Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorganChase, speaks about economic factors at play locally and nationally, photographed at the Four Seasons Hotel in New Orleans, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorganChase, speaks about economic factors at play locally and nationally, photographed at the Four Seasons Hotel in New Orleans, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorganChase, speaks about economic factors at play locally and nationally, photographed at the Four Seasons Hotel in New Orleans, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorganChase, speaks about economic factors at play locally and nationally, photographed at the Four Seasons Hotel in New Orleans, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.
Jamie Dimon has spent 25 years as chairman and CEO of JPMorganChase, and over that time leading the nation’s largest bank, he’s emerged as a global expert on business, economics and market forces.
He argues that listening, which he describes as a form of humility, is key to being an effective leader. To that end, Dimon, 68, regularly takes listening tours around the country, and New Orleans was among his stops last week. While here, he held a town hall with more than 200 local Chase employees, dined with important clients and toured Venture Global’s new liquefied natural gas export terminal in Port Sulphur, which kicked off production at its $21 billion facility on the day of Dimon’s arrival.
Dimon is a believer in LNG and what it means to the nation’s economy and geopolitical stability. Louisiana, with four LNG facilities, is one of the U.S. leaders in the field, though exporting has drawn some controversy over its emissions and effects on domestic prices. In this week’s Talking Business, Dimon discusses why he sees LNG exports as good for America, what successful cities do to grow their economies and whether he expects an end to higher interest rates and insurance premiums
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the years you have been at the helm of JPMorganChase, New Orleans has seen a lot of disinvestment. Big banks aren’t headquartered here any longer because big companies aren’t either. What do we need to do to change that trajectory?
If you want to grow, there are policies that help a city grow. Having schools teach skills that the local businesses need. Having rules and regulations that allow the rapid permitting of small businesses to large projects. Having infrastructure that actually works for people. Having consistent policies around capital and investment taxes, because when they flip-flop all the time, businesses have choices of where they want to go.
So basically everything we don’t do here.
I’m not an expert at what you do here, and I don’t want to criticize what you do here. I’m saying what works. Cities and states that do not do those things will not grow very well. That’s the choice they make.
You talk a lot about the listening around the country. What have you learned from cities comparable to ours? Who should we be emulating?
Read “Our Towns” by James Fallows. He and his wife got on a small airplane, traveled to 50 American cities, the largest being Columbus. He thought that it was going to show America coming apart at the seams.
And what did he find? In almost all these cities, he found people are working hard, trying to fix their problems locally. They’re not as focused on national politics as much as local politics. They’re building river walks. Business is collaborating locally with government to create the park they need or the industrial park they need or to bring jobs or to have affordable housing.
Close collaboration between universities and governments is another really important thing to do. … And, I think Detroit is a great example. It’s not in those 50 cities, but go to Detroit today and look at their downtown. It was a ghost town and today it’s booming and there are new buildings going up, and new hotels and new factories.
At one point, they had 40,000 abandoned homes. Now they have 10,000. The mayor there did an unbelievable job working with everybody, you know, civic companies, banks.
You’ve spoken about supporting the buildout of energy-related infrastructure to address climate change, which is something we’re particularly vulnerable to. What kind of investment opportunities does Chase see in that area in south Louisiana?
Things like LNG, which has three virtues, all of which are critical, all of which is the reason I thought the Biden administration made a huge mistake in delaying permits (earlier this year for new LNG facilities). One, it’s very good for America economically and it helps our allies. Germany, Japan, Korea need energy supplies and if they can’t get them from us, they’re going to get them from coal or Iran. And that’s a bad idea. Two, LNG is cheaper and a lot of these countries can’t afford very expensive energy. And the third thing is, it has a virtue of being clean. So safe, reliable, affordable energy, and LNG is far less pollution for energy units than coal.
One of the biggest pressure points in the local economy, as elsewhere, is the impact of high insurance and interest rates — on middle class homeowners and commercial developers alike. Do you see things improving?
I don’t know and I wouldn’t count on that. I hope it happens, but it’s a little wishful thinking when you think something like that’s going to come save you. But there are ways to make housing more affordable.
Mortgage rates are too high — not because of interest rates but because of rules and regulations put around mortgages that could literally reduce the cost of a mortgage for a lot of people, particularly lower income people. … I don’t know the rules here, but a lot of places don’t allow, don’t create affordable housing areas where you can build and develop new lower income, smaller-unit houses because of housing policies and things like that. There are policies at work that create more affordable housing.
It’s not just affordable housing but folks in the middle-income bracket that are struggling around here, and a lot of it has to do with insurance rates.
Hopefully inflation comes down a little bit so things like lumber become a little more affordable. … As for insurance rates, I don’t know how you reduce that.
Speaking of these larger economic forces, some are very concerned about this talk of 30% tariffs and what that could mean for inflation and an economy like ours, with a large port.
You have to take a deep breath because we don’t know what’s going to happen. And tariffs and negotiations go hand in hand.
So, I think they’ll be careful about how they deploy certain tools to get people to the negotiating table. I think certain types of tariffs could be damaging. But I think they did it last time. I’m hoping the Trump administration negotiates good deals that are good for America, net-net.
What about some of these other drastic-sounding policy changes, like doing away with entire federal departments of government?
They may have some negatives. But I think it’s very important to recognize certain grievances that Americans have. And one of them, which I think is legitimate, is, is our government effective?
When they take $4 trillion or $5 trillion of our citizens’ money and they spend it, do citizens feel like they got a good deal? I find it hard to believe that most people think it’s a good deal. … So I’m hoping they create a more effective government, and also, a government that a lot of people see doing a better job explaining the benefits it brings and isn’t lecturing people all the time and telling the states what they should be doing.
Email Stephanie Riegel at stephanie.riegel@theadvocate.com.
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