BANKING ON SORROW
Jamie’s quick kowtow after telling truth on China
THE state of corporate America is a sad one: Its best and brightest are so desperate to make a buck that they need to beg forgiveness when simply stating the obvious.
Last week at Boston College, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was riffing on US-China relations and said something every right-thinking person in the world should pray for: That a great American company will outlast the brutal Communist Chinese regime.
But CEO survival these days — even if it’s the head of the nation’s largest bank — is a bizarre spectacle. In national politics, corporate chieftains dance to the tune of progressive elites, fearing backlash from the media and their Twitter hordes.
Recall that Dimon himself took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter during last year’s summer of love to score some lefty kudos despite the movement’s Marxist underpinnings. If BLM had its way, JPM would be shuttered and Dimon summoned for a Soviet-style show trial after being charged for crimes against humanity (a k a being a capitalist).
Maybe even worse, these CEOs spend a lot of time overseas dancing to the tune of dictators in places like Saudi Arabia and Russia. Mostly, however, it’s in China as they look to tap into the country’s state-run market economy, which promises enormous profits given the country’s massive population and rising standard of living.
And that means Jamie Dimon has to eat crow when he says the truth even about a country that represses religious minorities, murders dissidents and has been credibly accused of unleashing COVID on the world and trying to cover it up.
To understand the absurdity of Dimon’s apologia to the communist Chinese, let’s go back to exactly what Dimon said last week that prompted not just one bended-knee about-face, but two.
“I was just in Hong Kong and I made a joke that the Communist Party is celebrating its hundredth year. So is JPMorgan. I’d make you a bet we last longer,” he quipped, adding: “I can’t say that in China. They probably are listening anyway.”
Vintage Dimon. Left to his own devices, he’s brutally and refreshingly honest. Who can forget that when most of the liberal corporate elite kept their distance from President Trump, Dimon vowed to work with him. Later, Dimon didn’t think twice about offending the leader of the free world when Jamie claimed he could easily beat Don in an election because Dimon’s “smarter.”
Gotta love it, and also got to love what Dimon said about China and his dig at its massive and abusive surveillance state. At last week’s Boston College event, Dimon said he “detest(s)” Trump’s legendary callous personality. Then he rightly gave kudos to Trump for his anti-China policies “because it was time to do something about” the country’s abusive trade practices and outright theft of American intellectual property as the price of doing business there.
Within a few hours came the apologies (“I regret I should not have made that comment . . . it’s never right to joke about or denigrate any group of people, whether it’s a country, its leadership, or any part of a society and culture”) after word of the event started making its way around media circles, and someone inside JPM reminded the boss that the bank does a lot business in China. For all the bad stuff that goes down on the mainland, JPM is looking to do more with the tyrants, not less. That’s why he just traveled to Hong Kong in the first place.
So before the Chinese could cancel JPM’s asset-management application and jail some of its employees who work there, the mea culpa maximas hit the tape. I am told the company issued two apologies because the company thinks it knows enough about Chinese culture that overt shows of respect and contrition work with its commissars.
And it did. The Chinese later insisted all the bad things (the truth) that Dimon said about them were much ado about nothing and they’re still looking forward to working with the bank.
I asked a senior JPM executive why Dimon decided to apologize. After all, Jamie was just being Jamie. The exec’s response: “Ha! He doesn’t feel it’s right to joke about an entire country and its leaders.”
But in reality, what he said wasn’t a joke. Given the choice between JPMorgan or the communist government of China lasting another 100 years, we should all hope for the former.