WHEN: Today, Monday, February 24, 2025
WHERE: CNBC’s “The Exchange”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with JPMorgan Chase Chairman & CEO Jamie Dimon on CNBC’s “The Exchange” (M-F, 1PM-2PM ET) today, Monday, February 24. Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/02/24/jpmorgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-im-not-against-wfh-im-against-it-where-it-doesnt-work.html and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/02/24/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-consumers-are-back-almost-normal.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
KELLY EVANS: We are about to hear from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon joining us live from the firm’s Global Leveraged Finance Conference down in Miami Beach. I was going to say sunny Miami Beach, but I haven’t actually seen the weather there. Leslie Picker is there and has an exclusive interview. Leslie, welcome to you.
LESLIE PICKER: Thank you, Kelly. It’s actually rainy here, but lots of rainmakers. I’m sitting with one of them, Jamie Dimon. Thank you so much for joining us from your Global Leveraged Finance Conference. Let’s get right into the macro environment, because the market really seems fixated on some of these growth concerns regarding weak retail sales, soft consumer sentiment, policy uncertainty, and the like. Does this skittishness match what you’re seeing within the bank and as well as what you hear from clients at this conference and beyond?
JAMIE DIMON: Yes, basically, it does. You had a slowing down. You have had this huge boom after COVID and all the money that was given out and spent. And so we see consumers are kind of back almost kind of normal. So, they don’t have all the extra money, but they have jobs. Wages are going up. But if they substitute a cheaper product for a more expensive one. They cancel a trip. So you are starting to see what I put at normal. Credit costs have normalized. So it’s just almost back to what I call a normal environment. Whether it gets better or worse from here, I don’t know, but kind of normal.
PICKER: Normalization. A key wild card that people are trying to grapple with has been just this flurry of executive orders coming in from Washington and whether they’re going to be net positive for growth. Point72’s Steve Cohen saying on Friday that tariffs, tighter immigration laws, and government cost-cutting efforts led by DOGE could weigh on the economy. Do you agree with that?
DIMON: Yes, I look, I’m, yes, could they? Yes, of course. But I think the economy is like this huge ship of state. And these things are at the margin may not change that ship of state. And, also, it really depends the quality in which they’re done. More effective government, more efficient government isn’t bad. It’s actually a good thing. They get overdone. Tariffs properly used — if they’re overused, if there’s retaliation, yes, it could be bad for the economy. But if they’re just making up for — used for negotiations, making up for unfair trade, so I’m more in the wait-and-see attitude about how this all plays out.
PICKER: How do you think about the self-described chain saw approach that DOGE is taking to the federal government? Is it something you support?
DIMON: Yes, it’s too binary to say support or not. Here’s what I support, OK? The government and most all everybody would know the government’s inefficient, not very competent, and it needs a lot of work. And so you and I it’s not just waste and fraud. It’s outcomes. Why are we spending the money on these things? Are we getting what we deserve? What should we change? So I think doing that needs to be done. Remember, it was tried by Al Gore and Bill Clinton. It was tried by a bunch of other folks in the past. Yes, they should try. I also — you have to understand that, whenever you go to any big institution or the government, the bureaucracy pushes back on everything. And they will here. Every little thing, they’re going to push back on. So, you have to be strong if you’re going to do it. I’m hoping it’s quite successful. If there’s overreach, things they’re doing which are not legal, the courts should stop it. But I’m hoping that’s not the case. But, again, it’s in very early stages to tell exactly what it’s going to mean and how it’s going to affect the economy.
PICKER: Is success defined by bringing down the deficit?
DIMON: I think ending fraud and waste and abuse, if it brings down the deficit, yes, but also making systems more — I mean, if you just identify that we can build better systems in — across these departments, that will be — more effectuate the jobs it’s supposed to do, modern technology, like the FAA — you have heard about the FAA, actually should be doing that. Now, some of them may actually cost money in the long run — in the short run, but it’ll save a lot of money in the long run. And it saves lives. So we have to learn to do the thing right. It’s not just about the deficit. It’s about building the right policies, procedures, and the government we deserve.
PICKER: How about tariffs? And I want to get your latest thoughts, because, at Davos, you told Andrew Ross Sorkin that, when it comes to tariffs, if it causes a little more inflation for the sake of national security, so be it. And there was recent research from J.P. Morgan’s economics team that said the tariff threats appear to be rattling business confidence, just the uncertainty of it all. How do you assess all of the various tariff headlines and what they mean for the economy?
DIMON: That’s why I said that’s so be it. I got a lot of criticism. What I’m saying is, if it’s used to protect national security, that is paramount, and that transcends if it causes a little inflation. National security has to be paramount. And think of rare earths. Think of medical supplies and things like that, where it may be one of the tools that create national security. I don’t know yet. He’s — we have had this before. He’s done some. He hasn’t done a lot. They’re talking about it. There are a lot of people with opinions. And even inside the administration, you hear some talking, it’s like, do a lot. And you see them talk, well, what we’re going to use it as a tool. So, again, I’m more in the wait-and-see attitude about how it is. Will it affect confidence? Yes, it’ll affect the confidence of certain businesses. But if I polled 100 businesses out here today, 80 would tell you, it’s not going to affect my business at all. Some may tell you it’s going to be good for my business. And there will be a bunch or few are rattled. It could really hurt their business.
PICKER: And in terms of inflation, broadly speaking, we have talked about tariffs. There’s also the immigration element to it all. Are you worried about inflation at this stage? Do you think that the Fed has fully stamped it out?
DIMON: No. I was worried about inflation before those issues because when I look at the world, we have spent — our deficit is 7 percent. Our debt-to-GDP is 100 percent. Those numbers are more than double what they were when we had a lot of inflation in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s hard to say it was driving. I even asked AI, what drove the inflation in the ’70s and ’80s? And there’s no real answer to it. But something drives it. But spending money drives inflation. Deficits are global. This is true around the world. And there are high debt levels around the world. So both of those are kind of a risk. But I’m also looking at future things. So there are things in the future which I can tell you are probably going to happen. And most of them are inflationary, the remilitarization of the world, the green economy, which we have wasted a lot of money. We will probably waste more. The infrastructure the world needs, the restructuring of trade, those things are inflationary, and it adds deficit spending. So I don’t see deflationary forces. And even if you say AI, I don’t think that’s going to be deflationary in the short run. It may very well be deflationary after three or four years, but most of us, for now, we are spending more money on it, not less.
PICKER: I want to ask you about AI in particular, because this is the first time we’re sitting down with you since the whole DeepSeek phenomenon came out, this idea that AI models can be trained cheaper, more efficiently perhaps than some of the well-known U.S. counterparts. I’m curious how you assess this space. Are you concerned at all about ROI? Are you concerned about overspend here in the U.S.? And are you concerned at all about American competitiveness?
DIMON: Yes. So America is very competitive. Not concerned about American competitiveness. The Chinese may be ahead on certain things. I’m going to take a deep breath on this one too. It’s going to sort out. All technologies have cheaper, faster, slower. They, some, they get deployed. It took 20 years to deploy the Internet. How long did it take to deploy electricity? How long did it take — and there will be fits and starts. There will be open miles. There will be closed miles. There will be cheap miles. There will be this type of mile. And my view as a business is to use them all to do a better job for your company and your clients. And we will — I want to be an expert at it, however it develops. Will too much money be spent? Probably. There is almost no new technology where maybe it didn’t get overbuilt at one point. But that may be — not be the next year or two, but that may very well happen.
PICKER: And I want to follow up on what you said about wasting money on the green economy. Where was that money wasted? And do you think that there should be a different approach as it pertains to—
DIMON: Totally. I think we have been using a Whac-A-Mole approach with gifts and telling people to do things. We need safe, secure, affordable energy. It has, things like LNG have the benefit of not just being safe, secure, but we can give it to our allies. And it reduces their CO2, because it replaces the use of coal. So we make a lot of decisions that sound like they’re good, but they create more CO2. And I put some EV policies in that. I put some place-based policies. I think some of the stuff we did around the Infrastructure Act added a lot of additional costs, which will not help CO2. So I think we have got to take a look at all of that and say, what are we really dealing with? The system is far more complex than people have been dealing with. And we try to play this Whac-A-Mole approach. And then we think yelling at companies is going to do it. A lot of these big companies, like oil companies, have done a great job getting down their CO2. And a lot of them are the ones — and some of these other big ones who are going to come up with the new ways of fixing it. It was biomass or carbon capture or how they do methane capture, etc. So the system will evolve. But you need all forces to work on it, R&D, government, and you should be very careful about restrictions. Like, we can’t get pipelines built that will reduce energy costs and CO2 in New York and Massachusetts. And that’s what I’m saying. That’s like the road to hell is built with good intentions. We need to finish the pipelines that get gas to places that use too much coal. We need to finish the pipelines that get gas to places that use too much coal. And you’re going to have a small consumer revolt when they have to pay three times more in one state than another state because they can’t get hydroelectric power. You may not be aware we couldn’t get hydroelectric power from Canada into Massachusetts because the states of Vermont and Maine wouldn’t allow it. So Massachusetts has — I think energy costs of two or three times higher and a lot dirtier. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
PICKER: Fascinating. In terms of geopolitics, broadly speaking, you have been warning about the geopolitical environment for quite some time. You have spent time with the Ukraine president Zelenskyy. You’re very focused on the conflict there. What do you make of the later — the latest posture in American foreign policy that seems to be shunning Ukraine in favor of Russia?
DIMON: Yes, I’m not sure, I hear that. I’m not sure that’s true. And I know, when people speak — you can read an article from this person who says it’s shunning, this one saying, no, no, that’s just the beginning gambit of the thing. I believe that we should have a safe, secure Ukraine, and the secure part has to be stable and secure for the rest of life. It can’t be — and it’s going to take a lot of complex negotiation to get all the players at the table. It will, I think it has to ultimately involve Europe, Ukraine, the United States, Russia, maybe China. And I’m hoping they succeed at it. I don’t think that, when people make one statement, that’s that’s the only thing that’s meant. I think there’s other parts to it. And if you listen to people like Mike Waltz or Steven Witkoff, they talk about the security of Ukraine. They talk about getting it right. They talk about Ukraine being involved. And so I hear that too.
PICKER: So you think that President Trump calling Zelenskyy a dictator and saying that Ukraine invaded first, all that’s a sideshow, essentially, or a negotiating point?
DIMON: I don’t know. I will let you guys decide that.
PICKER: Okay. I want to ask you about bank regulation because the industry and you in particular have largely cheered what we have seen in terms of a deregulatory posture. Do you think that the government is going far enough, from your perspective? And are you worried, as some critics have said, that there is a potential for the pendulum to swing too far that it would prevent a crisis or it would prevent some of the supervision that is necessary for a sound…
DIMON: Well, I’m not talking about banks. We have become a highly bureaucratic, litigious, overregulated society. And it’s bad. If you don’t believe me, go to Europe. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have regulations. We should protect the financial system. We should protect the food system, the water system. But the American polls show, this is bureaucracy completely run amok. So if you look at — and in the bank side now, they talk about they’re letting banks off the hook. If you look at regulations last — since Dodd-Frank, they have been going up nonstop. There’s no — never backsliding. And they — if you look at, between CCAR, G-SIFI, SLR, LCR, resolution recovery, CCAR, they have become terrible. They don’t work. They’re excessive. So my view is, it’s time to step back and look at, what do you want and how do you make the system safer, not — these things aren’t making the system safe. You look at Silicon Valley Bank, I would never let a bank take that much in straight risk. What were they all doing? And I think part of them, they were so busy doing this bureaucratic stuff, they forgot to look at interest rate risk. And so, yes, it’s time to step back and just clean it up. But I also agree with you, by the way, having policy that flip-flops is not a good idea. And let’s finish some of this stuff, and I think we could make banks virtually failsafe. Let’s go around and have a conversation about how to do that, as opposed to academics — and, literally, they’re all academics just darling more rules and regulations about things they simply don’t understand. And I do think it could free up a lot of capital to be used better and to help grow the world and grow the economy and free the banks to what they’re supposed to do. And we — and I remind you, we have the best natural system in the world. Let’s keep it that way. Let’s not hamstrung it, make it internationally less competitive. Let’s make sure we’re doing the right thing, so—
PICKER: You have $60 billion in excess capital, potentially if BASEL III capital rules don’t get enacted. This morning, there was an announcement that you plan to use $50 billion of balance sheet capital toward direct lending. How else do you see kind of the use cases for that $60 billion, if, ultimately, you don’t have to hoard it for some type of –
DIMON: Well, first of all, I don’t mind having extra. I mean, it’s a pretty difficult world out there, and extra feels good to me. And, remember, our market cap’s over $700 billion, so it’s 10 percent of what you would call our market cap. I — capital, to me, is very basic, which is, first, you pay a dividend. And that’s just — base should be sacrosanct, so it should be conservative. Now, obviously, when things get really bad, I have cut dividends twice here. And that’s out of preservation. I think it’s a wise thing to do. And after that, the best and highest use is your own organic growth, and real organic growth, new branches, new bankers, new technologies. And organic growth is hard. It’s like you got to add people, train people. I tell you, to do open these branches, we need real estate people, we need H.R. people, we need legal people. We need leases to be signed. We need equipment to be moved in. We need to train people. We need to market the brand and stuff like that. So, organic, organic, organic. Then, M&A is OK. M&A’s got always risk to it. It can always slow you down in the organic. It can slow down your base if you’re not careful. And then stock buyback. But stock buyback, to me, is you should buy back the stock when you think it’s cheap. And so we have been very reluctant buyback stock at these prices. And we will have opportunities. But, one day, we will deploy that capital in a way that’s very good for our shareholders.
PICKER: Yes, the stock near record highs. I have to ask about work from home. There have been a slew of headlines lately about what appears to be an internal debate within JPMorgan over the firm’s five-day-a-week-in-office mandate, including a leaked audio recording from a town hall in Ohio that was obtained by Barron’s. What’s going on? What’s going on with—
DIMON: I do town halls all around the world. And, as you know, I emote sometimes. You have probably been at some of the town halls. I should never curse, ever. That’s, okay. And I shouldn’t get angry and stuff like that. But, and the gentleman asked a long question. And I answered the question. I tried to give a lot of detail, which I think is tied to, I have never, ever fired anyone because they asked a question like that. I completely respect people that don’t want to go to the office all five days a week. That’s your right. It’s my right. It’s a citizen’s right. But they should respect that the company is going to decide what’s good for the clients, the company, etc., not an individual. And so they can get a job — and I’m not being mean — they can get a job elsewhere. I understand that. It may make total sense for them to do that. And I also respect the fact that other companies are going to try a different way to grow. And I think there are a lot — we do have 10 percent of jobs that are full-time at home. We have built these virtual call centers in Baltimore and Detroit. I’m not against work-from-home. I’m against where it doesn’t work. And I gave all the reasons for that. And so, you know, there’s a petition. But maybe I have — I forgot how many people signed, 1,200 people. That’s fine. And they have the right to feel that way. But we’re not going to change. We’re going back to the office. And I’m sure when we do, there will be some seats not available. And — but, for the most part, most of our people understand why we need to do it.
PICKER: In that same town hall, you reportedly spoke about some of the DEI efforts and some of the spending choices saying quote, “I saw how we were spending money on some stupid stuff.” I’m paraphrasing there. And it really upset you. You’re going to cancel them. “I don’t like wasted money on bureaucracy.” Given that there’s this whole debate over DEI right now, I’m curious what you found wasteful—
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: When you looked at it.
DIMON: Yes. So, we, obviously, you have to modify your plans, but we look at our policies all the time. So if you know me a little bit. I look at that all the time, saying, why are we doing that? And it could be in any subject. We have been, we have done the same in DEI a little bit. So it’s things like trainings that don’t work or too many of them, meetings that don’t work. People are hiring outside consultants to, for meetings and events. I don’t like that. There’s a whole bunch of stuff like that, a lot of small programs that just kind of a, kind of just grew over time. So we’re going to kind of consolidate them. They’re all very rational. We’re still going to reach out to the Black, Hispanic, LGBT, veteran, disabled communities. That, we’re not changing that. And it’s 95 percent commercial. You have been in our community branches. And most of the places I go, governors and mayors, both Republicans and Democrats, they like what we do locally. We lift up the country and stuff like that. We have great training programs. We recruited more HBCUs. But if we did something wrong with DEI, we’re going to fix it. I never had a problem admitting that we did too much and we need to change something.
PICKER: All right, Jamie Dimon, we have to leave it there. But I really appreciate your time today here in Miami Beach. Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase.
DIMON: Leslie, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Everyone, keep the faith, folks.
PICKER: Thank you. I will send it back to you, Kelly.
