JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon on Monday launched an astonishing attack on the Biden-Harris Administration by hitting out at the “onslaught” of red tape from Dem-backed regulators.
The Queens native, who reportedly had interest in becoming US Treasury Secretary should Kamala Harris win the election, gave bureaucrats in Washington a tongue-lashing for hobbling the industry with a raft of new rules.
“It’s time to fight back,” Dimon told a conference of bankers in New York. “I’ve had it with this s**t.”
“Many banks are afraid to fight with their regulators, because they would just come and punish you,” he added.
“We don’t want to get involved in litigation just to make a point. But I think if you’re in a knife fight you better damn well bring a knife.”
The 68-year-old poured scorn on the current administration’s plans for regulating the US banking industry, rattling off a list of what he described as ill-conceived rules.
Dimon singled out a blueprint aimed at helping banks absorb major economic shocks by forcing them to hold more capital on the balance sheets to weather any financial storms.
The proposal, known as Basel III, would see major lenders raise that emergency buffer by 9%. The veteran banker warned that “the devil would be in the details.”
“We are suing our regulators over and over and over because things are becoming unfair and unjust, and they are hurting companies, a lot of these rules are hurting lower paid individuals,” he said.
Dimon hinted that the plans may not even survive after the Nov. 5 presidential election, suggesting they were based upon “stupid calculations.”
“The biggest problem I have with all these overlapping rules is that we are not stepping back and saying, what could we do better to make the system work better,” he told the annual forum of the American Bankers Association, a group that represents and lobbies for the US financial sector.
JPMorgan’s top boss also slammed Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, over a new rule that that would make it easier for consumers to transfer their personal data between financial services providers.
Two banking lobby groups have already sued, saying that the CFPB had “overstepped its statutory mandate.”
“Rohit is a very smart guy who has one major flaw, which I told him personally, which is that you use your brains to justify what you already think,” Dimon said of the staunch ally of left-wing Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Last week, the New York Times parroted a scoop from Sept. 12 by The Post’s own Charles Gasparino that the JPMorgan chief executive would have preferred a role in any future Harris administration.
But the chances of victory for the vice president appear to be on the wane, with former president Donald Trump gaining momentum in the polls with just over a week to go until Election Day.
Dimon himself had told Wall Street analysts two weeks ago that the probability of him leaving the bank for a top government job was “almost nil.”