During a visit to China, where he promoted a policy of “engagement” and met with Shanghai’s top Chinese Communist Party official, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that he has political ambitions.
“I love my country, and maybe one day I’ll serve my country in one capacity or another,” the executive told Bloomberg TV in an interview today. He’s in Shanghai this week for his company’s Global China Summit.
He sounded a note of caution about the Chinese government’s ongoing crackdown on foreign business influences in the country, also telling Bloomberg that “if you have more uncertainty, somewhat caused by the Chinese government . . . it’s not going to just change foreign direct investment.” “It’s going to change the people here, their own confidence to invest,” he added.
Dimon also gave his perspective on the current downturn in the U.S.–Chinese relationship: “You’re not going to fix these things if you are just sitting across the Pacific yelling at each other, so I’m hoping we have real engagement.”
Hedge-fund executive Bill Ackman posted a glowing message about Dimon, encouraging him to run for president in 2024. “Jamie is beloved by his 240,000+ employees, highly respected by our military as well as by the global political and business leaders that matter,” Ackman wrote on Twitter today. “He has superbly managed @jpmorgan through every crisis, and has built the world’s best, large, global financial institution working for clients from startups and mom and pops, to global institutions and countries.”
Ackman added that Dimon can beat President Biden in the Democratic primary and Donald Trump in a general election.
But Dimon might find it difficult to shake the idea that he has too close a relationship to America’s primary geopolitical foe. The banking CEO has a history of controversial comments about the relationship between the two countries.
In November 2021, he apologized after making a joke about how JPMorgan would outlast the Chinese Communist Party. “I regret and should not have made that comment,” he said soon after making the initial joke.
Then, last year, he criticized his own country, saying that some Chinese views of the U.S. as a declining power are somewhat truthful.
“They kind of look at America and say, ‘You have been incompetent and lazy.’ There is truth to that. We have screwed up infrastructure. We have screwed up inner city schools,” he said. Dimon did, however, add that “it is a mistake to say that America has the short end of the stick.”
Dimon received special treatment from Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing government during China’s draconian Covid lockdowns. The authorities in the city exempted him from the onerous regulations in place at the time, which required foreign visitors to quarantine for three weeks.
Earlier this year, another JPMorgan executive, Geoffrey Siebengartner, appeared in a propaganda video produced by the Hong Kong government.