Jamie Dimon On Trump, Taxes, And A U.S. Renaissance

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, talks about the city's revival and his views on the incoming Trump administration

- Megan Murphy

We’re here in Detroit to look at what JPMorgan Chase has done with a five-year commitment to invest $100 million in the city. Why is an initiative like this good business for you as well as for Detroit?

I would do it for moral reasons alone. But it is good business. We are the largest bank in Detroit. The National Bank of Detroit was started by General Motors in 1933 in the Depression when most banks were closing. That bank merged with First Chicago, Bank One, and then with JPMorgan Chase. So here we are, the largest bank in consumers, small business, middle market. We bank all the major institutions, the hospitals, the major companies here, and the government. It’s an important town for us. It’s probably one of the only towns in America that really did not have a renaissance in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. So this has been a train wreck we all knew was coming for about 20 years.

It’s been two and a half years now. How have you learned to get things done?

We knew a little bit about the mayor: a white man who got elected in a mostly black community. He asked, “What do you need in Detroit?”

“We need the streetlights on.” He got them on, all 65,000.

But this mayor had this huge set of problems: “We need jobs. We need affordable housing. We need housing for commercial markets. We need training and skills.” He didn’t have one thing to focus on. He had to focus on all of them.