Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase

(As his predecessor John Pierpont Morgan had said about a banker’s reputation at the Pujo hearings in front of the House Banking and Currency Committee in 1912, “[It] is his most valuable possession; it is the result of years of faith and honorable dealing and, while it may be quickly lost, once lost cannot be restored for a long time, if ever.”)

When talking of the most important things in his life, he once said, “My family, humanity, my country, and the world. And way down here is J.P. Morgan.”

“I now bleed Morgan blood,” he says. “This is what I am going to do until they don’t want me here anymore.”

(Dimon is fond of Mark Twain’s wry comment that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.)

Ever a student of history, Dimon sent Paulson a note including a citation from a speech Theodore Roosevelt made in Paris in 1910: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred

Is he irreplaceable? Is he the Steve Jobs of JPMorgan Chase?

“He has an amazing sense of risk,” says his former colleague at Smith Barney, Bob Lessin, currently vice chairman of investment bank Jeffries & Company. “He understands it intuitively better than anyone alive, so he doesn’t do stupid things. The industry has a recent history of dramatically mis-pricing risk relative to return. Jamie never fell

“If you can’t say it in the room, don’t say it at all,”

“They feel a tremendous pressure to grow. Well, sometimes you can’t grow. Sometimes you don’t want to grow. In certain businesses, growth means you either take on bad clients, excess risk, or too much leverage. Wall Street firms felt this pressure to grow, and they succumbed to it.”