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

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.”

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

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

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 exe

(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.”)

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

“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 constant

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 sa

“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.”