[MUSIC] Jamie, welcome and thank you very much for
coming here today. >> Pleasure to be here,
thank you, everybody. I noticed a lot of other folks here I
didn't expect to be here, so welcome, friends, from other places. >> This is the third you've
come to talk to us and I have to ask are we just very lucky to
have you or is there some perhaps latent regret in choosing our competitor on the
east coast for your own business school? >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] So why, my wife went to Harvard Business
School, I went to Harvard Business School, my daughter went to
Harvard Business School and two son-in-laws went to
Harvard Business School. But we love Stanford. >> [LAUGH]
>> I like to come out here all the time. When I come out here I realize why
you don't work so hard out here. >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] >> Now speaking of business school, we have many people in the room who are
trying to decide between entrepreneurship and more traditional paths on leaving. Do you mind talking to the decision you
made on leaving Harvard yourself, and if you'd do the same thing today? >> So when I'd worked at a small
really second rate consulting company before business school,
back then they had a deferred admit, so I was admitted but
I had to work for two years. And I did the consulting thing, you learn a lot, I also learned I
didn't want to be a consultant. But I saw a whole bunch of different
companies and industries, including badly run political, all these various things,
so it was actually a very good experience. But when I got to Harvard Business School,
I actually worked at Goldman-Sachs the summer of 81 and I was headed
back to Goldman, Morgan, or Lehman. I was probably going to decide Goldman,
and at the last minute, Sandy Weill offered me
a job to be his assistant. He had just sold Shearson, which is a brokerage firm with a couple
thousand brokers through American Express. And it just looked like it was just too
good to not to see a large corporation from the inside, how it goes. My goal in life was to be
part of an organization. It wasn't necessarily to be an investment
banker or a trader or something like that. So I took the crap shoot,
I figured, worse comes to worst, I can go back to Wall Street. So I didn't feel like I was
going to lose anything but time. Yes, I would make the same decision again. Maybe not for the same guy again but
the same decision. >> Now, Samuel Weill obviously
saw something in you at the time. When you meet men and
women our age at JP Morgan today, what leadership characteristics
are you looking for in them ,and how do you identify and bring those
people through as the next generation? >> When you're young, it's hard to
say leadership characteristics but there's just some basic stuff. There are people who know a lot. There's some people walk
into your office and say, I'd like to know about the strategy
of the company and they didn't bother to read the chairman's letter I wrote
which is 30 or 40 pages long. There are people who walk in and say,
you really should be thinking about doing better digital services but
they don't look at the ones we do do. The other people walk in and
they know everything, and so when they have a conversation, they're actually enhancing your life
as opposed to the other way around. So character is a sine qua non and
by character, I also mean that they tell the whole
truth, nothing but the truth. They don't shave the truth and they say
the same thing to you that they say to you, because the second I see people
doing something different than that, you just go on a list to me,
I have no interest. I don't have time for that and
I won't have interest in it, and people who are good relate well to
other people, so a variety of things. >> I think when we look at finances,
often people concentrate on the competitive leadership
characteristics they see there. At the GSB,
we have a real folks on the collaborative. How do you see the balance between
competitive and collaborative [CROSSTALK]. >> Competitive inside the company? >> Inside and out. >> I think the things that destroy
companies, folks, are bureaucracy and politics. We had an offsite this summer, I asking
many times, we gotta make this simple, we gotta make this better,
we gotta kill our meetings are too long, and we stand behind regulations sometimes,
the regulators are making us do it. But I said no, we're going to re-imagine
all these things the way they should be, not the way they are today and let's take a crack at killing some of this
bureaucracy that's grown up recently. And someone wrote a memo,
and we all do pre-reads. In my meetings, you don't flip through
a chart, it's all pre-reads, I expect you to do your homework, get the analysis and
part it up with people beforehand. So you don't walk in and say,
I want to do a, b, and c but I haven't spoken to this person yet. I would say,
why didn't you speak to this person? The meeting is cancelled. Go do that first and then come back with a
joint recommendation or that you disagree and then we'll talk about specifically
why you disagree about something. Anyway, I'd asked about bureaucracy and the pre-read by saying bureaucracy
is a initially a condition at the output of complex businesses
operating in complex global environments. It's just not true, bureaucracy kills. Bureaucracy drives out good people,
it drives out innovation. It makes the person in the office
next to you a competitor and not a collaborator and
that's a really bad idea inside a company. Now it's okay to compete with ideas but it's really bad idea when you're
competing with the person next to you. It creates politics and if you look at
what's killed companies over the years, it was bureaucracy. When you look at the Fortune 500 and
you did a 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980,
look at the companies who failed, it was because they were dumb,
bureaucratic, backward and political. CEOs should never allow that stuff and
yet they do, as a normal course, they allow it and you've seen a lot of
public companies and boards allow it. Boards can create it, by the way. So absolute collaboration, but collaboration does not mean
everyone has to agree. Collaboration does not mean
you go a long to get along, because that's very often
what people mean by it. He's a good guy, if you walk into me and
say I'm going to be loyal to you, l would question what that means because
you should be loyal to the institution. You should be loyal to the customers,
you could be loyal to the principles for which l stand, but being loyal to me
usually means you're going to defend my decision whether or not you agree,
which I just think is a mistake. >> You're well known for
having a very candid and open, forthright style of communication. It's appreciated by Warren Buffett, he
says he loves your chairman letters, and we obviously appreciate it here. What was it that led you to develop
this style of communication early on? >> I'm one of those who I don't think
I've changed much since I've been eight. >> [LAUGH]
>> When I got to Harvard Business School, some of the advice I got when I was
graduating was whatever you do, Jamie, don't go into corporate America,
you won't survive. >> [LAUGH]
>> And there was truth to that, I was a little too outspoken for
some corporations etc, and part of it was Warren Buffet. When I was in high school or college,
I actually read his partnership letters. He would say, I'll speak to you as if
you're my smart sister who doesn't know everything I know, so I have to go
out of my way to explain it to you. Business is not that complicated, we should be able to explain it,
I always felt exactly the same way. I always felt as a matter of
principle inside a company, if I allow spinning to the public,
you are going to spin to me. Think of earnings, numbers, how great
we are doing when we're not and so I say the same thing to you that I say to
my board, that I say to my shareholder, I say to my employee,
that I say to my customer. There is no difference. I might phrase it differently
because you're talking to different group of people and
you're trying to explain yourself, but there is no difference,
and that clarity, I think, helps a company know what it's
trying to accomplish all the time. When I read annual letters, and it's all
gobbledygook in the letter, my respect for the company drops a little bit. And then you gotta be very specific,
because we can all say, the customer is the most important thing,
and the customer, the customer. But it should mean
something specific like, do you actually read
customer complaints and then you do something about it as
opposed to, we put the customer first. A lot of people say that and they don't
mean it in any way, shape, or form. They do no actions that would
actually support the statement. >> So this one I'm afraid I'm going to
try to sneak in some more career advice. I think everyone here is aware that
tech is extremely sexy right now. >> A little bit less so today. >> Don't say today. [LAUGH] What do you think is the
opportunity in a career in finance that some in audience maybe aren't seeing? >> First of all, one thing about tech, tech is driven I don't think it's
different than it was before. It's driven change throughout
all of history, and all various forms of technology
from the actual chips to Internet. But also printing, energy, institutions, schools, the churches,
the dissemination of morality. That's what's always changed society. It's always at the root,
it's at the root of changes in businesses, it's at the root of changes
in what companies do well and what companies don't do well,
so it's absolutely critical. I personally think Silicon Valley
kind of got a free ride with Obama in the White House. You pandered to him and
he pandered to you, now you're seeing a little
flip side of that. So the big companies,
the successful ones are going to find out, which I've known a long time. The bigger you are, the more the
government's going to get inside what you do, and want to impose on you and
set rules and standards, and sometimes for good,
sometimes not for good. But, so financial services, so I think technology's
an absolutely wonderful thing. But financial services, first of all,
we are a huge user of technology. We spend $9 billion a year, so
we're not at the bleeding edge, but we're damn close. In terms of what we spend money on, what
we do, our data centers, our capabilities, our mobile, our digital. We move $6 trillion around
the world every day digitally, not cryptocurrency, but
close to it because it's digital. And we bank 50 million
people on our households and soon we're going to have online investing
and robo investing and all these various things to link in to our accounts,
so we are huge users of that stuff. We also use the advertising
on Facebook and Google, etc. But financial services is always
going to be an interesting business, because it's not the most
important business, but it is at the nexus of how
a capitalist society functions. It's part of the spinning wheel. And when I say financial service, I'm
talking about all of it, private equity, venture capital, activist, whether you
like them or not, banks, nonbanks, individual investors. A lot of companies that
do things individually, that help change the world a little bit. But it's always going to this field
that when money gets invested, the ideas come together. Things get executed,
capital gets executed globally. So it's always fascinating,
it'll always be well paid, whatever some of these folks say in DC. It has to be well paid because you can't
do it with dumb people making dumb decisions, if you think you can actually
run a good economy or something like that. It will always be a high tech user, and it will always be complex and
global by its nature. And so it's a fascinating business. When you wake up in the morning,
when I read the paper, there's very little in the paper that
I'm not reading and thinking about. It affects our clients, it affects
our companies, it affects our risk. It affects our exposure, we should be doing something about it,
like just any article. because we do business in well over
a hundred countries, and with just about every country and every sovereign wealth,
and so it's a fascinating field. I mean, when you get into it,
there are all different parts to it. And you gotta decide if you want to get
into it, how you want to get into that. One of the things we set up,
which I really like, is, we hired top-notch people from investment
banking, okay, and sales and trading. So we go to the best schools in the world,
we hire some of the best people. We now do the same thing for
general management, about eight or nine or ten a year because we need people
who can run the damn joint, too. And I want the same quality and
we move around the company, kind of keep an eye on them. But the point is, they want to be global,
they want to move around, and they want to learn how to manage and
run something. So the same kind of compensation
as investment bankers, same openness to senior people,
so that we can get them. Not that if you're an investment banker,
you can't move into management or sales and trading, but this is really people want to do
more management of financial services. >> You mentioned cryptocurrency. I know you said you weren't going
to talk about Bitcoin anymore, but you're at Stanford. Some of us put all our
student loan money into it. And I have to ask you anyway,
why do you believe that governments and regulators can't allow the existence
of a global currency based on [CROSSTALK]
>> I've become like a spokesman against BitCoin, I don't care about BitCoin. I could give a shit,
to tell you the truth. >> [LAUGH]
>> And I promised myself I wouldn't
talk about it, the next day. There are four things really quickly,
blockchain is real, it's technology, it could be public or private,
it could be for five people, it could be for 5 million. It's going to work. We already use it in a lot of test cases
and stuff like that, so we're a supporter. I do worry a little bit about
the security because, like I said, we move $6 trillion a day, real time,
quite efficiently, effectively and secure. Before you replace that, you gotta
[LAUGH] make sure you can do it right. There are three cryptocurrencies, okay,
three types, three separate types. One is ICOs, ICO and I haven't studied
these things, but you're paying for a token that allows you to use a service,
which is very different than a currency, but that's what people
call cryptocurrencies. And maybe, Jim, maybe you've studied
some of these ICOs, I have no idea. Someone gives you cloud services or
you invest in services, that's one type. The second type you can use
cryptocurrency for fiat currency. Well, that works because it just uses
different technology to move money around. Basically we keep your money digitally
anyway, and if you just keep different files in a different way and
distributed ledgers, that would work fine. But I've always thought about Bitcoin
as a currency and a store value and a payment mechanism is that governments,
and this is my belief and I'm maybe wrong. I'm not telling you you
can't go to $100,000. That governments are going to crush
it one day for three reasons, okay? One is when it's used for
terrorist activities, okay? It'll happen, it's a matter of time,
it'll go back to a Bitcoin and then all of a sudden, the DOJ,
the United State government, all these people in Washington who
profess to love technology and the novelty of Bitcoin
are going to change their mind. Number two, when a lotta little
old ladies lose their money. Because the speculative vehicle is allowed
to exist by the United States government. And they're going to lose their money,
they're going to be pounding. You should of done something about it. And number three is the most important. Whenever a government forms itself, and you go to any country in the world,
pull out the currency, look at the date, that fiat currency was formed by that
government with the central bank. Because governments like
to control their currency. They like to know who has it, where it's
going, why it's going, when it went, etc., and right now, Bitcoin's a novelty. It's $100 billion and
$1 billion a day trades hands. Obviously, mostly speculation, okay? And obviously, there's a real use case,
I'm not making it as a joke. Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, criminal,
drug money, that will always be true. So we'll always have a use case that's
valuable to someone because it's better in those countries to have that than
currency or money in the bank, because the governments,
they take that too. And if you go to Argentina,
they had effectively savings accounts, the government just went in and took it. They just took it, and of course, everyone
took their money out of the bank right after that, and
the country basically collapsed. So that's the reason why. It's going to get bigger and bigger and
they're going to want to control it. And it's not the same as a fiat currency. A fiat currency, the government says,
you must take this as legal tender. And at par, effectively cash,
at par, and it's always worth par. And I don't know why a crypto dollar would
ever be something that the store value would be worse than a crypto Bitcoin. So that's my view and
I may be wrong, which I doubt, but- >> [LAUGH] >> I've been wrong before, though. So, and if I'm wrong,
I also don't care very much. It'll never affect my life. It's not because they're right, or
the bankers are defending their stuff. Absolutely untrue. If Bitcoin works and we have to do
something, Bitcoin will do that too. >> Kind of a win-win there. >> [LAUGH]
>> JP Morgan's a big investor in blockchain technology,
as we've seen from Bitcoin. What do you think the most interesting
applications of blockchain are going to be in finance? >> So blockchain, it's not like
a faster chip or the Nvidia GPUs and stuff like that,
because when you get certain technologies, they just filter through the whole system. And they allow you to do
things differently everywhere. Like more database and more reading
different natural language processing. You basically have to write code
to have a use case for Bitcoin. So think of it,
it'll be deployed use case by use case. We're using it to move
money inside the bank. Something like 30 or 40% of the $6 trillion we move is just
between JP Morgan Chase accounts. Okay, that's sort of a marry area. From General Motors to one of your
vendors when we have both the accounts, we just move them between
our own accounts, basically. Loan documents we do a trade,
all the paper, all the detail, all this notation, all the covenants, and all that can be kept in a place
where you'll have the same files. They're all kept up to date. You know who owns it, you know who
doesn't own it, so that would be one. Equity trading, I don't know the BitCoin
takes ten minutes to finish. We do thousands and
thousands of trades split second equities. So it may be too late to use for
equity trading. It may be okay for
end-of-day settlement stuff. So that's all use case by use case. You can go through one by one and say
it'll work here, it may not work there. But again, you gotta kind of write
the code, or effectively rewrite the code. >> So we then moved from
one hot topic to another. You are part of President Trump's
business advisory board. Should it have been disbanded, and where is that dialogue with
the administration are taking place? >> Yeah, so I joined the council,
just keep in mind. So when I joined the council,
the President asked, Steve Schwartzman called up actually and said the President
would like you to join his council. I am a patriot, I love
the United States of America, okay, and you want to help your country, and
I still am going to help my country. So help me God that is what
I'm going to do whether or not you all like President Trump. And remember, we help presidents and
prime ministers all around the world. I see them we advise them
we give them this and we want to help the people
of that country too. And that is part of your job as a bank and as a individual to try to help to
make the world a better place. I joined the council, I did get
one very long well written elegant nasty letter from my daughter, basically-
>> [LAUGH] >> Basically, how could you Dad? And my other two daughters were
right to the point, ditto. >> [LAUGH]
>> And my wife told me how many of her
friends she had to explain it to. Remember these are all liberal
effete New Yorkers, in my opinion. >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] >> I said I'm a patriot. It doesn't mean I agree with
everything the man says or the way the man is himself. It's about trying to help
the United States of America. The council met twice, so
think of these councils. The truth is they aren't
particularly effective. I was at one. I don't know if Mary was
at the second meeting. All right and
I think the same was a lot like the first. You talk about the infrastructure. You talk about this and
the president is like, that's ridiculous. We get better at this. All true but at one point that work has
got to be done in detail in the agencies. Okay, not by a bunch of CEOs
sitting around the table, telling you that it takes too
long to build a bridge and this regulation hurts and
we need this in capital markets. So the effectiveness comes down over time. And then after,
Charlotteville was the last straw but the negatives were going up. Most of us really believe in diversity. LGBT, DOCA programs, we're pro immigrant,
we're and we certainly wouldn't justify any way shape of form, nazism or
white supremacy or stuff like that. So we found ourselves having to
explain to our own people by the way, because the press was always calling me
up and saying you should say something. I don't remember the press calling me up
saying I had to go public every time I disagreed with something Obama did. So the press really is
extremely biased and they're going to have to
do something about it. Not all, I mean they're all
bias in their own way but having to explain it constantly over and
over is just a negative. We had a conference call. Steve Swartzman was the chairman. He ran it, we went alphabetically, everyone on the conference call
said let's just disband it. There were two said don't, having a seat
at the table is a good thing etc., etc., and we disbanded it. Of course Schwartzman told the President,
and the thing that came out was that the President agreed to disband
it which wasn't exactly the case. But everyone in that room is still
working with the people they should be working with to help the United States
government do proper things. They need help. If you think somehow decisions are going
to be made properly in Washington without the help of business, they won't. We're all doing it in our own way and
obviously, I do a lot with Monahan and Cohen And you have other people
deal with other agencies, etc., but is you come up and try to help. And just because you don't like
the president is a really bad idea. I think we become far too
knee jerk in our politics and to me, you should be willing to help. >> Your name is-
>> Sorry. >> Yeah
>> Yeah, I'm sorry go ahead. >> Your name was thrown around a lot
as a potential Secretary of Treasury. That didn't happen. But say you wake up tomorrow as
the secretary, what does tax reform or economic policy look like
on the secretary diamond? >> So,
I don't want to be Secretary of Treasury. >> [LAUGH]
>> But we have, and told you this is important this country has the best hand
ever dealt any country in the planet. And most people don't fully understand
if they never make the list. So I always say we have a problem, make a
list and go through what we think matters. And I’m going to do it quickly. We have all the food and
water and energy that we need. We have the Atlantic and the Pacific which
our founding fathers realize how powerful it is to defend this country from
wars in Asia, wars in Europe. We have the best military
the world's ever seen. That's going to be true for
a long period of time. I say compare it to China,
but do it respectfully. China does not have enough food,
water and energy, and it's neighbors happen to be Philippines,
Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, India and Russia. And they've had border skirmishes or
wars with five or six of those in the last 40 years. They are in the a tough part of the world. So those leadership there are saying God,
we need food. We need access to certain commodities. We have to have an army just to protect
ourselves from the billions of people who surround them that aren't
necessarily that happy with them. So the United States also has and I got out of business school talking about
Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan. Then it was BRIC, Brazil,
Russia, India, China. Then it was Mexico, MIST Mexico,
Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey. But none of them have what I'm about
to say, the universities we do, the rule of law like we do. Low corruption like we do. The widest, deepest, most transparent
markets the world has ever seen, public and private. And again,
I'm not talking about banks here. Okay, and hugely vibrant
businesses small to large, and innovation like the world's never seen. And I'm not talking about
just Silicon Valley. I'm talking about you go to
any company in America and believe me, they’re getting
productivity up 2% somewhere, okay? And does Brazil have that? India, China, okay does most European
countries have that whole list. Does Mexico have it? That’s the best hand. But something went wrong, and I do think
we left behind a huge segment of sociaty. 10 million people left the workforce, but
I think they're starting to come back in. 20 million people are felons, of which
a large amount shouldn't be felons. I tell people if you were caught
doing some of the shit you did, you'd be a felon too. And you can't get a job after that. Most companies, you’re not going to get
a job with JP Morgan by law from most of the jobs by regulatory rules and
requirements Scotty. We have the opioid crisis, I think we
blamed trade immigration technology, but that's not really the reason. But we have some of these
rustbelt towns left behind. Our inner-city school kids
50% don't graduate, okay? And most of you didn't
go to inter-city school. But 50% don't graduate,
they're mostly poor, they're mostly minorities in
this land of opportunity. There are 6 million open jobs today, good
jobs that you can get out of high school. Welding, construction,
electrical, coding, automotive, there are automotive jobs everywhere,
aviation, and we're not training the kids. So that's why and that's also why I took on the chairman
of the business round table. So the question I always have is,
how do you fix that stuff? In reality I think the fix
is actually known. I think the hard part is
getting it through Congress. But competitive tax reform has to be done. It shocks me that my democratic friends,
and they say, are you going to change wages on
day 1 of the 12 Corbett Tax Reform? That's their measure. What happened last time? That's their measure. The measure you should have
is the counter factual. Had you had competitive
tax systems 10 years ago, there would probably have been
$3 trillion retained here. Companies and capital,
5,000 companies have been bought by foreign companies because it's advantages
for them to own an American company now. So while our government
dawdled on these inversions, 5,000 companies were acquired
by foreign companies, net, there's a study that came out by
ENY that would have been retained here. Think of corporate headquarters and
we damaged ourselves and it's permanent. And that's 4 trillion overseas,
and it's 4 trillion, someone has been reinvesting hard
equipment in plant, and companies. But there is still 2.5 trillion in cash. That's why it is there. And it's not because these companies
are moral, it's because it's so much more advantageous
to do stuff over there. Microsoft built a research
center in Vancouver because they can hire the same kids in
Seattle because of our immigration laws. And so
these things have held back America. And I am absolutely convinced and it's hard to prove it because
you can't put a model. We're growing at 2% in spite of the dumb
things government's done for 10 years. And had we done the right things around
competitive taxes, infrastructure, education, we'd be growing at 3% or more. This recovery,
the growth is half of a normal recovery. A small business formation, we're down net millions of small companies
that normally would have been formed. And the reason is lack of
access to credit, regulations. And again I can't prove it, I'm trying, we're using big data now to try to get
some of the stuff looking backwards. And so part of the agenda of the Trump
administration is the right stuff, infrastructure, education,
competitive tax reform, proper regulation. All right, I'll just say proper
as opposed to less or more, they massively overdid it. You've heard people say that
didn't hold back landing, okay. And we did some real analysis and
done by economist, not by me. Mortgages alone, we believe held back
by $1-2 trillion because of the cost, lack of securitization,
lack of servicing requirements and because of litigation, stuff around it
that people are mostly mortgage under rise are willing to make mortgages to first
time buyers, young people, immigrants, private defaults and self employed. Not going back to
the sub-prime of the old age, just open up the credit box a little bit,
okay? $2 trillion of mortgages would've
been probably 5% growth in GDP. That one thing. And yet
they say it didn't hold back lending. And that would not have
changed any risk at all for banks, for
the most part we don't keep that stuff. And it wouldn't have changed the risk for
the government. Actually I think the risk is lower
when the economy is stronger. And so
that's what they should be doing and I think they are going to do
some of that stuff I hope. >> Under your management at JP Morgan
come from strength to strength but one instance stands out as
a negative during your tenure. So, in 2012 a London based trader
lost over $6 billion for the bank. Are there any lessons for us all on
how you dealt with that incident and do you wish you'd done
anything differently? >> Here is an example. This is what our country has come to,
okay? We had a record profit that year. We're a big company, hugely embarrassed, and I'll tell
you about that mistake in a second. No customers were involved. Okay, it was originally pronounced
a hedge, obviously it didn't work. And yet
we were punished severely in congress. $2 billion of fines. It's outrageous. It's just outrageous that
a company makes a mistake. My shareholders got hurt by 6 billion. I hurt my shareholders,
I apologize to my shareholders. And the government fines me 2 billion
in addition to that, because they can. Because they said, it's another example
of a bank being mismanaged etc. You know, shit happens! [LAUGH] And it was,
we had put on a hedge that was supposed to earn a lot in a recession and
basically break even in a normal thing, and lose money in a booming environment. Think is, we were short high yield and
long investment, something like that. And it wasn't the complex
derivatives that mattered. Because the fact is that
wasn't the mistake. The mistake was when we put thing on,
I thought and again I blamed myself and
I went public right away. Big mistake, 2 billion,
could be a lot worse. Bad strategy, barely vetted,
barely monitored, barely done. My fault. I'm sorry. We're going to fix it. And the details in some ways didn't
matter but there was this hugely liquid. This typical thing in trading by the way. When we had asked them to reduce
the positions in half, I had asked. I'd looked at some very
simple numbers has asked me. I should have asked
a couple more questions. They couldn't do it. So instead of reducing it in half and
saying we have a problem but if they said at that point in time we lost 500 million,
you probably wouldn't have known about it. But instead of that,
they kind of doubled down. They tried to come up with these old
cockamamie ways to reduce the risk. But they just added more and more liquid positions on top
of other liquid positions. And when you try to unwind that thing,
that's how you get killed. But the lesson, there's no lesson to me. I knew the second it happened. I've seen it before. I got the whole Mazarin team together and
all the PR people. I've said guys,
they're going to come after us. They're going to say Jamie
was like everybody else. Big banks are too big to manage. Jamie Dimon is a failure
just like these other guys. He's off his highly holy horse,
diamonds do break, diamond in the rough. I wrote all the headlines. >> [LAUGH]
>> I said forget all of that stuff, we're here to serve companies,
serve clients. We're going to do our jobs and
hopefully the attack by the, and when something like that happens, and
a lot of you have been through this. That is a letter to every AG,
to every newspaper, to every senator, to every congressman. And they'll attack like literary
like a bunch of barking hyenas. And yet we all look it like
that's okay but it's not okay. It's not the way professionals, people
should act when companies have proms and stuff like that. So the fact is,
there was no great lesson learned. Other than follow you, whenever you have
a problem and I say Zuckerberg's got one, that's what he going to deal with and I'm
not sure he completely understands that. Every AG, every Senator, every
Congressman, they'll turn immediately, they'll go on the attack,
they'll take advantage of it. I'm surprised they are not talking about
fining them billions of dollars yet. And so and that's just society, you just
have to learn how to deal with that stuff. So and the biggest risk of all,
the risk committees, we obviously bear risk
all around the world. That risk committee which was meeting,
had a senior risk officer on it. When I asked what about this trade,
they said no, that trade was done pretty much
between the bunch of those traders who were doing it, and
Ira Sho who's our CIO who I respect. They didn't want to share
the risk committee. That should never happen,
ever, ever, ever, ever. Okay, our risk committees see everything,
my general counsel sees everything, my head of compliance sees everything. Once someone ever says,
well that we're going to do over here, you've got a problem. And that tends to create an issue
that will come back and haunt you. >> To explore leadership in
tough situations some more, the Harvey Weinstein's story is very
much on people's minds at he moment. As a leader what do you feel is your role
to play in creating a work culture that is very respectful of women? >> Well I think it is
your role to do that and. And someone who said to me
about that Harvey Weinstein, so Wall Street has been that way. Wall Street is not that way today folks,
not like that stuff. I mean I'm sure there may be harassment
somewhere at J.P. Morgan, but if you think it's condoned by anyone at the company
in a senior position, absolutely not! Okay and we've got strict processes in
place to look at what people do, and how they do it, and review it. And if it involved me in any way,
shape, or form, it would go directly to
a separate board thing. It wouldn't be like I could go
negotiate a settlement on my own or something like that. So the first thing to Diversity,
and I think it's more important than anything else is that everyone in the
company is treated with trust and respect. Any meeting you walk in you
feel like you're welcome. Anyone can speak up. You see the subtle guy thing. I've seen this, a senior banker once
told me Jamie, watch this man who runs a big part of the company walk into the
partner's room and he'll walk up to you. Hey buddy,
how did you like that football game? Hey man, what was your score in golf? I mean, and he wouldn't even
talk to the women in the room? If you're managing a group of people and I saw you do that,
you'd get an earful from me. You've got to talk to everyone. You can like some people more than others,
but you've got to talk to everyone. And you have to go out of your way to get
the quiet person, the reserved person, the person who doesn't want to be
embarrassed to get them to speak up and feel comfortable. And when you have an environment of
trust and respect, people can shine. Okay, now you should have specialized
programs and all that, and I'm for those, but they don't work if you
don't create that environment. Doesn't matter. You just said you would advise it. I have three daughters. If they were in a terrible environment,
I'd tell them to leave. Go find a place that
appreciates your skills. And so it will hurt a company ultimately
because if I get to pick my team from all people, not just white men,
I would pick a far better team. I should point out that at
JP Morgan Chase, and again, the press doesn't write this,
half of my direct reports are women. Did you hear what I just said? Every article, even in
the Wall Street Journal is always saying, it'll be 30 years before women represent
30% of the executive suite on Wall Street. 50% including the head of tech now,
Lori Behr, who's been doing a great job, she's been there a couple of months. 20% of my direct reports are LGBT,
because they're good. And 30% of all of the top 200 people in
the company are women, and they run major parts of the company, credit card, private
banking, global equity, capital markets. An Indian woman is the head of US M&A. And that was the most macho belt and
suspenders, smoking cigar in the backroom
of all the jobs. >> [LAUGH]
>> And her father didn't even want her
to go to school or college. She's actually from India. She actually Indian, and so, yeah. I think if you do it right you'll have
a great environment for everybody. And you gotta have your eyes open to it. What I was worried about is not,
we have 5,000 branches. And I just always know that in
that branch, that guy or woman but mostly the guy, can be a bully and
get away with it because we can't see it. And no matter what we say, the people
in that branch, they need their job and they put up with it. Another one you shouldn't allow. And I'm sure you've been in companies,
you should never allow, and it came to my attention,
you are not allowed to have a golf event, invite the men in the division and
not the women, just not allowed. My first inclination would be to fire
someone on the spot if I heard about that. And don't have golf,
do something different. And go out of your way to make
everyone feel accepted, and you'll build a great company. >> One question we often ask female CEOs
here is how they manage work-life balance. We rarely ask male CEOs. But I've heard a story that you once
threatened to quit your first job because a partner forced you to work
over the weekend unnecessarily. We're not suggesting that JP Morgan
investment analysts stop doing the same. >> [LAUGH]
>> But do you have any tips for us on structuring our time,
balancing demands made of us, and sorting priorities? >> When I was an analyst
at this consulting company, this consultant had said
you've got to do this work. I need it Monday morning, 9 o'clock. He gave me the assignment Friday, which all the people in
Wall Street complain about. The kids are right. MDs, they come in, partners, and
they're not thinking about it till Friday. And on Friday, I need this. I need this, I need it Monday. Which means you gotta work all weekend. And most of the time you could have
gotten the assignment on Tuesday. And so we've actually tried to institute
some policies like you can't give people assignments on Friday basically anymore
unless it's approved by someone senior. But I worked all weekend and
then I show up at 9 o'clock. And I was in the library basically
doing research and stuff like that. And he wasn't there and he called in at
12 o'clock or 1 o'clock and said, Robin, I worked all weekend. You said 9 o'clock, it was critical. He said I didn't really
need it until tomorrow. I just want to make sure you got it done,
to which I was, bye. >> [LAUGH]
>> And I told him I'll never work for you again. Now this is not advice, okay? >> [LAUGH]
>> My advice would be a temper is not a good thing. [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] >> And they said, well, you can't tell the consulting firm
who you're going to work for. I said yes, I can,
because they can fire me. I was quite serious. I never worked for the person again. And I think that was a bully thing. That was my instinct,
that was just bullying me, and it was completely unnecessary. And he knew me well enough to know that I
was going to get down when I told them I was going to get down stuff like that. You can have work-life balance. When I tell people at JP Morgan Chase,
it is your job to take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, your soul,
your friends, your family, your health. Your job, it's not our job. So I think there's a little bit
of misunderstanding that some of the companies. Now we should do everything
we can to help you, right? I tell people, we give you medical,
shrinks, Pilates, massages. I mean, we really do try to take care
of people, but I can't make up for you not doing those other things. You really have to do it yourself. Most people don't work very smart. So first off, work smart. I do emails and
phone calls generally once, okay? I have three types of reading,
very fast, fast, very slow. So the very slow is the complex. I really need to think about it. Very fast might be a magazine. I just want to see if there is
something interesting in there or something like that. People don't run their lives efficiently. And I'm sure you've seen even in
school here, people are frenzied, they're always frenzied. They're late, they can't get back,
I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, I couldn't get this done. I got my cases, I couldn't do this. If you're frenzied, it's you. It's not the school, it's not the job, it's you because a lot
of us aren't frenzied. >> [LAUGH]
>> I'm never late, almost never late. I'm not frenzied. I have a nice. I know exactly what people are doing. I schedule time for myself for exercise,
and for making my phone calls. And if I didn't do it this morning, I would feel harried if
I wasn't all caught up. So work really smart. Learn how to work smart. And then, in [INAUDIBLE] I think it's
really difficult when you have children. That does burn the candle at both ends. My advice to men, is you better drop
watching every football game and playing golf on both Saturday and Sunday. Do something with your kids. If you don't, it's neglect. Okay, you call it whatever you want, but I have a lot of friends complain
that they have no family time. But they go play golf on Saturday and
Sunday. I'm playing golf on Saturday and
Sunday means you wake up at 7, right? You go play golf for three hours. You have lunch, usually a Bloody Mary,
you go home and take a nap. >> [LAUGH]
>> Okay, and then you go to dinner with friends. You should have done
something with your family. And so you can do it. And if you're a woman,
I think it's even harder. And I think there's some jobs that
are really conducive to helping you, and some aren't. And you gotta think that
through a little bit. And one of the greatest speech I ever saw
a woman give was, you can have it all, you just can't have it
all at the same time. And just be a little thoughtful
how you manage your life. That could be a man who's gotta stay
at home to take care of kids, or sick parents or something like that. And so it's a long race and
you can pretty much do it all. But you gotta make sure you save time for
yourself to do those things. And even the toughest job you can do that. >> In 2014 you continued to actively
lead JP Morgan despite battling and defeating throat cancer. Many people were incredibly impressed by
your decision to stay at the helm with the company during that time. What continues to motivate you
under those circumstances? >> Well, it's not up to me to
stand down with the company. You're never quite over
with cancer either. At first, I had to go public with it. It wasn't my preference, but
I couldn't be seen walking in and out of Sloan Kettering. And of course I was going to lose weight. I didn't lose my hair, but
I could have, and all that. So I just went completely clean. I did go to work, almost every day. But that does not mean I worked every day. I mean I was taking four or five naps,
I lost like 40 pounds and I didn't want to get close to anyone because your
immune system is virtually gone. So I didn't even want to
get a cold at that point. But people say [INAUDIBLE] so
I was sitting at home and I go get my treatment every morning
radiation and then I'd go home. I'd try to exercise, I went from
running five miles to walking five, to literally walking for a minute, going on
the floor because I was going to pass out, walking a minute, but
it made me feel better. But if I stayed at home
you know what I was doing? I couldn't read I thought I
could read eight hours a day but I just couldn't do it but I was staying
home I was watching ISIS and Ebola. [LAUGH]
>> And when I go to the office, I'm surrounded by friends and
interesting things and you keep mind well. I had some meeting and
so it was better for me. And the board was fully
beefed the whole time and I have unbelievable management team and
they were great. And my family is great and so it was in some ways a heart warming experience
other than the fact that it's terrifying. >> Jamie thank you so much, I think we'll
now turn it over to the audience for Q&A. >> Thank you so much for
being here Mister Diamond. At what level do you think
BitCoin has to get to before JP Morgan would embrace it and
at what level of demand? You said there is a level and I'm wondering what that would be as look
today at the price of $7,000 a coin. >> I doubt we're going to
embrace it at any price. So I mean to me it's
that I'm worried about being caught up in this maelstrom of
people losing money, and stuff like that, there's no reason for
us to do anything with Bitcoin. Now, if you're a client, and
you're going to trade it on the CMU, or something like that, I'd advise you
not to do it, but should we do it and put in trades for a client who asked us,
who is sophisticated, and obviously not bright,
but sophisticated. Maybe, I don't know. I mean and I told the senior team
I don't tell them what to do, I told to place a note to Daniel and I said Daniel I know you heard what
I said, it's your job to what you do. And if you disagree with
me that's completely fine. I'll probably do whatever he wants,
inspite what I said. Hi, hello, hi thanks for coming. One thing, I'm I'm a second year MBA. A couple things you said that
were quite interesting were that there is no lesson to be learned,
and I don't care if I'm wrong. And I guess from a lot of senior leaders
I've noticed that self-awareness and learning from mistakes or
key characteristics? Do you agree, and if so, do you have an example of a time when
you've actually tried to build those? >> Yeah, so
I did mention mistakes I've made. I should have asked some more questions. There's one question I would've known. Just one. There's the one where I said
it was a tempest in a teapot. I asked the question. I got the wrong answer. It was, how liquid are the positions? How many days can you get out? I was told ten. Yeah, it was like hundreds and
the second I heard that, I said, shit. We have a real problem. So you learn.
And I actually wrote about it
in my chairman's lever. I said, lessons learned or relearned. I knew that. It's like you kind of sometimes learn
the same lessons over and over. It's like being in a boxing ring,
They say duck, hold your hands up. Yeah, well,
That's harder to do than you think. So you do learn, you do get better as you
get older in management and people and decision making. But I'll tell you what the biggest
mistakes I've made are. They're not the specific one
like the London Whale but more the patterns around it. Temper's a bad idea. Any decision made out of temper, even treating people with temper
you They're always being careful. While you walk in, which mood is he in,
and stuff like that. You don't get the best out of people. And sometimes earlier in my life, it was
said, it was a well placed blow of anger. No, it wasn't. It was just a welling up of anger. It usually clouded your judgement,
as opposed to. So, I knew I'd finally matured
when about 10 years ago, I said, someone was sitting in front
of me talking about something. It was about investment banker comp. And I was getting so mad. And I said, you know what? I'm going to leave the room. You guys stay here for ten minutes. I'm going to come back. I went out. I thought about what made me mad. I came back. I told them very politely How offensive
what they were saying was to me, etc. But other mistakes, when you don't get the
right people involved, plain and simple. Sometimes the answer is
waiting to be found. You just have to get the people
in the room to work it. Making decisions when you're tired. Making decisions on Friday. Not throughly vetting people, the biggest
mistakes you make are people mistakes and I've made plenty. The people mistakes really
set back an organization because it takes a long
time to figure it out. And a lot of damage can be done,
then you have to replace them, so it's like a year and a half. A person mistake takes a year and
a half of setting the company back. And you may lose good
people in the meantime because when you put a person
in that job they often drive out some other good people by the
time you figured out you made a mistake. And you can avoid that because
I dont know your name but I can get the whole book on you and
never meet you. Okay I can find out how smart you are,
how you treat people. How you treat your friends, bosses, peers,
subordinates, whether you're on time, whether you show up, whether people
trust you, whether you shave the truth. I get that whole dossier on you. So we're pretty good now at making
sure when we put people on these big jobs that we know they're pretty good. You still can make a mistake, but you'd be surprised, the error rate is just
dramatically less than it ever was before. Hello. Hi.
I'm a 2018 Sloan fellow. I was working for JP Morgan in London
up until March of this year and I was just wondering where do you see the
future of European financial services and particularly JP Morgan in
the context of Brexit? So Brexit I mean the fact is we're
going to be prepared for hard Brexit not because we're predicting, though I
think it is pretty likely at this point. All right I think it's a very complex
thing, it's not great for Brittain. But the fact is to be prepared all we have
to do is have our European subsidiaries get more capital, certain licenses, certain approvals which
we're going to get. So if you're had the hard Brexit it
defaults the next day the existing EU law. Under existing EU law we simply have
to do certain things contractually in sovereign in entities in the EU. And we have them we've got licences,
proper subsidiaries and In Germany, Ireland, Brussels, it's only about 500
jobs, so it's not that big a deal, but in reality 12,000 people are servicing Europe
out of London, even after a hard Brexit. And the real issue is what happens
to the 12,000 in the 10 years after? Because I know it's going to
happen Regulators and politicians are going to walk in and
say we're uncomfortable. We know you did the license and you booked the trade of this subsidiary
but you know back to back to that subsidiary to risk manage it where you
have the banker do the ECM deal here but the research, risk, compliance, audit,
trading was all done in London. And that's not sufficient we don't want to
pretend we can grow this type of business you gotta move it here. I think there's going to be huge pressure
moving those 12,000 people over time into the EU. And my goal is to make sure we
conserve our clients none stop. It will cost us more money
it's a real pain in the ass. But that's not the point
I am worried about it. I want to be able to serve
those European clients. And we bank every European country just
about Every big European institution, every big European investor that's
what I gotta worry about being prepared to do that on the next day. >> Thank you this is a continuation
of what you're talking about, but what areas of the bank do you see most
exposed to technology disruption? You mentioned sales and
trading before Yeah so first of all like I said technology has
been changing the world forever, so it's not like it's completely different. I think it's faster now,
more money is going into fintech. Agile technology can do things
that couldn't be done before. And I think it's incompetent upon any
business to use technology to do a better for its client. Better could be better, faster, cheaper, straight through processing obviously
making a digital mobile, stuff like that. I remember banks have been doing that for
years and you can buy and sell effects on
our on your mobile phone now. And when some trade,
some trader did a $400 million trade and I said, God,
$400 million on a mobile phone. I said we've gotta put
breathalyzers on those phones. I just envisioned some macho trader
having two martinis and saying, I'm going to do this. But you know what? When I mentioned that to the risk
people they said, we do have that. And we can actually put that in, so that
you can't do a trade without [INAUDIBLE] breathalyzer or something like. Anyway. So I think, in some ways, always look at a business from
the standpoint of the client. So forget J.P. Morgan. A lot of the things the clients need,
they're still going to need. In fact, they'll need you to go overtime. ECM will still be there,
DCM will be still there. Hedging FX and hedging interest
rates will still be there. M&A advice will still be there, but
we have to use technology to do things better, faster,
quicker like everybody else. And straight through and
all that kind of stuff. But you ask me the thing that's
going to be most disrupted, it's going to be payments. There are payment systems
that you're integrating. All the HCh Systems, terrible. But we just put out a P2P. You all use Venmo? We just put out a P2P, it's realtime. Bank to bank. It's safer, it's better,
it's realtime, it's not social yet. So I don't possibly understand why
you'd want to share all that stuff with your friends, but could be that,
it could be in wholesale payments. But you could go on screens now
move money around the world, convert to different currencies. And so we're doing it, but if you ask me that's where most
of stuff going to take place. Remember, we've invested in
100 Fintech companies and we're going to compete,
build, buy, whatever it is. And just give you an example,
we're going to have online trading and mobile investing for our clients. It's in beta today,
I'm not sure I'm going to roll it out. We're going to roll it out and test it and
test price and all the stuffs like that, but we can analog those things for
free if we wanted to. So we're not, we're not dead in the water. So when the time comes, you are going
to see us being very aggressive to win businesses like we always have. We rolled out, it's not being marketed,
we rolled out a mobile-only bank in St. Louis recently and
we are going to test that. More for millennials than anyone else, but
from opening the account to moving money, it's only a debit card. And we're going to see how that works and then we are going to try to modify
that and then do it in all 50 states. Go ahead. They'll get it eventually. No, hold it up. >> Jonathan Walden,
third year PhD student now and I have a question about how
you brought up bureaucracy and politicalization, and
the detriments that does to the firm. And my concern is how do you assess
the bureaucratization within J.P. Morgan, compared with your peers. And how do you trade off the agency that
you give to individual portfolio managers with the oversight from compliance? Well, we're pretty rigorous how we run
the company, so we meet all the time, and go through everything top to bottom, and
we raises issues and stuff like that. So you know who your authorities
are if you're a trader. If you're a bank, you know exactly. You also know he's not supposed to do,
and you also when you go to compliance committee, risk
committee, an underwriting committee, or a credit committee,
there's no mystery to any of that. And it happens every day and
we barely make mistakes. And I'm not going to stand behind the
regulatory things, and we have a thousand new rules and regular requirements and
that does create some of the bureaucracy, but it's not an excuse for us to say,
this is a better way to do it. We listen to customers all the time. The management team is open, every issue,
the agenda is always set by them. So it isn't like you walk in the room and
I set the agenda. If you work for me, I expect you
to raise everything important. Everything and
anything including bureaucracies, cost slow down, bad service,
competitors got something better than us. That's your job not my job and, so I mean, I do it with you hoping presumably you're
going to do it with your management team. So you're always airing all this issues. We go on bus trips, we go to call centers,
we go to op centers, we got client reviews, we got advisory groups, and all
those things get circulated all of them. So all the complaints we're
always trying to deal with that become better and faster. I think one of the tough
things about management is you have to get rid of the bad people. So I can say anything I want,
but if I have a bunch of goomas, or they're not that good, or
they're friends of Jamie type of thing. That is what caused the problem. And so very well from people who were
on going to get rid of the bad people. Bad could be, because their culture is
bad and also because they're not good. They're not good enough. So in meritocracy people say,
Joe deserves the job or good old Joe and spending a long time. That doesn't mean they deserve the job. And in sports if you're not batting
250 you're not going to be playing second base. And it's very easy, you take out
a pitcher that's not doing a good job. In business there are left
in those jobs a long time. I'm not saying treat them disrespectfully. If you treat people disrespectfully, you're going to lose their hearts and
minds too. So it's gotta be a very respectful,
we're going to make a change for the following reasons. But you really, if you're going to run a real meritocracy,
you've gotta make sure you really do it. And those people, it should
filter through the whole company. Loyalty is such a misnamed
thing sometimes. What they usually mean is, I was asked
when I was a young CEO in a room like this, we had just done a big deal, how can we be loyal to you
when you weren't loyal to Joe? He's been around. He trained a lot of people in the room and
you just demoted him. I couldn't answer the question. And I called the person the next day, and I answer every question
eventually by the way. But I called him the next day and
I said, I thought about it and you got it backwards. If I was loyal to Joe and
kept him in the job. And most people thought he just
wasn't doing a good job anymore. Who am I being disloyal to? Everybody else and the customer. And so it's a hard thing to do but and that's the hardest thing to
do in management right there. And a lot of you will fail doing it,
because you deal the thin hams in management, you're owned by this desk down
the hall and they all take care of it. Don't worry I'll take care of it and
basically that becomes a club. And they're not taking care of it for
the company or the client. They're taking care of it generally for
themselves. And so you have to be very, very careful
in management, why you're doing what you're doing, and who gets to speak up and
who's in the room and things like that. >> We got time for one more question. >> So I worked for J.P. Morgan Chase back in 2012, part of
the team that redesigned the chase.com. So I do know Chase is always more towards
the technically advanced company. And this question is more
toward the tech side. What is the stand of backing community
in AI, artificial intelligence? Like AI is going to take
over automation stuff. >> Yeah.
>> And what does banking community thinks about it? >> Well,
I don't care what banking community think, I'll tell you what I think. [LAUGH] Big data, AI, machine learning,
chat boxes, roblox, they're all real. We have thousands in data scientists and
PhDs and not just coding. And we spent $9 billion a year in
technology, $700 million in cyber, probably $1 billion a year now and just some of these stuff just
uniquely devoted to that. And it is real it is an amazing thing
that you can do, that you can do today in a split second so we just to,
when you swiped that credit card, it goes through hundreds maybe
a thousand algorithms to test for fraud how you did it where
you did it what time. We do the same thing for big payments. So if you run a company,
small business large company, like what happened to the Federal Reserve
never happened to us. Payments at the wrong time,
different type, different entry, we're actually
monitoring your systems all the time. If we see anything wrong we're calling
you up and stuff like that, so it's real. The hardest part about it isn't
understanding it or knowing the technology, it's getting the people in
the company to understand the power of it. So when we first started big data, and big
data and we put it up at the central for standards, and we used Hadoop. To make sure that you don't end up
with 84 different platforms and stuff like that out of control. And machine learning has another problem
with regulation that I won't go through but we put it at the top. And we had to say, hey,
you do prospecting, how do you do it, why do you do it? We made prospecting ten time more
efficient in a commercial bank. Ten times and don't think, okay, the cost
is lower, instead of $30,000 it's $3,000, it also means we can put two
more bankers in Grand Rapids. It's a huge benefit to the company, and be immediately productive as opposed
to take three years to build it up. And then once we did that,
we now have it in every division. So every division has a big data,
AI, machine learning thing. And we ask every manager, come back and give us the use case that
you think is best for you. The demand is going up like this. But it's one of the areas
you want the demand. You want to spend more money. Obviously, you want to spend it wisely but
we push people. So in technology, I always do that. You can't ever say to me you didn't
do it because of the budget or you couldn't afford it. it is not allowed, you have to put in
your budget sort of a reflection of a 12 month of a plan, you have to put
in a plan everything you need to do. Going to sales force, going to companies going to technology,
do not be a baby about it, because people say, well we did not do it,
because we could not afford it, who said? We can afford anything we want. We spend $58 billion a year,
we make $35 billion pretax, if you guys put on the $2 billion to get
big data right, we're going to do it. So it's more about the getting executed
right than it is about the money. >> Everyone,
please join me in thanking Jamie Dimon. >> Thank you very much. >> [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]
This is a Dimon in the rough
thanks, nice post