Jamie Dimon doesn’t often give hourlong interviews, but when he does, he covers a lot of ground.
The JPMorgan CEO appeared on “The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost” on Monday, days after reporting the bank’s highest-ever quarterly profit of $21.2 billion, and describing an environment that’s “almost as good as it gets” for banks.
In his interview with Frost, Dimon — who has run JPMorgan for 20 years, through the financial crisis, COVID, and the 2023 banking turmoil — covered everything from the bond markets to Iran to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Here are four key takeaways that stood out.
He wouldn’t buy bonds — and doesn’t fully trust the inflation data
Asked whether he’d buy long-dated government bonds, Dimon didn’t hedge: “Personally, no. I would not be a buyer.”
“Even if inflation was 2%, the 10-year bond should probably be at four to four and a half,” — and yields are “almost there today,” leaving little upside.
He noted inflation has run above 3% for nearly five years, and said the official numbers deserve scrutiny: “You dig into these numbers, I mean, really dig into them, and I wouldn’t give them too much credence.”
The self-described economic historian said he can’t shake the memory of the 1970s, when inflation climbed from around 3.5% to 11%.
With global debt-to-GDP near 100% and the US deficit at 6%, he predicted governments will wait for a crisis rather than act: “That’ll exhibit itself with higher interest rates, the market getting rattled,” he said.
Dimon added that he hasn’t purchased any stocks in recent months.
He says the US should squeeze Iran’s economy for a year — even if gas prices spike
With strikes restarting and the Strait of Hormuz shut again, Dimon argued that President Donald Trump should level with the public and commit to a yearlong economic strangulation of Iran, accepting higher gas prices as the cost, with no US military deaths and ally support.
Dimon imagined the president making the case directly to the American people: “I could resolve it without any military deaths or put 100,000 of your kids on the field.” Gas prices might climb for a year, he said — but for Dimon, that trade-off is worth it.
“Is that a better outcome than them having a nuclear weapon in 10 years?” he asked. “One is maybe life and death for mankind, the other one is the economy.”
AI will pay off, but ‘definitely not’ the way investors expect
Dimon is a believer in the technology itself: “It’s real … it will cure cancers. Your children are going to live to 100.”
The investment boom is another matter. “The amount of money being spent is huge. Will it, in total, pay off? Probably, just like the internet did. Will it pay off the way you expect, on the time you expect? Definitely not.”
His template is the dot-com era: “We had Yahoo and Netscape and all these companies that went bankrupt. But Google made it, Facebook made it.”
He predicted a reckoning in discipline as companies start asking: “I put $100 million in this, what am I getting?”
He’s putting New York’s mayor on notice
Dimon said he has personally confronted New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani with the numbers behind JPMorgan’s southward drift in staffing. The bank’s New York head count has fallen from 35,000 to 26,000 over 20 years, while Texas has surged from around 11,000 to 35,000, he said.
Asked whether anything City Hall could do would push the bank out of New York, where it just opened a new headquarters tower, Dimon pointedly declined to rule it out: “I wouldn’t make it binary like that.”
Instead, he laid out the scorecard he says mayors are now graded on: “It’s not just the taxes, but it is the taxes. It’s the medical. It’s the hospitals. It’s the social life. It’s the commute. It’s the housing.”
Cities, he warned, no longer have captive employers: “There weren’t as many competitive cities; now there are a lot.”
He held up Texas as the state getting it right: “They’re open to business … it’s easy for you to buy a house and have a family. If governments do the wrong thing, it will work adversely.”
Insecurity, not arrogance, is the worst trait for CEOs
Dimon said leaders need to acknowledge that they can’t know everything and trust the people around them to make decisions and tell them the truth, even if it’s hard to hear.
The best leaders, in Dimon’s eyes, have the “innate skills to trust people, to get the best out of people, to not get embarrassed by not knowing.”
A secure leader treats criticism as a good thing, Dimon said. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings by telling me we have a crappy product,” he told Frost.
“Customer complaints are a gift.”
