Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., is widely assumed to be a very smart man, as well as a very rich one. BloombergPolitics catches up with Jamie on his way back from a trip abroad to Israel, Ireland and France and reports the following:
“It’s almost an embarrassment being an American traveling around the world,” Dimon, 61, said on a conference call with analysts. He doesn’t like listening to the “stupid shit” Americans have to deal with, expressing frustration over the nation’s inability to invest in infrastructure and overhaul the tax code. “There would be much stronger growth if there were more intelligent decisions and less gridlock.”
Dimon heaped his ire on the U.S. media during an earlier call with reporters to discuss JPMorgan’s second-quarter results. Reporters should focus on the major issues the nation faces rather than the vagaries of the firm’s trading businesses, he said. The biggest U.S. bank reported record profit despite a 19 percent revenue drop for its bond-trading franchise.
“The United States of America has to start to focus on policy which is good for all Americans, and that is infrastructure, regulation, taxation, education,” Dimon said. “Why you guys don’t write about it every day is completely beyond me. And, like, who cares about fixed-income trading in the last two weeks of June? I mean, seriously.”
Well, to begin with, I would skip the “almost an embarassment” and say it’s a severe embarassment being an American these days, even if you never leave the States, because 46% of our great nation’s electorate voted an amoral bully into the Oval Office. But Dimon, who’s a member of the president’s advisory council of business leaders, refused to criticize Trump, blaming America’s ills on–wait for it–the media, who stupidly ask him questions about, you know, banking, instead of the big picture, like the low graduation rates for inner city high schools and the opiate epidemic–problems for which, presumably, he has excellent solutions, if someone would, you know, just ask him.
Yes, Jamie, “gridlock” is a major problem. Lack of investment in infrastructure is a major problem. But which major party has made gridlock its major purpose in life since 1992? Which party has adamantly refused to consider any significant investment in repairing/improving America’s infrastructure for the same length of time? And, just for laughs, which major party has become the “party of white nativism” since the 2016 presidential primary?
What’s the point of being a billionaire if you can’t speak your mind?
