Every year, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon pens a letter to shareholders detailing his firm’s performance, describing future plans, and, perhaps most importantly, giving his take on the economy and the day’s most pressing issues. And after March’s banking crisis, headlined by the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, this year’s shareholder letter was hotly anticipated on Wall Street.
With nearly two decades of experience leading what is now America’s largest bank, Dimon is often seen as the financial industry’s voice, and on Tuesday, he used his status to rebuke regulators, fellow bank CEOs, and venture capitalists for their role in the banking crisis.
“As I write this letter, the current crisis is not yet over, and even when it is behind us, there will be repercussions from it for years to come,” he wrote, noting that banks’ issues have “provoked lots of jitters in the market” and will force some lenders to become increasingly “conservative.”
Dimon believes that regulators should have foreseen most of the problems that sparked the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—including the lender’s exposure to rising interest rates, unrealized loan losses, and high number of uninsured depositors—as they “were hiding in plain sight.” He noted that regulations meant to make banks more resilient even, “ironically,” incentivized SVB to buy government bonds that plummeted in value as the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates to fight inflation over the past year.
Dimon also criticized the stress testing that is typically done by Fed officials, arguing that it is too academic to prevent bank runs. “A less academic, more collaborative reflection of possible risks that a bank faces would better inform institutions and their regulators about the full landscape of potential risks,” he wrote.
The only “unknown risk” at SVB, according to Dimon, was the lender’s concentrated base of corporate depositors, which he says was controlled by a small number of venture capitalists who “moved their deposits in lockstep,” causing the bank to fail.
“This is not to absolve bank management—it’s just to make clear that this wasn’t the finest hour for many players,” the CEO wrote after criticizing regulators and venture capitalists.
After discussing the latest crisis, Dimon made it clear that what banks are experiencing now is nothing like the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), in his view. He noted that in 2008 the underlying mortgages that banks held were “about to go bad,” but this time there isn’t the same credit risk. “This current banking crisis involves far fewer financial players and fewer issues that need to be resolved,” he wrote.
And the CEO, who himself lobbied against parts of the Dodd-Frank act that regulated banks after the GFC, said that regulators should avoid a “knee-jerk, whack-a-mole or politically motivated” response to the current banking crisis. Regulations need to be specifically tailored to prevent the issues that caused SVB’s collapse, Dimon believes, adding it “should not always be about more or less regulation.”
When it comes to the economy, Dimon warned that there is “potential trouble brewing” due to high inflation, “geopolitical tension,” and the Fed’s aggressive monetary tightening. And as consumers spend the extra savings they built up during the pandemic, he argued we “may be moving…from a virtuous cycle to a vicious cycle.”
The CEO put together a list of “storm clouds” facing the U.S. economy—in a reference to his previous recession predictions—that included “unpredictable war,” “potential for rising oil and gas prices,” and “higher long-term interest rates.” However, he added that, for now, the overall economy remains in “pretty good” health.
“Of course, we hope that everything turns out okay and that all of these storm clouds peacefully and painlessly dissipate—and we need to be prepared for that outcome,” he wrote. “We also need to be prepared for a new and uncertain future.”
