Dimon calls Wells Fargo ‘irresponsible’ for lack of CEO plan

Jpmorgan chief hits out at rival for failing to have replacement ready for ousted Sloan

JPmorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon said it was “irresponsible” for Wells Fargo to announce the departure of its chief executive before having an alternative in place.

Wells Fargo announced the departure of Tim Sloan in March, after years of tussles with regulators over a mis-selling scandal. Wells’s legal boss took over on an interim basis, and several former Jpmorgan executives have been linked with the job.

“I think Tim Sloan was doing a good job,” Mr Dimon told Deutsche Bank’s annual financials conference in New York. “I think it’s not responsible for a company to have a CEO leave with no plan in place . . . I’d be surprised if regulators wanted that to happen because it’s irresponsible . . . It’s not the way to run the railroad.”

Mr Dimon also warned that second quarter investment banking fees would be $200m lower

than some analysts had pencilled in, coming at around $1.7bn, describing the business as “episodic”. The bank reported investment banking fees of $2.2bn in the second quarter of 2018.

Mr Dimon stuck a more optimistic tone on the overall US economy and said “it isn’t like you have to have a recession . . . It might be we’re in the last third [of the economic cycle] — that third could be five more years.”

Mr Dimon, who runs America’s biggest bank by assets, warned that ongoing trade tensions had gone from “a skirmish to being far more important than that.”

“You already see businesses trying to think about moving their supply lines and things like that,” he added.

In a spirited Q&A session, Mr Dimon also repeated his well known criticism of overregulation in the financial system, bemoaning the “mind numbing paperwork and bureaucracy that is sucking this country dry”.