JPMorgan’s Dimon wants Washington to ‘look at all the rules and regulations’
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon made it clear during a visit to Washington, D.C. on Thursday that he is in favor of a restructuring of the financial regulatory agencies that oversee his bank and his industry.
“I think it’s time in my view to take a step back and look at all the rules and regulations put in place,” he told reporters after a closed-door meeting with Republican lawmakers and other top bank CEOs on the issue of whether big lenders are “debanking” certain customers.
“You have got to take a step back and look at the whole thing.”
The new comments from the boss of the largest US bank coincide with attempts by the Trump administration to rein in one big bank regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and reportedly rethink how to restructure other big regulators that oversee the nation’s largest lenders.
Last weekend, the Trump administration ordered a halt to effectively all work at the CFPB and barred employees from showing up to the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters this week.
Many Republicans have opposed the CFPB since its creation and have often called for its closure, arguing that Washington has too many redundant regulators.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also reportedly discussing plans to consolidate other bank regulators without Congress’s input, according to a Wednesday report in the Wall Street Journal. The discussions include possibly folding the FDIC into the Treasury Department and combining it with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Dimon on Thursday did not sound overly concerned about the fate of the CFPB, which oversees how banks and other financial firms treat US consumers.
“There is consumer protection out of the SEC, the OCC, the Federal Reserve and the question is how do you design a system that is good for everybody, that makes sense. It isn’t just for the CFPB alone,” Dimon told reporters.
Dimon even passed out a chart to reporters on his way into the meeting titled “Complexities of the Regulatory System,” with numerous lines drawn to the CFPB and other regulators that have some oversight of JPMorgan’s various businesses.
The chart, which was first printed in a Dimon letter to shareholders, is referred to by executives inside JPM as the “spaghetti chart.”
Dimon on Thursday also repeated some points he has made previously about debanking, or whether banks are denying services to certain customers.
He told reporters that “we don’t debank people for their religious or political affiliations” but that “there are a lot of things that should be fixed” — specifically anti-money laundering rules.
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