Jamie Dimon on What Kills Companies and the Key to Business Leadership

0:00When I go to a meeting, I've done the pre-reads, and you get 100 % of my attention. 100%. You know, none of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail. You know, if you have an iPad in front of me, and it looks like you're reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It's disrespectful. For the past two decades, Jamie Dimon has led JPMorgan Chase as its CEO during periods of rapid change and even crisis. Through it, Dimon has built the largest U.S. bank and emerged as the smartest voice on the U.S. and global economy. If we are not the preeminent military and the preeminent economy in 40 years, we will not be the reserve currency.

0:36His opinion and counsel are sought after by leaders across all sectors, from tariff impact to return to office mandates to best management practices. Diamond, who has led effectively even through instability and hardship, including two major personal health episodes, says his goal now is to live deliberately, as many wonder what succession will look like at his bank. The economy is weakening. As part of that, he has three major priorities, his family, his country, and what he views as his personal contribution to the world. I sat down with Diamond to pick his brain on all of it and to bring you back the best advice to help you navigate your own lives and jobs.

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1:40So, Jamie, you were in New York this morning giving great earnings reports, actually. And now you're here. It's the life of the CEO to be on the road. We appreciate your time with us. I just wanted to open with an economic snapshot from your vantage point. What's happening in the economy? What's happening in the global economy? What are the main signals you're looking at? So first of all, welcome, everybody. Thrilled to be here. I have a little laryngitis. I apologize for that. Look, the global economy is like inscrutable. So I'm going to tell you, but I want to point out whenever you talk about it, we always say we're worried about this or uncertain about that.

2:13You can open the newspaper of any month, of any year, of anything. It's always that way. Always. What you have to do is compare it to an average, you know, and I do think an average is more complicated. It's more complicated because of trade and tariffs. It's more complicated for huge global deficits. Inflation is not going away. The geopolitical situation, the remiliteration of the world, these are fairly serious things. Interest rates, and I think the chance of surprise is pretty high. Underneath that, if you look at America, the consumer is doing fine. Unemployment is good. Wages are not going up so much.

2:47Labor has gone a little bit weaker. Wholesale credit has been good, but I suspect that we borrowed and spend$10 trillion over the last six years. Of course, that's going to drive corporate profits and corporate credits, so that may weaken. The whole world is a deficit issue. And so I'm kind of in the cautious category and also made cautious by the fact that asset prices are high in some form of bubble territory, but that doesn't mean they can't go up with 20 % more. Credit spreads are historical lows. So it looks like the market world is pricing in, I'm going to call it a continued soft landing.

3:21And, you know, if you looked at next year, and I hate forecasting, what's the odds of a recession? Well, in any one year, it's 20 % or 30%. So, you know, I think the market's pricing in 10%, I'd say 20 % or 30 % is probably more accurate. The chance of not being surprised by something next year, and then you look at factors like tariffs, I look at, it's just a straw in the camel's back. You know, it's not the one thing that's going to break the camel's back. It's always a confluence of factors that do that, and it's very hard. Maybe AI will one day figure it out, but it's very hard for human beings to consistently forecast real inflection points in the economy.

3:56What are some of the longer-term cycles that you're keeping an eye on that may not be reflected as much in the numbers today, but you're a little bit worried about? That's a very important point. I always do future back. People look at all the data today, unemployment today. Well, unemployment was good. Markets were good in 71, and then they crashed. That was true in 80, and then they crashed. That was true in 87, and there was a crash. That was true in 1990s, and it got down. So you can't look at current data. You've got to anticipate data. So here's some anticipatory data. Deficits are not going away, and that will bite one day.

4:28I don't know when. Inflation, what I see is health care prices are going up 10%. Food prices are not going down. Immigration policies are inflationary. The remilitarization of the world is inflationary. The restructure of trade is inflationary. The capital needs from AI and infrastructure is large, growing, and probably inflationary in the short run. So that's why I look at the risk is that rates go up, inflation goes up, and the Fed can't cut rates anymore, maybe has to reverse course. And when I look at risk, I just put that on the table of all the possibilities of outcomes, and we are prepared for that more than most.

5:06In fact, if you look at all things being equal, all things being equal make more money if interest rates go up. On the other hand, if interest rates go up because of inflation and their stagflation, we will do much worse on credit, volumes, and a whole bunch of stuff I can't predict. Can I play a game with you? What? Can I play a game? Sure. Can we play overvalued, undervalued? You can try. Okay. I always tell the press you can ask whatever you want and they say whatever I want. We don't play a game. It's time to play a game. So gold, overvalued or undervalued? I don't know. I mean, I'm not a gold buyer.

5:45It costs 4 % to own it. It could easily go to$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 in environments like this. This is one of the few times in my life I say it's semi-rational to have some in your portfolio. Asset price, but asset prices are kind of high. So I'm not, in the back of my mind, that cuts across almost everything at this point. Bitcoin. I'm my blockchain is real stable coins may have a real use we have the JP Morgan coin tokens will be real program of money, all that will be real I'm not going to say anything about Bitcoin because then that's all I'm going to read about in the headlines and then I get death threats and shit like that so it's not a pet rock but maybe a pet rock TBD, but the underlying technology you think Yeah, but I've always said that.

6:31Blockchain is a technology that we've all been yapping about for 12 years, and it's not fully deployed because it's hard to deploy blockchain that we all agree on permissions and rules. We do use it. We use an intraday repo. I think it can replace certain systems we all use that are clunky or late or not 24-7. Those are all legitimate complaints, and blockchain may be one of the things that fixes that. Other technologies can fix it too, by the way. It's not the only thing that can fix it, And sometimes it's a solution looking for a problem. We already move money real-time payments. Most of it moves digitally, in effect.

7:06You know, it runs through AML, KYC, risk systems, what happens. You can't just replace all that with a blockchain and think you're doing what regulators and governments want you to do. So it's a little more complicated than just it's going to replace everything. Next, NVIDIA. I can't comment on them, but there's some of these names that I just don't want to give specific stuff. Unbelievable company. AI itself is real. I know we're going to talk about AI a little bit later, so I'll reserve that for that. Okay, so then what about open AI? That's the last one. Well, again, are we going to talk about AI in general?

7:41Yes, that's next. First of all, I think you should all use it. Stop debating open, closed, little models. It's going to be all that. It's going to be faster. It's going to get cheaper. You have specialized models. We have 2 ,000 people doing it. We've been doing it since 2012. We have hundreds of use cases. We can identify benefits of like$2 billion, maybe two and a half, I was told today, either cost saves or revenue enhancements. And it's just part of how we run the business today, just like big math was that before, and it's making huge improvements to certain things. Other things are hard to measure.

8:14Like Gen AI, we have almost 150 ,000 people using it a week on internal documents for report writing, for reviewing hundreds of, thousands of legal documents, for summarizing things. It's just hard to tell the productivity. I do think it's real. I think in total, AI is real. Just like if you go back to 1996, in total, the internet was real. There were a lot of people in there. You could look at the whole thing like it was a bubble. I remember it crashed at one point, but out of that came Google, YouTube, Meta. So I think in total, it'll pay off. It's hard to know exactly which ones will, and they won't be the ones you necessarily predict today.

8:52There may be some attributes where winner takes all. That may not be true. I mean, we'll see over time how that works. Yeah, I mean, I think that's completely true. The underlying the hype is a real tech that is extremely transformative. Extremely good, yeah. And you need power. It's high capital usage, unlike the internet. So it's got different dynamics. The power may not be there in some cases. Bad guys are going to use it, but bad guys use the internet on social media. They use airplanes for bad things. And so I do think there should be proper, thoughtful regulations and guardrails to protect the public.

9:25It will eliminate jobs. I think people should stop sticking their head in the sand. So did tractors, and so did cars, and so did—and now if it happens too fast, we, society, government, and businesses should figure out how we can save jobs, save people, retrain, income assist, you know, early retirement or something. So you can't just take all these people and throw them on the street where the next job is making$30 ,000 a year when they're making$150 ,000. You'll have a revolution, so we should be thoughtful about that. But in the meantime, you should be good at using it and deploy it, and we'll figure it out.

9:59There's so much in there that I could dig into each of it, and I'm going to try and tack a little bit at a time. One is your investment in AI as a company. There's been this well-cited MIT study that so many of these early corporate pilot programs of AI have just been giant money pits, and they haven't been that effective in generating real returns for companies. I know you just came out with a report that said you guys have invested about$2 billion in. You're getting about$2 billion back. It sounds like break-even point finally for AI. Yeah, and I was wrong about the$2 billion cost. It's considerably less than that.

10:28I think MIT... You have spent less than$2 billion. I think MIT was talking about generative AI, not about AI. so most of the things that when we apply AI to AML, KYC or risk or fraud very specific things or errors or customer service it works reconciliations you apply it and sometimes by just improving your procedures it's not even really AI it's just part of the process improvement you go in and all of a sudden your headcount's down 40 % and your time to get something done is not 12 days it's 12 hours or 12 minutes so it absolutely works You can overcount the cost saves or the revenues. It works for fraud.

11:09We know our fraud costs are coming down. Most people's are going up. We spent$10 billion a year in marketing, and we know it's going to work on marketing. I mean, marketing by its nature is very inefficient. Put the stuff on the wall and see what happens. And they'll be able to measure multiple different things. And it can measure productivity. It reduces coding time for those who use it by 30%. That's all real. Genitive AI is the other category where that's where you're using generative AI to read documents. So you might have used it to figure out some of these questions here. It's hard to tell.

11:44Never. What are you going to say? What? Never. Yeah. What are you going to say? Well, save me two hours. What's that worth? Did you just spend two hours doing something else? So we don't really know. And I think it's a mistake to try to calculate everything positive. We spend a lot of money getting data into the proper format so it can be used by AI. We're just doing it. We're not measuring how much it costs. We're just going to get it in proper database, et cetera. But it is completely real. And again, I think MIT is either wrong or it's just generative AI. I think it was just generative AI. Interesting.

12:16So did you have any big corporate failures, though, as you were figuring out how to make more efficiencies with AI? Any learnings, basically? No, we did something different. where it's not in tech, even though them and tech are like deep partners and everything they do. And tech does a lot of the heavy lifting, but the AI experts, data, think of the data CEOs and the data people are in this area. And then we have a mirror inside every company, you know, credit card, consumer, trading. And at most, I think it really works. It's part of this in your mind. You know, how do you deploy it? I can't tell you use AI.

12:56You have to figure out how you're going to use it sit down and think about it, call friends at other companies. So most of them actually work, but I say some are maybe disappointing. There's no example we spent$400 million and it was a complete waste of money. There's none of that. And even though it was, it was part of just the learnings of getting something done. So you're recommending to a lot of companies, you think it's beyond time to be investing in it. Absolutely. Time to go. You should be using it. It should be, when we meet for business reviews, every business review at a detailed level, what are you doing in technology?

13:28What are you doing in AI? What are the projects? How are you improving it? We're sending people to a master class so the management team say, my God, I didn't know it could do that for me. I didn't know it could read 100 ,000 documents. I didn't know it could correlate this database with that database and tell me patterns that I can't possibly see, which is how we're picking up a lot of fraud. It's pattern recognition that part of some of the AI machines that human beings can't pick up. So use it. Get good at it. Make it part of your tool set, your weapon set, and you'll learn. It'll get better all the time.

13:59Your manager will get better. And you should do it in any business. And did you say you're sending your executives and your team to a master class in AI? How are you training your teams in it? We had a request from our own people. So I said we have 150 ,000 people using large language models on inside data. And remember, the inside data, private data, is huge. And it's not in the web. And therefore, all the data is being used right. That's not completely true. and we use data both inside and outside but a lot of people say I want to learn I want to know how to use it, how do you think about it when I sit down as a management team our HR people did a great job they formed a master class, some was at headquarters I think some was MIT some were inside people, some were outside people we just had the first one and I haven't gotten a report back I always tell people to do something like that people say this is great, this is wonderful I want to know if six months later they say it was useful and so we're going to find out but I'm sure it had some benefit Awesome.

14:54Last question on AI. So the CapEx spending on it, especially from tech companies, is tremendous. AI companies, I've read a stat, have accounted for 80 % of gains of U.S. stocks in 2025. And companies investing hundreds of billions in AI accounts for an estimated 40 % of U.S. GDP growth this year. Does that concern you as you look at the markets? What kind of a bubble are we talking about? and also the secular nature of the investments going into these AI companies, AMD into OpenAI, back into the chips, things like that? It's 40 % of the increase in GDP, which I forgot was 2.5%. So it was a big increase in CapEx.

15:37And remember that CapEx is roads and cement and steel and servers and connectors. It's a million different things going on. I wouldn't say I'm concerned. And like I said, you can't look at AI as a bubble, though some of these things may be in the bubble. In total, it will probably pay off. Some of those projects won't get done the way they were announced. Some of them won't get the power they need. And when you look at how they're done, I call it project finance. If JPMorgan is leasing a building from you, that's a pretty good credit. If you are relying on a company that doesn't have revenues to pay you for your lease, that's not the same thing.

16:15or who's responsible for finishing the building? Is there insurance on it? What if the machines don't work? What if the chips fail? Who's taking all these risks? And so you've got to go literally project by project. And even on that investment scheme, it's not abnormal to have vendor finance, which is what you seal about by part of your company. You get the cash off financial purchase. You've got to go one by one to say, is it pushing the bubble or is it real? Is it really going to develop stuff that'll have productive capability to pay off on the investment. Like I said, in total, I think they probably will, but one by one, I don't know.

16:50So I want to jump ahead to just a little bit of a near-term look at the market to 2026. The Trump administration has done a lot this year, the tariffs. First off, the first thing I want to actually ask you is, on April 2nd, when the Liberation Day tariffs dropped, what was your day like? Tell me that 24-hour day in the life of Jamie Dimon. I do remember it. I remember the market going down and then for a couple of days after, that number caught people by surprise. And I think appropriately, the administration backed off of it and assigned people to go country by country to come up with these agreements in principle, which are agreements in principle.

17:26And the market came way, I've got 15 % or something like that, and then mostly recovered once it seemed more rational. And I think you've seen that pattern exhibit itself. and that's how they negotiate out here and we'll move here see how you're moving, what works, what doesn't work and in some ways it's good it's wrong for people to say it's not good to respond to legitimate complaints about what you're doing is a good thing to do and to make adjustments is appropriate which they've said they're going to do in India they've said they're going to do in China the market went down a thousand points when this minor trade war happened so that's the right thing to do but they're still out there These are our allies and friends, and we should finish these things and put them in place.

18:10I think they're getting better at it. They're very complicated. I'm not sure when they started, they completely are complicated. In fact, someone from the government told me that you need hundreds of people to negotiate one deal. I think the whole trade department has 450, and there were 100 of these. So it takes a little bit of time to work through. I assume you're following. And the really important thing to me, by the way, we need to keep the Western world together economically. And while there are legitimate trade complaints, both about national security, we've made some failures, and unfair trade, I hope at the end of the day that we are embracing our allies and our non-allies.

18:56India's not an ally of ours, but I think we should embrace them. They're a natural ally. All we have to do is reach out our hand. Trade is part of that. But I've also been told that hopefully that will be resolved soon, too. Well, that gets into the bigger geopolitical reordering that's happening around these tariffs. And yes, they've come down from that April 2nd day, for the most part, pretty much everywhere. But it is creating ripple effects. Yes, we're getting some nice revenue back into the country, but also other countries are turning to each other for help. And if you look at China, I wonder, do you think we've overplayed our hand there a little bit?

19:29They corner the market on rare earth. They have turned to the rest of the world to make up some of the business lost in the U.S. in these trade talks. So what's happening there? I think it's very complicated. This is a multiplayer, multi-year game. And so initial responses, you're absolutely right. Negotiating a settlement here does not mean you don't do things going forward. I think you have seen people do that. And there are layers of these things where you can move some business over here, but you can't move at all. You can avoid some tariffs over there. is complicated. And with China, it's the most complicated.

20:05It's the biggest trading part with everyone in the world. And the rare earths, yeah, they've kind of cornered it, but the rare earths are everywhere. They're not rare. This is the processing, mining, and dirty. We basically outsource dirty stuff to other countries is what this was. And we should be able to fix that. But they've also, when they do something like that, they're also telling the world they're willing to do something like that. And so this goes a little bit of both ways. I would be in favor of deep engagement with China where there are legitimate issues and there are some about how they subsidize industries and they should be very specific.

20:39And then anything about national security to me has got nothing to do with China. It's got to do with we need to make sure that things are done here or in friendly places with secure supply chains that we need for national security, our defense, and our safety. And that's a whole different issue that it should be unilateral. That's not a negotiation. So stepping back into the strategy of what the Trump administration seems to be doing in some ways is they're almost operating the American government like it's a business in need of a turnaround. We have this ballooning deficit and some things have been helpful in reducing that, some things are not like the one big beautiful bill.

21:16But it seems like if you listen to Howard Lutnik speaking, he's talking about things like, well, revenue is coming in from tariffs and why are we giving handouts to Harvard grants and to Intel? We should be taking equity and getting upside potential for that. That's sort of how a venture capitalist would think, and that's not been done before in our government. Is this a good idea or not? We had a lot in there. Yes. Every topic. I think that government should be pro-business and pro-growth, and I think that's very good. I think the tariffs, we think it's going to collect at a run rate of about$400 billion a year, somewhat offset by the big, beautiful bill that will be more stimulus.

21:56and a lot of that's front-ended. And I think deregulation, I should say smart regulation is a good idea. And everyone knows it is crippling to people. It's redundant. It slows people down. You can't move. It's hard to get licenses. It's hard to get permitting. It affects affordable housing. Of course, the right to be looking at that. And then, of course, when you say business, government isn't business, but they should have the same, and I've been writing about this for years, you give me your money for schools or whatever I do, I owe you. You gave me this. We said we'd do this. Here's the outcome.

22:31Here's the cost per person. Here's how many people we covered. Here's how many people got jobs. Here's how many people. And they don't do that. So to apply certain disciplines to government, absolutely. And until we do it, I would say, I'm going to guess, there's not one person in this room, even the most liberal Democrat in the room, who would say the government is well-run and efficient. Okay? And they owe you that. And it is part of the reason we have a little bit of this, you know, people think Washington is a swamp because it sucks up money. It's the great sucking sound. Like how many of you think if we gave Washington another trillion dollars that you will be better off?

23:05That poor people would be better off? That school, maybe you're, you know, there are few people who believe that. But you haven't spent much time in what goes on in this town and how money goes to special interest groups and all these various things. So they already collect 20 % of everyone's profits. So they already have the kind of owner of our companies you look at. I think they have to be very careful about individual deals with individual logic. And I don't know all the deals, so I don't know all the things that took place. We know some of these companies. We're involved in some, so I can't answer specific questions.

23:41But you've got to be very careful about why, what, when, where. What kind of precedent is this at? Is it national security? Is it fairness? I thought they did a very good deal with MP Materials. We were the banker on that, but they signed a long-term contract, which these companies need to survive. They bought a piece of the company. They probably tripled their money already. I think that is a reasonable thing to do, but it's national security. It's not, and Intel's national security, because I do think advanced chips are, but whether that was the way to do it, I'd have to leave that to people who know exactly what's in the deal.