By Tatiana Bautzer and Nupur Anand
NEW YORK (Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon blasted several major U.S. regulatory initiatives on capital rules, card payments and open banking at a conference on Monday.
The outspoken executive, 68, who runs the largest U.S. lender, criticized what he called overlapping or ill-conceived regulations.
“It’s time to fight back,” Dimon said. Many banks are afraid to “fight with their regulators, because they would just come and punish you more,” Dimon said. “I have been told by people at the Fed, know that because of what you have said and what you wrote about, you know they are coming after you.”
The Federal Reserve declined to comment.
“We are suing our regulators over and over and over because things are becoming unfair and unjust, and they are hurting companies, a lot of these rules are hurting lower paid individuals,” he said.
As banks await new proposals under what is known as the Basel III endgame, “the devil is in the details,” Dimon said.
He was referring to a proposal by U.S. regulators in July 2023 to align their standards with those of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to help the industry better absorb economic shocks.
The Fed’s regulatory chief Michael Barr last month outlined a plan to raise big bank capital by 9%, easing the previous proposal to hike capital 19%. It was a major concession to Wall Street banks that had lobbied to water down the draft.
Despite the apparent industry victory, the plan was still mired in uncertainty, with key details unclear and the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election casting doubt over whether it would survive a new administration.
It will be difficult to get anything done if the proposals do not emerge before the election, Dimon said.
Among the “stupid calculations” in the Basel framework were the capital surcharge for global systemically important banks, and operational risk models, he said.
“The biggest problem I have with all these overlapping rules is that we are not stepping back and saying, what could we do better to make the system work better,” he added.
(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Nupur Anand in New York; Additional reporting by Pete Schroeder; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Lananh Nguyen and Richard Chang)
