicated to accomplish something. So I remember trying to do digital account over years ago, and the first reaction you get is tech says okay, you know, this person is okay. Sales is okay, marketing says okay, branches is okay. It's 1% of each person's job. It will not get done. You need a dedicated people authorized to build an account, a digital opening, and that is the team. They obviously have to rely on lots of people, but they have what they need on the team. That might be a lawyer, in some places, it might be compliance. It might be something like that. It's hard to do. You also need the platform. We can't all have our own separate editions of applications and stuff like that. So you kind of need the best of both. Kind of like these Navy SEAL teams. They all have common equipment, common languages, common intelligence. They don't pick their own guns and their own tanks. That's common, you know. And so you gotta. You gotta have the best of both worlds. You gotta make sure that the common one doesn't create an enormous bureaucracy that kills the ability of the team. Then that does happen. Everyone wants to review it, everyone wants to go through it. And so you have to have like little war rooms. Okay, we're gonna pick. We're gonna pick. Are we gonna do this with databricks or snowflake? Are we gonna do this? Get the people in the room and work it out. Don't allow it to go back and forth with groups for six months or nine months or a year. This guy did some unbelievable. By the way, in India, he built that system that identifies. I remember 7 million people. It's probably more than that. By. I think by eye, by finger. So the transfer payments and bank accounts for 700 million people, now what? 1.4 billion. He did it out of the goodness of his heart, literally built this unbelievable system of id. And now you can go in India and pay people with QR codes and stuff like that. And then the corruption on real transfer payments, I don't know if it went to zero, but it used to be kind of cash that got handed from the state to state to state to state to this thing to that. Then distribute it to the poor person over here so God knows how much didn't get passed on.
- [15:55]
A
And just to fill in the people who are listening in, this is Nandani Ligani from Infosys who has done this. How do you, you have a very deep bench or you are known for your very deep bench. How do you, how do you prepare people for the next role?
- [16:08]
C
That's, that's that when you get higher up the organization, it gets harder because you only have so many choices. And that is a issue about, you know, you can't move everyone at the same time. Lower down is easier. We move people around all the time. We've had people go from, you know, banking to cfo, from this to tech. The woman running AI ran Prime Services for us for years. She's a great businesswoman, but she wanted to tackle AI. So we do move people around and that is important. Also, my management team meets every week around a table, open conversation. Everyone hears everything. They know almost everything about what's going on. So even though it's not in their business, they're going to hear. I was talking about consumer payment systems, wealth management products, mistakes, errors, litigation problems, regulation problems, tech problems, customer complaints. And that same group meets once a month with a detailed agenda with pre reads. And then we meet by business. And the only other one that meets all the time is a risk meeting which meets every week. And so mostly around markets, risk. Great.
- [17:15]
A
Well, let's move from, let's move from copper culture to risk culture. And so when we change topic, you can press that one. It's not the nuclear button. It's
- [17:26]
C
fun, huh? Got it.
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A
I've been looking forward to that. What are you seeing in the credit market just now?
- [17:37]
C
Yeah, when it comes to risk, you have to be really disciplined and examine it over and over and over with risk reports shared because people, things change and before you know it, you're trouble. So the United States is doing fine. So when are you talking about private credit? Now. So private credit, just to put it in context, it's at 1.7 trillion of leveraged loans. High yield bonds are 1.7 trillion. Bank syndicated leverage lending is 1.7 trillion. Investment grade is 13 trillion. Mortgages, which is mostly high. Investment grade or more is 13 trillion. And there's a bunch of other stuff so you can see right from the beginning it's not huge, it's not systemic. Even if a lot of it goes bad, it's not going to cause a problem. And some of it's longer term funded. However, here's what I say and I wrote about this, I'm not saying it's terrible, but there's been a slightly deterioration under Ryan standards across a wide spectrum of stuff. So it's only been a little bit, but it's the wide spectrum a little bit. Assumptions too aggressive, leverage a little bit higher. There's too much ratings arbitrage covenants have gone a little bit weaker. There's more pick in there. And the thing about credit or any investors that you know, I think there are more than 1,000 private credit people. You may be Carlyle and Blackstone and KKR and all these areas and maybe brilliant, but I guarantee you not all thousands of them are. So my view, because that and the underlying standards. We haven't had a credit recession so long, so when we have one, it would be worse than people think. It won't be terrible, just be worse. Building in private credit. That may be true for some banks too, by the way. So this is what I'm saying is not just private credit.
- [19:14]
A
There is a saying that amateurs don't know what to do. Professionals know what not to do.
- [19:19]
C
Yeah, well, that's true.
- [19:20]
A
How do you install that in your people to extend the right type of credit?
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C
People have short memories. I've had people say things to me literally in the last month or two. I'm like, really? I mean seriously, like things can. So when I, when I got to J.P. morgan, the risk. I'm going to give you just a little example. The risk measurement was the market going down 10%, stock market, FX currencies moving 3%, the G10 and credit spreads gapping up by 40%. And after a while I said to him, 50% down the stock market, 10% currencies. And worst ever in credit. Worst. So high Yield bonds at 500%. You know, 40% is 700 basis points. Worst ever was 17%. And of course people say that'll never happen, it's too much. Now once you do that and of course a wide spectrum of stuff, it kind of undresses how much risk people are taking. And people are selling your balance sheet, they're putting puts in your balance sheet. They're, they're, you know, they're gaining profits and results all the time until it blows up. And so our, our losses. And then you start building the business, which is flow. Give you good prices, good service, great research, great execution, honest. You know, we fix mistakes and, and you know how you build a real, a real good trading business. So, and then I don't guess what's going to happen to the risk. I Always look and say, okay, we can manage this broad range of outcomes. Low rates, higher rates, lower oil prices, $200 oil prices. That can we. We could argue about what we think the probabilities are. But I will not be put in a position where if that happens, we're in deep trouble.
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A
What are the risks you are most concerned about just now?
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C
Oh, cyber. There's two cyber because of Mythos, which I assume a lot of you guys have read about. But the bad guys can use cyber and they're going to get stronger, more powerful from defying vulnerabilities. It's been written about. You really should read it. And then. And the geopolitics. So I'm not, I'm not worried about the U.S. i don't worry about the U.S. economy. The economy is like the weather. It's going to get better. It's going to get. People talk about it all the time. Did you bring your. But it's not the most significant thing for the future of the free world, free and democratic world is the geopolitics.
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A
And which part of the geopolitics?
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C
I'd say the wars in Ukraine, Iran, our relationship that NATO has to stay strong, that we need to work with our trading partners to keep the Western world together. I think the worst thing we can do is fragment it. And remember, economic relations are not just tariffs. There are investment rules, there are regulatory rules. There are all these WTO rules. Some people just don't allow it. There's agriculture in. Almost every country has its own special rules. But what we should be doing is trying to make sure we keep the Western world together. America has 60 military allies and partners and more than that, economic allies and partners. I think that is important. And you know, the fragmentation of that would be the reason that a book is written one day how the West Was Lost. And so I'm quite conscious that, you know, I'm going to Copenhagen tomorrow. I hope they don't. I don't know if I should bring more security or something like that, you know, but I'm quite conscious that we should do that to strengthen our economic alliances, strengthen our military alliances. There are legitimate complaints, no problem. We can deal with those. But we should make sure we don't fragment the world we have and that. Which is precisely what Russia and China
- [22:40]
A
wants, by the way you run your risk scenarios. Is it every week, I think you told me last time we met. Or was it.
- [22:46]
C
Yeah, we do this fed ccar stress once a year. We do hundreds a week. So.
- [22:52]
A
Hundreds a week?
- [22:53]
C
Hundreds, yeah. And if you said to me, what's the worst one? If you, it's usually the great financial crisis, you know, but you know, we, we would, we'd be fine if, if that scenario happened. And that's the one we never anticipate home prices being down 40%. That was just not on the list. And so there's always something new out there, but we've got plenty of capital liquidity to handle. You know, shocking scenarios.
- [23:17]
A
How worried are you about inflation at this stage?
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C
I'm not worried about it, but on the list of scenarios would be lower interest rates, higher interest rates and higher interest rates with growth is 1, higher trades with inflation is 1. The worst case is stagflation. And I just wouldn't take it off the list. And you know, I'm just saying, okay, if you do that, what would it mean for us? What would mean for our clients? We run our clients through tests like that, we run our clients through tests like high oil prices. How many people be under a lot of stress at high interest rates? You know, what happens to all those rollover loans that people pay a lot more interest on? And that would put a lot of stress in the system. You know, we'd survive it, but it would put a lot, we would be fine, but a lot of stress in the system. Again, companies are assuming that debt will be rolled over maybe 100 basis points more. Well, why not 500 basis points more? Who said that? We've had 3%, we've had over 2% inflation, United States for five years now. And I think there are a lot, my view, and again I'm going to put the probabilities are higher than the market thinks. And my view is that there are a lot of inflationary things out there, including the Iran war, the remilitariation of the world, the infrastructure needs of the world and our deficits. And I just ask all my economists, I know you have a great economist in the room. I don't know how the world running deficits like this isn't inflationary and you just may not have seen that yet. That die may have been cast. It just hasn't happened yet. And so when I look at scenarios, you know, I'm not, I'm looking for early indicators, but it is possible that inflation ticks up and that will catch a lot of people off guard. Not if it's 15 basis points, but if it's 50, 75 people sell a 10 year bond, etc.
- [24:57]
A
When things which we know are volatile, when they move up and down is not so worrisome. But if something we think should be stable is moving a lot, it's pretty scary. So given the level of government debt around the world and in your country, how worried are you about that?
- [25:14]
C
You know, I'm not. Again, I'm not that worried we'll be able to deal with it. I just think maturity should say you should deal with it as opposed to let it happen. The way it's going now, there will be some kind of bond crisis and then we'll have to deal with it and it will be okay. It's just not the way to do it. But you mentioned to us the level of things that are adding to on the risk column are high, like geopolitics, oil, government deficits. And they may go away, but. But they may not. And we don't know what confluence of events causes the problem. So if you look at all economic history, it's different confluence of events, different tectonic places in each other. And they may affect 2026, they may not, but they need to be resolved. And if they're not resolved properly, they will cause real additional problems down the road.
- [26:00]
A
Should we move to Europe?
- [26:02]
C
Say it again?
- [26:03]
A
Should we move to Europe?
- [26:04]
C
You we should move to Europe. Oh, we did.
- [26:11]
A
Now, 25 years ago, the GDP of Europe and America was the same. Now Europe is 70% of the U.S. levels. And you say that Europe never finished its economic union. What do you mean by that?
- [26:25]
C
Yeah, we're slow walking into a real problem here. I think the European Union was one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind because after millennial of war, not just World War I, World Two, but the 100 year war, the 30 year war, the War of the Roses, Spanish wars, these wars, you know, that's a lot of killing. And they decided want to live in peace through political means. Fabulous. Started with the coal commission, etc. It never got finished. So if you look at the part of the point of the European Union is to have a common market so that all of the companies in the European Union can compete across all countries, just like you can in the United States. That common market creates a huge competitive advantage for American companies. That competitive advantage helps American companies in America, helps American companies with the kind of skills outside of America and, and also bureaucracy. Anti business, taxes not conducive to growth. You know, capital formation has been the thing that's driven most productivity in the world. And you have a lot of countries that put in anti capital, anti business. So I think we should be taking care of all our citizens. That's not what I'm saying here. I'm saying that policies conducive to growth are really important. Draghi. Mario Draghi, who I have enormous respect for, wrote the Draghi report. He listed them all 300 recommendations, of which they've done seven or eight. Okay. And they're needed capital markets union, some common bankruptcy laws. For your banks to merge, they need to have probably common insurance schemes, which means handing more power to unelected bureaucrats. But the common market would be a huge benefit. I think it's in America's interest to help you not slow walk into it. Now, you all know it. This is not an American saying something bad about a European. But it needs to be fixed. If that number becomes 60% of America, 50% of America, you and your companies will not be able to compete with American and Chinese companies. The Chinese are building juggernauts in almost every industry. And you're going to need scale and scope. And not only is it important for business, it's important for your civilians. All of them, all of them. If they, you know, affording social safety nets, affording national defense, you got to be a little more competitive. And so one of the things I wrote about my letter was, I know this is maybe a dream. Okay. I don't know if President Trump's going to read it, which is if they do the Draghi report, I would give them one big beautiful free trade bill.
- [28:46]
A
How would that work? How would that work?
- [28:48]
C
Well, we have trade agreements with the EU today and the UK today and other countries. And you know, there's some problem. You'll never fix all the agricultural stuff. You should. The digital tax thing could be negotiated. That's fair. You know, it's kind of one side and the CSDD thing's gotta go away, cause it doesn't work. But other than that, we should have free and open trade. Other than keeping what you need, everyone keeps their own national security. That was a lesson we all learned. You know, you need to do some things, but in this case I would include French sourcing. So, you know, I met a great company I have here today, Konigsberg. They make the NASA missiles. French sourcing works too. Doesn't all have to be the United States, but we do have to rely on each other for that. So I think if we did that, Europe would grow, be stronger, which would be good for America. Europe being weaker is actually bad for our long term health and the long term health of the free and democratic world. And so that's why, and this is more like a 20 or 30 year thing. I'm not talking about the economy here but I do think it's important that we try to accomplish that.
- [29:47]
A
So now you're in charge of Europe for a day. Where do you start?
- [29:51]
C
That's the great Kissinger quote. If you need to talk to Europe, who do you call? I think it has to start with Mers McCrone won't be there much longer. Starmer Maloney and actually they're talking about the cluish and the willing. You're not going to get all 28 nations but if you get the six big ones to agree to do some of those things I think the other ones will have to do it and it'll be good for their citizens. I'm not trying to impose on them something that's bad. You'll have more growth, more wealth to share. It should be shared. We should help all of our citizens usually anti capital act like that's just good for business. No it's not just good for business. It's good for creation of everything that feeds the people and houses the people. And in America I suggest some ways to get more income to lower paid a lot of ways, considerable ways. I think it would go a long way to fixing some of the polarization. There has been a divide, there's no question about it. I think something needs to be fixed. I also mentioned that when business goes to capitals they should also ask the question what can you do for your country? Like John F. Kennedy asked not what can your country do for you? Because a lot of people that go to Washington it's just about their tax break for sugar or cotton or corn or. And that doesn't work anymore. You know in business Norway and you have very sophisticated businesses but you know businesses back away from the government because government is really hard. And so it's like don't go there. But I don't think if we become part, if we're not part of the solution it won't work.
- [31:15]
A
Moving on. What will I do to J.P. morgan and the way you work?
- [31:20]
C
No, we are not going to put our heads in the sand. We're going to use AI do a better job for you. That's what we're going to do. We already we've been doing it for 13 years. We've got thousands of people deployed in it. We have six or seven are use cases around risk fraud, marketing, hedging, design, location prospecting, note taking, aml, bsa, kyc and it's just started and it is really powerful stuff and so deploy it. My Suggestion would be have some. When your management team meets, they should always talk about it should be part of every business review you do. What are your projects? How are you doing it? What's your competition? Doing it is also used by bad guys. So part of that conversation is how we protect ourselves from the bad guys. So, you know, we spend a lot of money in cyber defense. That's network segmentation passcodes, you know, everything you downloaded. JPMorgan goes through multiple, you know, protection to make sure it's not polluted. Some of it's just hygiene. You know, you put these rules in place, follow them, don't allow, don't allow me to be in our payment systems. I don't need to do it, I don't use it. And people sometimes give access to the CEO. Well, you should have access. No, if someone got my passcode during the payment systems. So you got to be quite careful how you do it. You got to work with governments. We need, we're going to need government help. We're going to have to work together with the government to get this right. It is not possible to do it just on our own because, you know, the weak spot, the weak link is the weak link. That could be the Norway exchange, it could be the Fed wire, it could be a jPoint, it could be a vendor that serves a company that the vendor, a small business has taken down. The company's got to close its manufacturing plants. It could be a loaners who were just very brilliant can use some of these things now. And think of the Unabomber in the United States who hate banks, they hate oil companies, they hate airlines or whatever, and they're going to cause harm. So you got to, you got to get involved in the protection side and then in our own company. And I think government should be thinking this way too. Redeployment. So how do we, you know, if we people are going to lose jobs, we want to say to them, hey, we love you. We got this job here. Here's training. You can move income assistance or early retirement so that you're taking care of your people during this process, because I don't know this is going to happen. But unlike Internet, electricity, steam engine, agricultural equipment, this may happen much faster than the ability of our society to adjust in terms of skilled jobs. Where people have a job, it's not stacking a shelf, it's equal pay. And so we just need to get ready. And I think governments can be helpful in that too. Not by doing the training programs, but by telling local schools to do the training programs by, you know, giving tax breaks if you relocate someone or assist them or something. So they're teaching companies how to handle this. So we need, you know, we don't want to have so many jobs lost that you're having, creating huge social problems.
- [34:09]
A
Talking of which, on the one hand you've been very vocal that you want everybody to come back, back to the office. On the other hand, you say in your letter that you think at some stage we'll work three and a half days.
- [34:18]
C
Yeah.
- [34:18]
A
When is that?
- [34:19]
C
You're already doing it here.
- [34:24]
A
That's pretty spoiled.
- [34:25]
C
I take that back. I take that we've gone from working seven days a week to six days a week. It was six days a week, 12 hours a day. Now it's five days a week, eight hours a day. All I'm saying is sometime down the road, with the more productivity and stuff like that, human beings develop, world will probably work in three days a week. We'll have wonderful lives. GDP person will be $200,000. We shouldn't. That's probably, that's from productivity, from capital formation. And I think working the office is a different issue. That is collaboration, knowing each other, socialization, idea generation. We have people who work at home permanently. I just don't think it works the very well for a whole bunch of types of jobs. And if it doesn't work for the client, we're not going to do it. We're here for the client. We're not here to satisfy my employees that they don't want to do it. We've had almost no issue with people coming back. Almost no one quit. The newspapers wrote about it incessantly. And a few people friends of mine said, look, I understand that you don't want to. Got it. I don't think that's immoral. I don't think it's wrong. But you cannot tell J.P. morgan what to do. So have that job as long as you can. We'll work out a transition. But if you don't want to come back to work, you have to find a job somewhere else.
- [35:35]
A
You've been talking about jobs. You've been president of the bank for a long time. What about being president of a country?
- [35:42]
C
I think it's too late for me for that. You got to run, you know. And so I always say, if you anointed me, I'd be happy to do it, but there's no way I'd be able to get through primaries. And plus, I love what I do. Remember, I love what I do. I do A lot to try to help my company and my country and the world from here. I'd have to give that up for a quixotic thing. Yeah.
- [36:06]
A
Now if we were to, if we were to tie the whole conference back. We've been talking about what's a winning corporate culture for you? What is a winning corporate culture?
- [36:19]
C
I'll give it to you real quick that people real detail, facts, analysis, you never give up on it. You segment into small pieces. If you have companies aggregate stuff, they're hiding something, okay? And that includes everything like allocations, you report everything, everything important. Npf, systems compliance, rules, regulations. Not P and l. P&LS, are they accurate? P&LS? I give people a million examples. This is just a little bit. If I open a branch, I have to expense it. It's not earning money for three years. At the end of three years it's making a million or two million dollars a year. Is that an expense or a profit or an investment for the software, I'd capitalize it and I would start depreciating. So I tell people, even when you look at numbers, don't believe the number. Think about it a little bit. There are good expenses and bad expenses. There are good revenues and bad revenues in our business. You take on a lot of bad business, you will pay for it. There are bad revenues and so quality how you do things. Then you want to have complete openness with management teams, detailed follow up list, people that have a little grit, a little bit of courage to speak up. Some people don't treat everyone with respect. Earn your respect. Every day I look at my company, I want everyone to say the company treats me well and gives me opportunity and I like working there and I trust them. We make a lot of mistakes. So you also trust me, make mistakes that we'll fix them, you know. And I have a list of those things that I gotta fix. And it's hard, you know, it's like. And you gotta, it's gotta be everywhere. And we kind of have that, we kind of, kind of consistent discipline. And I travel around, I see our people. It makes me. What we do for companies, countries, communities, companies is extraordinary. We do it in philanthropy, we do it, we do it in research. And it makes me very proud and it motivates me. And you know, I go to somewhere on standing stage with 2,000 people in the room and thanking our top branches, not even the branch manager. The people working the branch who got the award, some are crying, some never been airplane. And we stand for hours shaking their hands. And giving out awards. Spend two days with them. And I tell you, it motivates me tremendously that we're giving opportunity to people and they appreciate it and they like their jobs. And sometimes they whisper a complaint in my ear. But I check that's true. I always check. So,
- [38:34]
A
Gemini, it's been extraordinary. Thank you so much.
- [38:37]
C
Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.