I think you'd be doing this for 20 years.
I didn't give it much thought. I'm thrilled to be here. Everybody go free enterprise.
But yeah. Okay. So, after 20 years, your market capitalization is up about 700% and your stock price up about 500% or something like that?
Like a thousand percent. But go ahead.
How much? We bought back a lot of stock and paid a lot of dividends and all that. So it's pretty good, Tom. So people are very happy. And so the question you get asked every day five times a day is how much longer do you want to do this? And the answer is five more years.
Yeah. At least about five more years. I love what I do. It's up to the board how long I do it. As long as I have the energy and the spit in the eye and the fire in the gut, I want to do it.
Okay. So you recently built a new building in New York. Why did you decide to build your headquarters in New York? You tore down the building you had built, built a new building, took a couple years, cost maybe $3 billion or something like that, and it's now open. Are you happy you made that decision? And are you going to build a similar building in London now?
Yeah, we are. So if you look at what we have, we spend $40 billion a year on people, which is important, $4 billion a year on real estate. We want to have great real estate. The old building wasn't fit for purpose. It was too small. Couldn't handle our trading floors. I looked everywhere. I looked downtown. I looked at Hudson Yards. I looked at buying Vanderbilt. But we could tear that building down. We could buy air rights. I thought it was the best location in the best city, and we should build it there. We're quite happy we did it. It's beautiful. It's got 14 places to eat. Got Morgan's Pub, Guinness Beer. It has sushi bars and hamburger and deli provisions. People like Danny Meyer helped us make sure it had the right vibes when you go there. It's got Sweetgreen, eight trading floors, full city blocks. It's a beautiful place and people like going there and bringing their moms and dads and kids to show it. When you walk in, it's also got a big American flag up front blowing in the wind inside. So I love it.
So recently you've been talking about the importance of the United States and celebrating our 250th, but also investing in things that are security related. What made you focus on that, and you're now going to commit a trillion and a half dollars over the next 10 years for this kind of investment? Why did you decide to do that?
Yeah. So I've always been a patriot. You talk here about growth, growing the economy, and the grievances of America, which are legitimate. We've got to deal with them to get policy right. But one of them was this notion that we ended up being so reliant on other people, some potential adversaries, for things critical to the security of the United States. And it wasn't just us, allies too. So we did some real research across 28 industry groups. You're talking about rare earth, active pharmaceutical ingredients, military production, drones, air, cyber, satellite. What are the things you need for resiliency? We already did a lot of it, and we wanted to do more, realizing it was an important thing to do. How we got here? I don't like crying over spilled milk, but we should never have been here. So that's a trillion and a half dollars. My guess is it'll be quite a bit more than that by the time we're done. We've had a deluge of interest in it. We hired Todd Combs, who's a world-class investor and a world-class person, who's got his own deluge coming in to invest $10 billion and probably more. And we certainly probably have partners in helping companies with growth capital they need to grow to build the next plant or something. We did real research on supply chains. There are a lot of companies that provide what's important for basic military equipment that need help to grow. They could be private companies or bigger companies. There's a venture capital component. We're also going to do research, think around the shipbuilding ecosystem. And then policy. A lot of things that are wrong are policy reasons, how we're allowed to procure in the military, things like permitting, EPA laws. If you want to keep this country safe and secure, we need to do this work. We need to do it now and right away. It also will be extended to nations in Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc. And it's just important we do it. National security. If you didn't get the wakeup call in February when 300,000 Russian troops invaded Ukraine, the world's not safe. It was never safe. We just got lulled into a false sense of security. The biggest safe thing to have is the strongest military on the planet.
Jamie, you went to Harvard Business School, graduated as a Baker Scholar, top 5% of your class. You could have gone to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, all the famous firms. You chose to go work for a person who was a friend of your father's, named Sandy Weill. You did that, and then when Sandy left, you stayed with him, and then ultimately you guys went to Citicorp, and then he fired you. Did you ever think then that you'd be coming back and running the most important bank in the world at the time you got fired there? What were you thinking at that time? I said you should come into private equity. I went to see you and said why don't you come to private equity, and you didn't seem that interested.
The biggest money offer I ever got in my life was from this guy over here. It was never about money for me. I knew after I got fired that they were going to screw up Citicorp because I knew how stupid some of the things they were doing was. But no, I didn't think that way. I just took time. I thought about all these various alternatives. I spoke to a lot of people. Then I went to Bank One. I love the Home Depot guys. They were talking to me, but I had to confess to them. I walked in, I'd never been in a Home Depot until my friend made me go that weekend before I had dinner with Arthur Blank, Bernie Marcus, and Ken Langone. I just loved their culture, but I'd never been in a merchant business. I'd been on Wall Street trading, insurance, etc. But Bank One was there. I thought it was going to be tough. I put half my money into it. I moved to Chicago. I love Chicago. All I thought about was just do the best you can. I don't like it when senior people complain. I always had a no whining sign. Suck it up and do the job. That's all it was. I just go about the work, division by division, person by person, department by department, tech by tech, try to build something great. I had my eye on JPMorgan Chase. A couple years I thought it would never happen because we were so small and not doing well. But four years later we had done a good job at Bank One. The values were close enough. Bill Harrison and I knew each other. We merged the two companies. Then I had a dream that if we did it right, we could make this a great company.
What do you think is the most important thing you did that put JPMorgan ahead of every other bank in the world? Is it that you worked harder, you hired better people around you? What were the things that you think are the most important thing that made JPMorgan what it is today?
I think first of all, a lot of people do things better. So to say we're the best at everything is not right. I think that's one of the reasons sometimes we do a little better, which is I'm relentless: detail, facts, analysis, no bullshitting, no meetings after meetings. Share all the information. Put it on the table. Put the dead cats on the table. Go through system by system. Get out on the road. Visit other companies. They all do things better than you. Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn and be relentless about doing it. Big companies slow down. They become complacent. They become bureaucratic. All that stuff, arrogant, is the petri dish of politics. As Jeff Bezos says, that kind of stuff leads to stasis and death. If you don't believe me, look at all the companies who failed, huge, wonderful companies. It's because of things like that. So I'm kind of relentless about driving stuff. Nothing's too small to care about. When I go around my company, I was listening to you talk about Chris running Hilton. Nothing's too small to care about. Hey Chris, I want to be able to read when I'm having shampoo or conditioner. That's my one big beep. And also one button to turn off all the lights when you get in these fancy rooms and you're tired and going to bed. That's what management is. It's relentless attention to detail, getting strategy right, investing your capital, not being beholden to people. But the most important is that the people at the company can contribute to the best of their ability. They know that the boss doesn't know everything. They know that you just want to do the right thing for the company, the client, or the community. That's the only goal. We don't pander to Wall Street about quarterly earnings or stuff like that. I've never spent any time on that in my life. Just try to do the right thing for the right reason and do it quickly.
Now, you used to, I don't know if you still do this, how technologically proficient you are, but you used to come in every morning with a list of things to do. You wrote it down by hand.
I hesitate to do this because the TV out there...
And so the TV's going to zoom in on it. I did that once with a credit card. They took my number and immediately got stolen by criminals.
I hope it doesn't say anything bad about the press on here.
Okay. So, many people in the business world, they're out socializing, all kinds of other organizations. You don't do anything. You just run your bank and you spend time with your family. Isn't that boring?
No, I love my family. I love all of them. I got seven grandkids and one more coming. We take our family vacation together. That's the most important thing. The second most important is my country, that I do spend time on with my own time, my own effort. My company obviously gets involved. I love business. I think if you're talking about I don't do a lot of black-tie events. I don't play golf. I don't do red carpets. I do a little bit, but I love what I do. I don't feel like I have any regrets at all about doing that. I feel if JPMorgan Chase does well, I can help our employees, help my clients, help my communities, help my country, help the world if I do a good job. I always tell people if we don't keep JPMorgan healthy and vibrant, I cannot do those things. That's the other side of that: lay people off. It's miserable. Your life is terrible. So I fight hard to make sure we're healthy and vibrant.
Now, you flirted at times with maybe running for president of the United States. Are you still thinking maybe you would ever do that?
I never really flirted with it. I simply asked someone once, 'What does it entail?'
And they told me that was it.
It entails a lot. It is a huge thing, but I love what I do, and that's what I intend to be doing.
Suppose a president of the United States said, 'I'd like you to be Secretary of the Treasury or chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.' What would you say to that?
Chairman of the Fed, I'd put in absolutely positively no chance, no way, no how for any reason.
Secretary of Treasury, I would consider it. If a president calls you up and asks you to do something, you should consider it. So I would take the call and consider it and think about why and what they want, etc. But what they want and how they want to operate would be important to me. I like my job. I've been my own boss for pretty much 25 years and I like it that way.
I was in Peru at the APEC meeting or something like that, and I was coming on stage like this, a televised thing. As I was walking up, the person questioning me, I think it was from Bloomberg, said the president just tweeted that he likes you or something like that, but you're not going to be Secretary of Treasury. She asked me on national TV. I said that's good because I like being my own boss.
We both like it that way.
When the Great Recession happened, were you worried about the viability of our financial system? Your bank was in pretty good shape. Were you worried that many investment banks and commercial banks would go under at that time?
Well, a lot of them did. A lot of companies around the world, a lot of non-banks around the world went bankrupt. JPMorgan, we did a lot to keep people afloat. We took a lot of risk to do that. We worked with governments around the world. It was terrifying. It was 24/7. People just trying to do the right thing to make sure we kept the...
Do you think there's a chance of something like that happening in the next couple years? Do you think we're much better protected from that kind of problem?
There's no chance that you're going to have that kind of problem, but there are chances you have a problem somewhere somehow. The biggest unknown is geopolitics. It's not like that's going to determine what the economy does in 2026, but it is a moving tectonic plate. Alliances, obviously this terrible war in Ukraine, which we need to do as much as we can to help Ukraine, but aided and abetted by Iran and Russia, somewhat by China. Those folks have told you what they want to do. They want to dismantle the system set up by the Western world after World War II, which has been quite successful. There are a lot of forces at play, and people are going to have to choose how they want to play this for now. That would be my greatest concern, and that's about the future of the free democratic world. That's not just about America.
Are you worried about the overregulation that some people in the banking world think is occurring now, or do you think the regulations are okay now?
