The Guardian (USA)

Covid has highlighte­d America's flaws, says bank boss Jamie Dimon

- Kalyeena Makortoff Banking correspond­ent

The JP Morgan boss has said the Covid pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd have shone a spotlight on America’s flaws and its failure to address inequality and racism.

Jamie Dimon told a banking conference on Monday that the tumultuous events of the past year had magnified problems around structural racism and poverty that had plagued the US for more than 150 years.

“Covid and the murder of George Floyd kind of shine the spotlight on something that we already knew,” Dimon said during an interview at the Sibos conference. “We’ve had racial inequality in this country since way before the civil war and we haven’t done a particular­ly good job of fixing it.

“And let’s acknowledg­e the truth … the black community has been left behind for a long time and a lot of it was structural: jobs, education, stuff like that.”

He said black communitie­s were among the hardest hit by the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last week’s US jobs report showed the unemployme­nt rate falling to 7.9% in September. While that is a significan­t improvemen­t on the 14.7% record high reached in April, when the Covid crisis shut down most of the US economy, the recovery has been uneven and disproport­ionately benefited white men. Women, Latino and black Americans have continued to struggle.

The jobless rate rate among white people was 7% in September, compared with 10.3% among Latinos and 12.1% among black Americans.

“Poor people tend to suffer in any crisis, more than everybody else, more than the rich people.” Dimon said. “That was true for Superstorm Sandy, it’s true for recessions, it’s true for Covid. Covid just highlights so many flaws in how we run our country, the mistakes we make in running our country and how it hurts so many people.”

Dimon said JP Morgan was “doubling down and advancing black pathways”. The bank has said it aims to hire 4,000 black college graduates by 2024.

The bank reportedly introduced new diversity training programmes in March,months after a New York Times article detailed allegation­s of racial discrimina­tion at a branch in Arizona. The bank put one of its executive directors on administra­tive leave after the claims went public.

Dimon said he wanted to create an

inclusive environmen­t at JP Morgan. “I don’t care if you’re Muslim, Asian, gay, black, women, a shy man – I want you all to feel treated with respect at this company.”

 ?? Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images ?? Jamie Dimon, the JP Morgan chief executive, in 2018.
Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Jamie Dimon, the JP Morgan chief executive, in 2018.

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