his view of acquisition opportunities. “There are three things that have to make sense,” he said. “And they are not in order of importance. One is the business logic. There should be clear business logic to it. The second is the price. Sometimes there is a price [at] which you cannot make it pay for shareholders. And the third is the ability to

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

Moments after sitting down, Lee pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and put it down on the table next to him. Dimon looked at Lee and said, “What’s that?” Lee replied, “It’s the list of things I needed to do today. I wanted to make sure I covered all the topics I wanted to talk to you about.” Dimon looked incredulous. “Let me see that,” he

“We think [the business] should be prepared for adverse times,” Dimon told analysts in a conference call. “In fact, we think if you’re strong in adverse times that that puts you in the position where you actually can do more interesting things, either hire people or buy other companies that are having a tough time.” Dimon and his team were

“You don’t run a business hoping you don’t have a recession,”

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

“honesty,” “integrity and honor,” and doing “the right thing, not necessarily the easy or expedient thing.”

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

“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.”