Jamie Dimon Can't Be That Dumb

Plus, crypto does not have a monopoly on fraud.

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Jamie Dimon Can’t Be That Dumb

It’s long been said that politics makes strange bedfellows, but it doesn’t get much stranger than this. If you had been told that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was going to appear before a Senate banking committee featuring Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), would you not assume that she would be raking him over the coals, as she often does with the nation’s prominent bankers?

And yet in the annual oversight hearing of the biggest U.S. banks—Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, State Street and Wells Fargo—Warren managed to get each of the biggest bank CEOs to pledge to root out any use of their financial networks to fund terrorism, and that any crypto company should have to follow the same anti-money laundering regulation that traditional banks have to follow. Warren acknowledged the oddity of the moment: “When it comes to banking policy, I am not usually holding hands with the CEOs of multibillion-dollar banks.” The context here is that federal law enforcement officials have asked Congress to amend the Bank Secrecy Act, citing cryptocurrency as a way that terrorists get around being governed by the law.

But Dimon took the opportunity to go further than his colleagues. “I’ve always been deeply opposed to crypto, Bitcoin, etc.,” he declared.