Welcome back. Good Friday morning, thank you so much for joining us this morning. I am Maria Bartiromo. It is Friday, May 29, coming live from the Reagan National Economic Forum.
JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon here at the forum. Part two of my special interview with the chairman: how he feels about the Clarity Act, future AI banking, and his recent meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Plus, he gave us advice for the 2026 graduates on achieving the American dream.
Let me get your take on how business changes, how the whole industry is changing with regard to digital assets. We've had Coinbase CEO on a lot. He wants to be able to pay rewards to people who put money in crypto platforms like his. Banks are worried that's going to mean people are taking money out of deposit accounts. How do you see the Clarity Act changing things?
Let me rephrase it. We're not worried. We think it's fair if he takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules, social requirements, these are capital requirements, financial, transparent requirements. If you want to be a bank, be a bank. The second issue, not related to rewards and interest on stablecoins, is AML, BSA, KYC. The bank system has been through that. We do that. We have to for the federal government. So if they want to be moving money around on a normal basis, you should have to question, can that be used illegitimately? The answer is yes, unless they're following the same rules.
Not FDIC insured. We have liquidity requirements, capital requirements, reporting requirements. We have 84 regulators all over us. Just saying it should be fair, equal, period. Not that they can't do what they want to do. If you want to buy cryptocurrency, be my guest. It's a free country. I defend that. But we want it to be fair.
Is that who you were talking about when you said a lot of competition out there?
No, no, no. I'm talking about Stripe, Dave, SoFi, PayPal is doing a great job. In the past, companies doing even small business, really interesting. Capital One, BNY Mellon, hundreds trying to take a slice of business or a bigger piece of business. Citadel does a great job in trading. So when I look at these, I say, let's, I tell people, open your eyes, look at what they did. We did not do it. Stablecoin might be among that list. I am not that worried about stablecoins. Really, if you have a JPM deposit, if you are a wholesale stablecoin, you say to me, money, I put it where I want, buy stable, sell stable. So transaction costs both sides. A lot of movement of money. Stablecoins, not as simple. I do think for court-ordered updates, small-dollar payments, person-to-person type thing. But even person-to-person, money like to the Philippines, requirements, who is sending it, who it has been sent to. You have to, if you want that money sent, once that money is in a wallet overseas, it could be anyone's wallet. It goes to a third wallet, fourth wallet, maybe a sex trafficker. It's being complicated. The government thoughtfully, if not thoughtfully, a huge problem.
Are you happy with the way the Clarity Act is turning out?
No. It allows them to effectively pay interest on deposits, stablecoins, something like that, without protection. There should be. It doesn't do anything for, no legal protections. No. Banks will not accept that way. ABA, small banks, credit unions, not just big guys. I am not worried about stablecoin. I would have nothing to do with it. It would blow up on its own. My personal thing. I do want to, the bank.
We will fight it if we lose, we lose. But it will be fought. Don't bow down to this guy or company. The only one paying hundreds of millions in this thing.
Well, let me watch that one. I mean, this is turning into a big fight between the whole industry and you're talking about blockchain.
We're doing it. We're going to do it. I think it's a legitimate technology. Stablecoin could be a legitimate payment system.
Let me get your take on AI, Jamie. There are people out there, you were in a meeting with Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, who suggested he's worried that the banks are able to put the patches up before bad actors can use AI against us. How do you hack a bank account? What are you doing in terms of putting guardrails in place around AI, agentic AI, so they don't, agents acting unpredictably?
Big picture, technology only changes the world, makes it more productive. I do think AI will cause huge productivity, cure cancer, reduce deaths. It will be wonderful. But now you have that one issue about, it came out powerful. You can see vulnerabilities. A legitimate concern. Anthropic did the right thing, gave it to the government, companies to find out what it is, how to handle it. You raised one of the big, the patching side. You can't, open source people now deploy it here, it would be public. You have a week or two to fix it. Now you are talking about you need hours. Once the adversary sees that, they can reverse engineer, go directly into vulnerabilities identified. We have to build utilities. I think Scott Bessent is running the whole part of this. The banks working together, hundreds of people working around the clock to see this out, what can be done. I do think a big part for government role to play. It is water utilities, telecom, it is manufacturing. Because you know, you take down, if you ransomware, 20 billion dollars ransomware, I can see that skyrocketing. We have to be thoughtful, help small companies, small banks. This is not fair. You are looking at it, and we don't want it to look like you are, I totally agree. We have to help everybody in this. And as we intend to expand safely, if you give it to a company, they give it to 1,000 people as opposed to a select group of people, you are putting very powerful weapons in the hands of maybe one person who wants to hurt your company. Be thoughtful, learn in the process. Still a lot to do.
I agree. White House, Congress, work being on this morning, noon, and night. We realize because of the Anthropic breach that we saw, AI can work against humanity, even though there are positives to it.
Not just humanity. Could be used by bad guys to do a lot of bad things. An individual guy, could be one person, has at their fingertips a powerful weapon. Don't like a bank, oil company, or refinery, they can do huge damage. We got to get smart. I think like a Manhattan Project with this. I don't think it settles itself doing this kind of stuff.
You've used AI. The use cases you've used.
We've used it since, first time, 2012. People think of you, of course, much more powerful. Big risk, fraud, no taking, coming up with questions like this, generation, resolving errors, building agents can do things people can't do. A hundred thousand documents in seconds. If you ask how many contracts, it is powerful stuff. Makes a lot of people more productive. People, you can wake up in the morning, tell you what you need to do, what happened overnight that isn't in this thing. So it can do a lot of things. It is early. New models more powerful than ones we had a year ago.
Do you think that that will replace jobs?
