Top 60 Jamie Dimon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Don’t do anything stupd. And don’t waste money. Let everybody else waste money and do stupid things; then we’ll buy them.”

— Jamie Dimon

2. “My daughter asked me when she came home from school, “What’s the financial crisis?” and I said, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.”

— Jamie Dimon

3. “And if you’re going to be a leader, you know what I ask myself? Would I want to work for you in this job? Would I let my children work for you? Would I give you this job if I wasn’t there to provide oversight? If you went to run another company, would I, as an investor, invest in that company?”

— Jamie Dimon

4. “Finance went from being a small business, effectively, to being a big business. In part, that’s the growth of the world’s wealth. That’s called savings.”

— Jamie Dimon

5. “If I ran the whole place like it was my way or the highway, we would not be as good a company. I’m going to have mistakes – they’ll be made on my watch and will embarrass me. But I’ll also make sure the company learns from them so it can become a better company.”

— Jamie Dimon

6. “I am not embarrassed to be a banker. I am not embarrassed to be in business.”

— Jamie Dimon

7. “Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.”

— Jamie Dimon

8. “The term ‘too big to fail’ must be excised from our vocabulary.”

— Jamie Dimon

9. “The government has the right to change laws and rules and regulations.”

— Jamie Dimon

10. “We use technology to make it cheaper, better, and faster for the client. And then if you have the most flow, you can win. Now, having said that, Silicon Valley wants to take on this business. They think they see an opening.”

— Jamie Dimon

11. “A democracy is a compromise by its nature. It’s not a dictatorship.”

— Jamie Dimon

12. “No one has the right to not assume that the business cycle will turn! Every five years or so, you have got to assume that something bad will happen.”

— Jamie Dimon

13. “Banks also have to say no to customers. We can’t always give clients what they want; it may not be in the client’s best interest.”

— Jamie Dimon

14. “We have built a very good company, and we’re proud of it. We also recognize that much of it has been built on the shoulders of the thousands of employees and leaders who have worked here before us.”

— Jamie Dimon

15. “We’re going to do the right thing for the company and our customers, all things considered.”

— Jamie Dimon

16. “If business doesn’t thrive, it hurts America. We need improved relations, more collaboration, more thought and more consistency as we go about trying to make sure we have the best country in the world. Not scapegoating and finger-pointing.”

— Jamie Dimon

17. “No one can forecast the economy with certainty.”

— Jamie Dimon

18. “I don’t think you’re going to have one bank. Big companies aren’t going to give us all their business. So they can pick and choose – by product, by country, whatever. We have major competition across every product in every place we operate.”

— Jamie Dimon

19. “I hope the story of 2011 is that America gets its mojo back. You’ve got to remember that America has the best universities; it’s got some of the best businesses. It’s got an unbelievable work ethic, rule of law. The story of 2011 will be America blossoming again.”

— Jamie Dimon

20. “Remember that banks aren’t markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn’t care who you are. You’re a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you’re riskier. Banks didn’t do that.”

— Jamie Dimon

21. “Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn’t have them, we’d still be living in tents and eating buffalo.”

— Jamie Dimon

22. “Our plate is full. We have a lot to do building our company organically and that is our key focus.”

— Jamie Dimon

23. “Look, every institution will make mistakes. I acknowledge we make mistakes, and they can hurt my reputation and our company’s. But you also must be willing to let go a little bit, trust others, and not always be so stringent, provided you have robust controls.”

— Jamie Dimon

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

— Jamie Dimon

25. “When you walk into a store and you want to buy something, you give them cash and they sell it to you. But very often, you walk into our “store” and you want something – a credit card, maybe, or a loan – and very often the answer is “No,” even if you’re a large corporation.”

— Jamie Dimon

26. “You can design a mortgage system that is different without a Fannie and Freddie, but there are principles you have to have, to have a good system.”

— Jamie Dimon

27. “I’ve asked our people, “Why don’t we just put a revolver on top of our basic loan?” Make it easier for the client.”

— Jamie Dimon

28. “Our global corporate investment bank competes with Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and a bunch of other banks that are in those businesses. We may have slightly different products or services, but so what? That’s always been true in American business.”

— Jamie Dimon

29. “It’s great that people get together and collaborate, talk about the facts and the analysis, all in the interest of having a great financial system.”

— Jamie Dimon

30. “The United States has the best, deepest, widest, and most transparent capital markets in the world which give you, the investor, the ability to buy and sell large amounts at very cheap prices. That is a good thing.”

— Jamie Dimon

31. “Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean everybody else was.”

— Jamie Dimon

32. “If you have the choice, it’s far better to say, “That person has the job, and they really don’t need that much of my oversight.” Maybe they don’t need any of it.”

— Jamie Dimon

33. “If you look at the banking business over many years, it’s always been a huge user of technology. This has been going on my whole life, that people have been adding technology, digitizing services.”

— Jamie Dimon

34. “We got a lot of excellent people and businesses from Bear and WaMu. But Bear definitely was more painful. WaMu got us into Florida, California, and other states, which was a huge benefit – to expand and grow and add middle-market, private banking, investment banking, and other products, too.”

— Jamie Dimon

35. “Just because you have a good hand today doesn’t mean it’s good tomorrow. And some of the things we’re doing may become very disadvantageous at some point.”

— Jamie Dimon

36. “If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that’s business. I’m doing it because I’m serving you; I’m not doing it because I want to be universal.”

— Jamie Dimon

37. “Businesses can be opaque. They are complex. You don’t know how aircraft engines work either.”

— Jamie Dimon

38. “JP Morgan always has higher capital liquidity, that is partially to make up for mistakes and problems and obviously its a tough economy. We support an oversight committee, we supported some of the compensation, new compensation rules, though we already follow most of them. We support a lot of it.”

— Jamie Dimon

39. “All businesses tend to pass costs onto customers.”

— Jamie Dimon

40. “My operating assumption is we will always have very tough competition. And even with some European banks struggling right now, some of them can reemerge – and maybe even stronger.”

— Jamie Dimon

41. “Unraveling the euro is a terrible thing. This is a 50-year endeavor to get this continent together and that’s a wonderful endeavor.”

— Jamie Dimon

42. “If you’re making all your money simply betting on interest rates, that’s not a business. Flow is a business. On the outside, they look the same for a while. But when you dig into them, no, they weren’t exactly the same.”

— Jamie Dimon

43. “If the economy grows, housing gets better, quicker.”

— Jamie Dimon

44. “I was a normal human being, but I did like that. I read a lot. I also liked math and science.”

— Jamie Dimon

45. “I hate the word universal, because I don’t know exactly what it means. The question is, does it work for the client? Travelers was a diversified, financial conglomerate that did very well. The businesses had nothing to do with each other.”

— Jamie Dimon

46. “We don’t think there are cases where people were evicted out of homes when they shouldn’t have been.”

— Jamie Dimon

47. “People need to understand: Businesses are going to make mistakes. They shouldn’t be shot and hung every time. We should apologize for it. We should make up for it. My shareholders paid for it. No customer was hurt, which is critical to me. But I hurt my shareholders, and I wish I hadn’t.”

— Jamie Dimon

48. “The government isn’t going to say, “We’re going to regulate banks, but we’ll leave these other companies alone.” I think the regulators want to make sure that they have some form of regulation on anything systemic. We like our hand. But, you know, honestly, who owns the future?”

— Jamie Dimon

49. “It is vital for officials and regulators to have input from people within our businesses who understand the intricacies of how financial markets operate and the consequences of certain policy decisions.”

— Jamie Dimon

50. “I don’t think you could have a banker serving in a major role in Washington in the next 10 years. I just don’t think it’s going to happen – it’s just not politically feasible – so I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Do I think I could do a good job? Maybe. It’s possible.”

— Jamie Dimon