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

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

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

“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

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.”

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

“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.”

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

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