'GET THIS MACHINE GOING': Jamie Dimon calls for a new American industrial buildout

Yeah, thrilled to be here.

Well, it's pretty good, which you all, all your viewers know is that the economy is growing at 2%, unemployment's low, 4.3%. Wages not going up that much anymore. Corporate debt's not that high, consumer debt's actually not that high. You know, inflation is ticking up. That's not good. And you have a lot of stimulus. The one big beautiful bill, 300 billion of stimulus. The additional spend, AI is 300 billion of stimulus. Dereg, it's a form of good stimulus because it allows people to put their money to work in a better way. And so those things are good and a lot of that, and then but we have a huge deficit and that's kind of stimulus that also ends up in corporate profits. So corporate profits, you know, are up huge this year. So, you know, people feeling good, stock prices are up, that's all good.

Yes. I think, well, you got to separate consumers into various segments. For the high end, it doesn't do anything. And if you take the higher gas prices, a dollar of gas is a hundred billion dollars a year, but of course it affects lower income folks much more. And for them, they have to cut back something else or do something. So what has happened for some is they have cut savings and they still spend, and borrowing is going up just a little bit. So it might be that it might not be sustainable forever, and we don't know what's going on with future gas prices. So you do have a little bit of that.

No, it's expensing options. It's the R&D credits. It's a competitive, I think a reminder we need a competitive tax structure globally and this is competitive globally. And so that puts American companies in a position where they're going to invest here, elsewhere, there's an incentive to do it here too, or at least not a disincentive to do it here and an incentive to do it elsewhere. Before taxes were cut, this happened in Trump's first term. You know, you had huge sums of money going overseas and staying there because, you know, the returns were so much lower if you could do exactly the same equivalent behavior. So that does matter.

Yeah, I feel okay. I'm a little more worried about those other people. I see, you know, it's not immediate cracks in the economy. It's the other things I worry about that has a long list of serious issues that are going to have to be dealt with. I don't know how they're going to affect the economy this year. You can't put them in a base forecast. They are large items. I always refer to them as tectonic plates moving around that may cause issues that we don't fully understand today.

I'm not surprised other than in the face of two wars that they, you know, they don't seem to have derailed anything. But you and I have seen this before where you have these kind of meltups and you often go on longer than you think. So, you know, the person says that's too much. Well, maybe not because they can go on for a long time before something reverses them and you don't know what that is. You know, it could be sentiment. It could be inflation. It could be higher rates. It could be business sentiment. You know, obviously consumer demand if it drops, a lot of companies will cut back inventory and the profits will drop and all that. So, it's always a confluence of events. Very hard to predict in the next 12 months what's going to happen. I actually think it's a huge intellectual error to say here's my base case. What I always look at is what's the range of outcomes. You could put probabilities of those outcomes. You know, my probabilities of a worse outcome are higher than other people's and it's mostly around inflation driven by multiple factors.

Yes, I know. I was joking because everyone says cautiously optimistic.

I have been very consistent. We are buying back the stock at these levels. I prefer to buy them at lower levels. I prefer to help my existing shareholder, not my leaving shareholder. And we've always believed that investing in our company is better than buying back the stock. However, we have a lot of excess capital and you know the stock is, you call equilibrium, but I don't like equilibrium. I like to buy it when I think it's kind of cheap and it's a bargain. So Warren Buffett says the same thing and so do a lot of the people. Buying it automatically I think is just an intellectual fault. That's not, you should be buying it. If stock price go from here to here, you buy more here and less here. And that's kind of what we do.

Exactly. And then it takes judgment, what that is. And it's hard to fight the market. You know, the market says the stock's worth X. Well, it is probably. Yeah. But that doesn't mean I want to buy at that price. Particularly when I think I can use my capital. That's the other thing I probably mentioned at the conference is that we have all this excess capital. Estimated about $40 billion. I believe now that we can deploy it in our businesses over time. It may take a couple years because of things like SRR and that I'd rather do that. So if I had no other options and you know maybe it'd be more stock buyback.

I didn't say the industry. I said us. It just means there, when you have our business always has high volumes that go high to low. Okay, credit losses that go high to low. Credit losses are kind of normalized. Volumes are quite high. Exuberance is quite high. Profits are made at the margin. The next trade is more profitable than the average rate. And people sometimes forget that. And so I have a little humility because look at what happens in 120 company years between the last 10 years. How many companies earned over 17 in banking earned over 17%? It was like literally 8% of the time. So to think it's going to go on forever is a mistake. It's a competitive world. It's a capitalist world. As Jeff Bezos says, your margin is my opportunity. And we have a lot of competition and they're coming and they're smart. You know, I recognize that they've done very well and the base competition is quite good. They're all back. It's not like anyone's weak anymore and you see that in the numbers. So I just think we should be a little cautious about bragging about our results. So trading volume is abnormally high right now.

It is high and values are high. So, remember values drive a lot of things. Custody, treasury, deposits, asset prices going up. And so, all these things drive a lot of things. And if you model it through, there's another side of that mountain sometimes. And I don't know when that's going to happen. I just think, you know, eventually something will happen and volumes will go down, there'll be a little recession, credit losses will go up and we'll still do fine. And I think actually that's when you perform. It's really important to perform in bad times, not just in good times.

I think the world of Kevin, he's quite experienced in this field, in all fields. You know, he's been in the central bank before. He obviously knows global markets and I like what he says, which is, you know, the Fed should focus more on the financial system and not so much regulatory. He's right to say all these years rule after rule around the world. I mean Basel 3 has been 10 years in the making. So say is this, if we wanted what was the outcome? Can we make it better? I actually think you can make regulations simpler, less costly, get more loans out there and make the system better and safer. And I think that should be the goal. And so I hope they do that. And then you know rates I don't know, remember he's going to walk in a room with 12 other governors. And so he has his ideas. He's a smart guy, but he's got to give them time to think about it, do some research and all that. So, you know, it won't be immediately. He can't decide by himself in day one what to do.

I saw that. I think it's possible. I mean, I don't know. I don't spend that much time guessing about stuff like that. If you ask me, I can give you all the analysis around why it might go up and why it might go down. I can give you probabilities. I don't know. And but we are prepared for higher rates too and higher credit spreads. We have not seen in a long time as people get a little more credit conscious, which I expect to happen.

Well, but we keep money at these things because of regulations and requirements, liquidity rules. So, I think he's right. The Fed shouldn't have to intervene every single time there's a kerfuffle in the markets. It's a mistake. It's a policy error that somehow we got to make everyone comfortable, but to do it, he's got to change some of those regulations and the, you know, the LCR and SLR and certain GCF rules to give banks more flexibility. But the important thing is it's not to deregulate to make it easier for banks to make a lot of money and then go bankrupt. It's to, I think you can do it and make the system safer. And I think Kevin's quite bright. He probably knows that. And it's going to take a little bit of analysis. We've got a lot of reports to the Fed about how that can be done. I think Secretary Bessent has actually spoken about it, you know, to do that. We have to change some of these requirements. But the banks have so much capital and so much liquidity. It's a good question to say you can never use it again in your life. And for us, it's a trillion, 1.2 trillion of basic cash in treasuries can never use for productive purposes other than safety, which is a good one. But I think we could do it much differently and have more safety and then we can intermediate more actively in the markets as opposed to the Fed having to intermediate when the time comes.

She is on top of all these issues. Yes.

Just so you know, a lot of banks are lending a lot more today. So they're doing it in anticipation of some of these changes.

Yeah.

I think, you know, if you, I was just reading some reports flying out here. Some will say commercial banking, some will say, you know, markets related financing issues, balance sheet issues. Remember the needs of all these global investors are huge. So, you know, banks constrain themselves sometimes like even provide repo because of some of these rules. So I think it's literally across the board.

No, but lending creates money. Okay. So when the Fed buys securities, it creates money and when banks lend, it kind of creates money. So it's kind of a bullish thing which is happening right now.

I'm shocked that people think that's shocking. I don't have anything in mind. I'm simply saying yes, of course it could be used for that if it makes sense. If we did one, I'd explain to the shareholders why we're doing this, why it makes sense. It will make sense. It won't be some, you know, something that'll surprise people in a terrible way. And so, and of course, I'll remind people, I'd rather we invest organically. So, it's quite clear, organic growth is the best kind of growth. It's your people, it's your culture, it's your systems, it's your tech. You're not taking on whole new different things. You know, mergers can be very tough and we're quite conscious of that. So, it doesn't mean we won't do them. And there may be a small, we've done a lot of small ones, by the way, that you don't even know about. You know, First Republic is $300 billion of assets. You know, that I don't know how you'd measure that, but that was a massive acquisition.

We look at everything, you know, just to be smarter. And, you know, a lot of these fintech have done a great job. It doesn't seem to me like that's the likely outcome, but it's possible that someone's going to come. You know, I always say to myself, I don't care what I think. I want you to tell me what you think. And if you come up with say that's a great idea, we'd consider buying something.

Yeah, that could make sense, too. Yeah.

But in every area, we can do it organically. So, you're always going to compare it to an organic possibility. Some people, they're not in that position. They can't do it organically. They have to buy it. I think we have the luxury of saying, 'No, I can build it, too.'

Yeah. So, you know, the first thing which I know your viewers know is that America is still the beacon of light in the hill, is still the arsenal of democracy, the bastion of freedom. I'm quite patriotic in that and that this country provides safety to the whole world, and it wasn't just our allies. It actually provides safety to India, you know, people who are not allied nations, United States of America. And I think the most important thing is we have the strongest military in the world underpinned by the strongest economy in the world. And if you ask me about the dollar dominance, it's depend on those two things. If those two things disappear, so will dollar dominance one day. That may take 30 years. But so that was the first thing. But we didn't identify it ourselves. It's kind of been identified by the military itself, by the administration, by others about we don't, we rely on outside parties for rare earths. We should have been self-reliant or at least friendly reliant or neighborly or something like that. That was true for active pharmaceutical ingredients and the ingredients that go into the drugs that people take, you know, mostly come out of China and India. And then there are things we do in manufacturing that we should have done here and we didn't keep productive capability to build more bombs and missiles and so we can't double production. And so all these things like, and the people know it now we got to go do it. So this was our effort to say, you know, instead of complaining about it, what are we going to do? And so we looked at what we already do and then we said we're going to do 50% more, that's the 1.5 trillion over 10 years. It's been outstanding. I mean we've been in contact with thousands of companies. We've already, Todd Combs came in and done a great, we've already invested two billion directly in companies. We're going to beat this 1.5 trillion I'm pretty sure. But we've learned a lot in the process. Importantly, and this might be interesting to your viewers, we've done research around the shipbuilding ecosystem, we're doing around the drone ecosystem. We did it around the API ecosystem, around the rare earth ecosystem. And that teaches you what policy should be. And then we're going to promote policy to, you know, here's how we can keep productive capability, you know, ready to go for another commercial use. But if you need it for military purpose, you push a button, the other stuff goes out. And you can do that for shipbuilding, you can do that for missiles, you can do it for a lot of different things. And so it's been a great effort. We're learning a lot. We have a lot of partners, a great advisory board. And as you pointed out, we're going to roll it out to allied nations, which is UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Australia, Japan, Korea, Canada.

Yes. And this is normal commercial business. So it's not, we may do some venture capital type of stuff, but it's mostly just helping companies grow and expand like we do in middle market corporate banking and investment banking.

We should have 15 years ago, right? The military, the government and business should have said we need to run things that are needed for national security and resiliency the same way companies do. We've got backups for almost everything. And we didn't. Now you and I can cry over spilled milk, but my view is admit it, acknowledge the problem, roll up your sleeves, get to work. And that's what this is. And you have it. I mean, you have a huge amount of companies, a lot of other people doing this, not just us. We're just a small part of this. You have the military's behind the, you know, getting this thing right. They've got Stephen Feinberg who's doing a great job at that. They've got Bessent working on some of these things. So we're fully engaged. You got to read the book Freedom Forge. How America got fully engaged after Pearl Harbor. Like we went from building almost nothing, no ships, no tanks, no aircraft to we built 144 aircraft carriers in four years. There was no car produced in America from 1943 to 1945.

All those plants, all of them. And not just GM and Ford. All those plants were building bombers, fighters, tanks, jeeps, ships. We went from building a Liberty ship in one year to two days. And so it's just we just got to get this machine going. And hopefully this will get it done fast enough.

Yeah. Well, you want about the world, you want about China?

So, we've been in China for a long time and we have exposure. We have China, we got Hong Kong, got Taiwan. I went, by the way, from Shanghai to Taiwan. I had to stop at Okinawa because you're not allowed to go direct. So, you know, we have a lot of clients in Taiwan, too. So, we've had a China conference for years, the 3,000 investors from around the world. When we bank people in China, we bank some Chinese companies, only those that were allowed to by the United States government or the European government. So, you know, we follow the rules that we're supposed to. But we also bank something like, I forgot the number, I'm going to say 2,000 multinationals in China. So, we probably bank Fox in China. We probably bank everyone else in China and we want to and you want us to and you know all these companies we bank want us to and we all follow the laws of the United States which they've gotten very tough and they should, you know, sanctions, you know, what could be sold there, what could be sold here, etc. And it makes you smarter so I believe what the government's doing is the right thing, full engagement, full engagement but do things your own self-interest when it comes to security and I think we're actually doing that and so there's more to do. I mean, we haven't quite gotten there in a bunch of these things, but there's more to do. But we'll be okay and we just got to move quickly.

The other thing I'd say very important when I look at what we need to do. We need to maintain the strongest military in the world, the strongest economy in the world. And that a lot of that's us doing a better job. It's not about potential adversaries. We could do a hell of a lot better job in our own business, our own economies, our own growth, our own standards, you know, teaching people about civic responsibility in this country that people, you know, billions of people would come here if you opened up the borders, you know, billions of people. And we're not teaching our own kids that.

I would tell you the Constitution is a legal embodiment of values. Those values are principles: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, freedom of enterprise, country, God. That's what it's about. And we don't teach that anymore. And those values of freedom are everything. They're more powerful than anything in the world. And you know, we've done a terrible job making that part of our school system. And I put the work ethic in there. It's a good thing to work.

And work hard and try to do well. Treat people well. And so it's all kind of one big bundle of getting this stuff right.

Well that's not my job. I understand your point. But are they surveilling the company? I probably... but the president knows a hell of a lot more about what's actually going on than I do. And so you know when the government tells us to do something we salute but we're quite conscious of that. I do think we need to do a lot more but you know he has to deal with China the way they are and there's still a lot of trade with China. But also like America, one of the things I think is important, we keep our military allies and our economic allies. And I think more than just a little, I think it's geopolitically brilliant. And so to me if we do that well that's a great thing and we should be conscious that's the best way to counter adversaries is to keep yourself very strong. And so I understand your point and I don't know private conversations they've had and he's probably not going to tell you either.

Let me just rephrase it. We're not worried. We think it should just be fair. If he takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules. We have social requirements, legal liquidity requirements, capital requirements, AML requirements, financial reporting requirements, transparency requirements. If he wants to be a bank, be a bank. That's all it is. And the second issue, not really related to rewards and interest, interest on stable coins, is also about AML, BSA, KYC. Because when you enter a bank system, it's already been through all that. And we do that because we have to for the federal government. And so if they want to be moving money around the world on any basis, you should ask the question, can that be used illegitimately easily? And the answer would be yes, unless they follow the same rules.

And they're not FDIC insured. We have requirements to build branches in lower income neighborhoods. You know, we have liquidity requirements and capital requirements, reporting requirements. We have like 84 regulators all over us. We're just saying it should be fair and equal, period. Not that they can't do what they want to do. You know, if you want to buy cryptocurrency, be my guest. You know, I believe it's a free country and I defend that. But we just want it to be fair.

No, no, no. I was talking about Revolut and Stripe and Chime and Dave and SoFi and you know, some of these companies, PayPal, they've done a great job in the past. There are companies that are doing things in small business which are really interesting. You know, Capital One just bought one called Brex, you know, and there are hundreds of them and these are smart people trying to take a slice of your business or a bigger piece of your business. And Citadel has done a great job in trading. And so when I look at these things, I'm saying let's... but I tell my own people, open your eyes. Look what they did. We didn't do it and some we could have and some we couldn't have for a whole bunch of different reasons. Stable coins might be among that list. I'm not that worried about stable coin and we already have the JP Morgan deposit coin. Like if you're a wholesale, if you're a company and I send you the JPM stable coin, you know what you're gonna say to me? Just give me my money. I'll put in what I want. And remember, you have to buy the stable coin and sell the stable coin. So the transaction costs on both sides. There's a lot of movement of money risk in stable coin. So it's not as simple as people think. I do think it'll be used for cross-border payments, for small dollar payments, for person-to-person type thing. But even person to person, if I send money to someone in the Philippines, I have requirements about who's sending it and who it's being sent to. And so you have to... and you know if you want that money to be sent free because remember once that money is in a wallet overseas, it could be in anyone's wallet and that goes to a third wallet, a fourth wallet. So the first one may be legitimate, second one may be a sex trafficker. So you know this, it's complicated and the government needs to do it thoughtfully. If they don't do it thoughtfully, it will cause, it'll be a huge problem.

No. No, because it allows them to effectively pay interest on deposits, stable coins or something like that without the protection that they should have. And it doesn't do anything for MLBSA. It has almost no legal protections. So, no, the banks will not accept it that way.

And the ABA, the small banks, the credit unions, it's not just the big guys. I'm not worried about stable coin, but if it happened, I'm telling you, I would have nothing to do with it and it would eventually blow up on its own. Okay? But that's my personal thing. But I do understand the concern of all the other banks.

It is. We'll fight it. If we lose, we lose and we'll live.

But it will be fought. This will not be... no, no one's going to bow down to this guy, okay? Or that company. And but he's the only one. And he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington on this thing.

He's full of...

Yeah.

But we do blockchain.

We have connectors. We have JPM Coin. We're going to do it. I think it's a legitimate technology. I think stable coin can be a legitimate payment system.

Yeah. So first of all big picture is technology has always changed the world and made it more productive. It's why we have so much productivity in this nation and I do think AI will cause huge productivity and it'll cure cancers. It'll come up with composite materials. It'll reduce deaths on roads. It will be wonderful. But now you have that one issue about Mythos came out and it is so powerful. It can see vulnerabilities in your own code or own applications, open source which is hundreds of thousands, third parties and it's a legitimate concern. And I think Anthropic did the right thing to kind of give it to the government and give it to some of our companies to test it and find out what it is and how we can handle it. Now you raised one of the big issues, the patching side. In the old days for open source people, now there's a flaw here, it'd be public and you'd have a week or two to fix it. Now you're talking about you need hours because once the adversary sees that they can reverse engineer and go directly into the vulnerability that was just identified. So we have to build things like utilities. I think Scott Bessent is running the whole part of this effort at least the financial services part, the banks all working together. We're talking hundreds of people are working around the clock to figure this out and what could be done. But I do think there's going to be a big part for the government role to play because not just our industry, it's water, it's utilities, it's telecom, it's manufacturing because you know if you take down, if you... it's ransomware. We had $20 billion of ransomware last year but I can see that number skyrocketing. So, we have to be very thoughtful how we do this and we have to help all the small companies. So, you know, a lot of smaller banks are like, you know, this is not fair. You guys are looking at it and we don't want it to look like you're strong and we're weak. And I totally agree with them. So, we have to figure out how to help everybody in this and as we expand it, expand it safely. If you give Mythos to a company and they give it to a thousand people as opposed to a very select group of people, you're putting very powerful weapons in the hands of maybe someone who wants to hurt your company like the insider threat type thing. So, we got to be very thoughtful. We've learned a lot in the process. There's still a lot to do.

It's not working against humanity. So, it could be used by bad guys to do a lot of bad things, you know, and like I said, it could be the individual guy. It could be one person has at the fingertips a very powerful weapon that if they don't like a bank or an oil company refinery or a television company they can do huge damage and so we got to get smart. I think we're going to need like a mini Manhattan project in this one. I don't think this settles itself by us just doing this kind of stuff.

And we've used it since 20... first time we ever used it 2012. Yeah, like people think it's new, it's not. And of course it's gotten much more powerful than that but think of risk, fraud, underwriting, marketing, prospecting, note taking, coming up with questions like this, idea generation, resolving errors, you know, building agents who can do things that people can't do. We can read 100,000 documents in seconds, that's unbelievable. If you ask like how many contracts have this clause in it, it's just powerful stuff. It'll make a lot of people more productive. You know, it makes people, you can wake up in the morning, it could tell you what you need to do or what happened overnight that isn't in this thing. And so you know, it's going to do a lot of things and it's early. I mean these new models are just far more powerful than the ones we had a year ago.

Yeah, look it's a big issue and my view of this is it will create a lot of jobs. It may replace jobs, all technology has done that. We had 40 million people working in farms and now we have a million and a half. Okay, we're a far more productive society. Those people went to cities and specialized in something else. That's why we have productivity. So I think in the big run it's a plus. It'll make America more productive, America wealthier, it may cause job loss faster than it should. And we need to plan for that a little bit. So my view is don't panic over it. Take a deep breath and have a plan in place. So the government for example, every community has community colleges and local unions trained people in the trades and every community has different needs. Every school should be teaching people skills they need. Actually, today there are eight million jobs open today that can't be filled because they don't have people who can do them. So, if we do that, we'll have a system in place that can adjust much more quickly.

The system, you know, our system always adjusted, but it had a little more time. And so, instead of panicking, let's take some actions that are no regret actions that cost no money that we should be doing anyway. That would be my view of it.

Yeah, so this is another one that came out of like what can we do and it's also a deep recognition. There's part of our society is not doing well. You know, think of the bottom 20%, 30% of the income scales and you know they're the ones who have their jobs, wages did not go up for 20 or 30 years. There's more crime in their neighborhoods, the schools are failing their kids and it's a recognition that you're not going to solve all of America's problems until we attack that. That by the way, you know, Democrats and Republicans know we still haven't fixed it with all these policies and all this money and we still haven't fixed it. It's almost the same that it was, obviously lives are actually better, but it's almost the same as years ago. And so, we just want to say, okay, the American dream is important to have a cohesive America where people actually feel opportunity. And you read all the time that people say it's unfair. I don't have opportunity. So, that's what that is. It's housing, it's small businesses, it's financial education, it's we call them vital institutions. So, it's financing local schools, hospitals, roads, infrastructure, things like that. And very importantly, it's the skill side. So, we're going to double down. We already do it. We're good at it, but let's double down. And so, you mentioned small business where we went from... we're going to go from financing seven...

10 million.

You know, at least we're going to try. And so we're one of the largest affordable housing companies in the country. There are a couple few bigger, but we're going to try to double that in five years. And as we do that, do policy. A lot of what holds back housing is policy. It's bad local policy or state policy or sometimes federal policy that needs to be changed.

Yes, but that's policy. They can't get the land. They can't build a second floor. You can't build a single family thing in that plot. You have to have two stairways when they only need one. I mean I can go on and on. You know then the studies show that in California it costs 40% more to build affordable housing than other states and some states have got it right. So there are lessons to be learned. I think we could reduce the cost of mortgages by 50 basis points by changing regulations around securitization, origination and servicing that were so excessive they increased the cost for no good reason and they didn't really reduce risk. So I think we do that and not change the risk profile and it would make mortgages much more affordable at the $150,000 range and that's a big deal because those people want to buy a home. It's to start a home and when they buy a home where do they leave? They leave a rental. So, it actually creates more rental units. So, it's deflationary in my opinion. And I've been begging the government to change this for 10 or 15 years, and we still haven't done it.

I think good policy is free. I feel like telling the politicians, don't try to raise more taxes or spend more money. Sit down and fix policy. And I think you can grow 1% faster. I literally believe that. And the public knows you can't get certificate of occupancy. You can't get roads built. The Baltimore bridge was supposed to be built by now is another five years. I go on and on and on.

It's frustrating. It hurts. It's embarrassing. And it always hurts the civilians of our country. And so I had a great meeting with Mamdani, meaning it was pleasant. You know, but I said everything I wanted to say.

About what America does, about what JP Morgan does, about my grandparents came here for the same reason his parents came here to be part of this country. They were Greek immigrants who never finished, a little bit Italian by the way, who never finished high school. What we do for affordable housing, for medical, for wellness, that we bank schools, cities, states, hospitals, countries. And yes we make mistakes and there were good parts. I went through cities have to compete which he had read my chairman's letter and I said the competition, you know, there's taxes, there's individual taxes, corporate taxes, there's real estate taxes, there are other hidden taxes and then there's quality of life which has nothing to do with ideology, it's like crime, police, sanitation, hospitals. And you know, I want him to succeed and I said somewhere that I want him to succeed and we'll see what he does.

And my opinion was made, he was very polite. It was very earnest. We had a very good conversation but I said everything I wanted to say and so then the press comes down right the headline. I wasn't avoiding anything. I mean but that's what I should do is and he said what he wanted to say and I got told about affordable housing and child care. Most people want it. If you do it badly it will be a disaster. The thing is do it right. There's studies that could tell you how to do it right. Get people who know what they're doing and implement proper policies. So we'll see. And I've seen and I said this too. I've seen mayors grow into the job. I mean he's running a city of 300,000 employees now. He's never had a job like that. I've seen mayors who just they fail miserably because they can't administer themselves out of a paper bag or ideology blinds them to practical realistic real world policy. And so we'll see. And you know, if I can help him do the good stuff, I'd be happy to do that.

I agree that... my guess is he probably regrets that, but you got to ask him that.

How they going to get a job? I think they're going to do great. Okay. Particularly inherit this plan that was built for them just like I inherited this stuff my parents did and my grandparents came with nothing. So the notion that we don't have this unbelievable country, our system morphs, it will create jobs. Learn how to think, learn how to earn respect, have EQ, learn how to communicate, learn to have a heart, have empathy, all that, you'll have a great life.

Well I would go back to my parents and you know maybe heritage, have a purpose in life. Like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness or happiness the way people talk about today, it was purpose. Have a purpose in life that you pursue. And for some, you know, for Thomas Jefferson it was farming, for Alexander Hamilton it was banking and manufacturing, you know, and for others it's teaching, for some it's being a reporter. Have a purpose in life, treat everyone well, like everyone who walks this planet, and don't you know, fight the bullies if you can. Do the best you can, make the world a better place. That's it. That's all I ever wanted to do. But work. I mean, my parents, you know, you work. You earn, you got to earn it every day.

I tell people the notion that somehow I go and I can coast. I can't.

And here we are ahead of the 250th anniversary of America. And it's almost what, 230 plus years for JP Morgan.

227 years. Alexander Hamilton was one of the founders as was Aaron Burr. In fact, we have the pistols on... you should come to our floor, we have all these flags. We have a flag from the USS Constitution. We have a flag, a couple flags from Omaha Beach and one from the top of Pointe du Hoc, one of the two on the top of Pointe du Hoc, June 6th, 1944, right after the Rangers took it. And we had 100 veterans there last night and there were a lot of tears in the room. We have them from the Vietnam War, Korea, George Patton's pennant, Apollo missions and you will be very... just walking around, it's very touching. People should understand this country, what it created for people, whatever its flaws and we can always look at them and improve upon them but they better learn what it did because and if they don't like it let them go visit some of these other countries, they'll learn the hard way.

Thank you.