DIMON’S BOOM & GLOOM
Banks fine, $ociety not
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned on Monday that “society is going to get worse” because millions of Americans are suffering even as banks have taken in record profits.
“I don’t want to be a tone-deaf CEO. While the company is doing fine, it is absolutely obvious that a big chunk has been left behind,” the billionaire head of Wall Street’s largest company said at an event in its Midtown headquarters.
“Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids” annually, Dimon added.
“We’ve kind of bifurcated the economy, and you’ve got these terrible things out there.”
Dimon, 63, made the comments while unveiling a $350 million jobtraining program designed to help people land some of the 7 million open jobs in the US economy.
The program is aimed at residents of depressed areas and intendedtended to give workers skills that companicompanies want but that aren’t usually ttaught in college.
“CompCompanies have to be involved,”volved,” he said. “We made a mistake by ignoring some of these things. If we don’t [act], society is going to get worse, because these problems aren’t aging well.”
The dire warning was in stark contrast to Dimmon’s gangbuster year.
The six largest US banks — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America — raked in $111 billion in profits last year, their highest ever, according to Bloomberg News.
Dimon, who also heads the lobbying group The Business Roundtable, spoke on the college-admissions scandal in which dozens of wealthy parents, including two actresses and top business execs, have been accused of paying bribes to gain entry for their children into prestigious universities. He said college is overrated. “Having gone, I know just how worthless a college degree is sometimes,” said Dimon, a graduate of Harvard Business School.
Chase has dropped college-degree requirements for some positions, like tellers, Dimon said. And JPMorgan has stopped donating to universities.
“Harvard and Princeton are not a philanthropy,” Dimon said. “Helping these kids is.”