The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank
Jamie Dimon explains how he rebuilt from his 1998 Citigroup firing to create the only U.S. bank worth over $800B — more than twice its nearest competitor.
- JPMorgan Chase has an $800B+ market cap, more than twice its nearest competitor, and is the most valuable company east of the Mississippi.
- Dimon was fired as Citigroup president in 1998 and nearly ran Amazon instead — he met Jeff Bezos, who was seeking a president at the time.
- At Bank One, he found it carried more US corporate credit risk than Citibank with far less capital, and personally reviewed every single loan on the books.
- In 2006 he pulled back on subprime and stockpiled liquidity; big investment banks ran 35x leverage versus JP Morgan’s roughly 12x.
- Bear Stearns acquisition cost ~$1B for a company with $300B assets; the government later sued JP Morgan for Bear’s and WaMu’s bad mortgages, forcing a $5B settlement Dimon called unjust.
- WaMu was bought one week after Lehman’s collapse for ~$30B, immediately writing off mortgage losses, then JP Morgan raised an additional $11B in equity the next day purely as a conservative buffer.
- SVB and First Republic collapsed due to concentrated venture-backed depositors — VCs told portfolio companies to pull funds simultaneously, with SVB losing $100B in deposits in one day.
- Dimon’s biggest current concern is cyber: JP Morgan spends $800M/year on cybersecurity, but grid and water infrastructure protections are insufficient for a real wartime cyber scenario.
2025-07-16 · Watch on YouTube
