RED ALERT: Jamie Dimon warns of a POWERFUL weapon in the making

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:06]Welcome back. Good Friday morning everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I'm Maria Bartoromo and it is Friday, May 29th. We are coming to you live from the Reagan National Economic Forum this morning in Seami Valley, California. It is 8:03 on the East Coast. And we kick it off with the hot topic of the hour. JP Morgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Diamond here at the forum. Now, part two of my special interview with the chairman and how he feels about the Clarity Act. the future of AI and banking and his recent meeting with New York City Mayor Zoran Mandani.

[00:00:35]Plus, he gave us advice for the 2026 graduates on achieving the American dream.

[00:00:43]>> Let me get your take on how your business isn't changes and changing and how the whole industry is changing with regard to digital assets. We've had on Coinbase CEO a lot and I know that he wants to be able to pay rewards and he wants people to put, you know, uh, money in crypto platforms like his and and the banks are worried that it's going to mean people are taking money out of their deposit accounts. How do you see the Clarity Act changing things?

[00:01:05]>> Let me just rephrase it. We're not worried. We think it should just be fair. If he takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules. We have social requirements, litig leg legal liquidity requirements, capital requirements, AML requirements, financial reporting requirements, transparency requirements. If you want to be a bank, be a bank. That's all it is. And the second issue not really related to rewards and interest on stable coins is also about uh AML, BSA, KYC because when you earn a bank system, it's already been through all that.

[00:01:34]Okay? And we do that because we have to for the federal government. And so if they want to be moving money around the world on any basis, you should ask the question, can that be used illegitimately easily? And the answer would be yes, unless you they follow the same rules, >> right? They're not FDIC insured.

[00:01:49]>> And they're not FDIC insured. We have requirements to build branches in lower income neighborhoods. You know, we have liquidity requirements and capital requirements, reporting requirements. We have like 84 regulators all over us. Uh we're just saying it should be fair and equal, period. Not that they can't do what they want to do. you know, if you want to buy cryptocurrency, be my guest.

[00:02:08]You know, I believe it's a free country and and I and I defend that, right? But um but we just wanted to be fair.

[00:02:14]>> But is that who you were talking about when you said there's a lot of competition out there?

[00:02:17]>> No, no, no. I was talking about uh Revolute and Stripe and Chime and Dave and SoFi and and you know, some of these companies, PayPal, they've done a great job in the past. There there are companies that are doing things in small business which are really interesting.

[00:02:32]you know, Capital One just bought one called Brex, you know, and there are hundreds of them and these are smart people trying to, you know, take a slice of your business or a bigger piece of your business and uh Citadel has done a great job in trading. And so when I look at these things, I'm saying let's let's but I tell my own people, open your eyes. Look what they did. We didn't do it. And some we could have and some we couldn't have for a whole bunch of different reasons. Stable coins might be among that list. I'm not that worried about stable coin and we already have the JP Morgan deposit coin. Like if you're a wholesale, if you're a company and I send you the Jade War stable coin, you know what you're going to say to me?

[00:03:05]Just give me my money. I'll put in what I want. And remember, you have to buy the stable coin and sell the stable coin. So the transaction cost on both sides. There's a lot of there is movement of money, risk, and stable coin. So it's not as simple as people think. I do think it'll be used for crossber payments, for small dollar payments, uh you know, for personto person type thing. But even person to person, if I send money to someone in the Philippines, I have requirements about who's sending it and who it's being sent to. And so you have to and you know if you want that money to be sent free because remember once that money is in a wallet overseas, it could be in anyone's wallet and it goes to a third wallet, a fourth wallet. So the first one may be legitimate, second one may be a sex trafficker. So you know this it's complicated and the government needs to do it thoughtfully. If they don't do it thoughtfully, it will be cause it'll be a huge problem.

[00:03:50]>> So are you happy with the way the clarity act is turning out?

[00:03:53]>> No. No, because it it it it allows them to effectively pay interest on deposits, stable coins or something like that without the protection that they should have. And it doesn't do anything for MLBSA. It has almost no legal protections. So, no, it's the banks will not accept it that way.

[00:04:09]>> They won't.

[00:04:10]>> And the ABA, the small banks, the credit unions, it's not just the big guys. I'm not worried about stable coin, but if it happened, I'm telling you, I would have nothing to do with it and it would eventually blow up on its own. Okay? But that's my personal thing. But I do understand the concern of all the other banks. So, >> well, the markup is coming. I mean, what are you going to do about it?

[00:04:27]>> It is. We'll fight it. If we lose, we lose and we'll live.

[00:04:30]>> Yeah. Okay.

[00:04:30]>> But it will be fought. This will not be No, no one's going to bow down to this guy. Okay. Or that company. And but he's the only one. And he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington in this thing.

[00:04:41]>> He said he's he's representing the whole >> He's full of >> Well, um we're going to watch that one.

[00:04:48]>> Yeah.

[00:04:48]>> Wow. Well, I mean, this is turning into a big fight between the whole, you know, each industry and and and you're talking about blockchain and and and getting blockchain out, but we do blockchain.

[00:04:57]>> You've been doing that for a long time.

[00:04:58]>> We have connections. We have J. We're going to do it. I think it's a legitimate technology. I think stable coin can be a legitimate payment system.

[00:05:06]>> Okay.

[00:05:06]>> Um, let me get your take on AI, Jamie.

[00:05:09]There's some fear out there about AI, and I know that you were in the meeting with Scott Bessent. Scott Basset, the Treasury Secretary is worried or or or I think is suggested that he's worried that um the banks uh are able to put the patches up before the bad bad actors can use AI against us and say, "Oh, how do you hack a person's bank account?" What are you doing in terms of putting the guardrails in place around AI and this agentic AI so that they don't have these agents um acting unpredictably?

[00:05:38]>> Yeah. So the first of all the big picture is technology is always changed the world and made it more productive.

[00:05:43]It's why we have so much productivity in this nation and I do think I will cause huge productivity and it'll cure cancers. It'll come up composite materials. It'll reduce deaths on roads.

[00:05:53]It it's it would be wonderful. But now you have that one issue about mitos came out and it it is so powerful. can see vulnerabilities in your own code, our own applications, open source, which is, you know, the hundreds of thousands third parties and it's a legitimate concern. I think they anthropic did the right thing to kind of give it to the government and give it to some of our companies to test it and find out what it is and how we can handle it. Now, you raised one of the big issues, the patching side, and you can't in the old days, you know, for open source, people now there's a flaw here, they it'd be public uh and you'd have a week or two to fix it. Now you're talking about you need ours because once the uh the adversary sees that they can reverse engineer and go directly into the vulnerability that was just identified.

[00:06:34]So we have to we have to build things like utilities. I think Scott Besson is running the whole part of this effort at least the financial services part. The banks all working together. We're talking hundreds of people are working around the clock to figure this out and what could be done. But I do think there's going to be a big part for the government role to play because it's not just our industry. It's water, it's utilities, it's telecom, you know, it's it's manufacturing because, you know, if you take down if you it's ransomware. We had $20 billion of ransomware last year, but I can see that number skyrocketing.

[00:07:03]So, we have to be very thoughtful how we do this and we have to help all the small companies. So, you know, a lot of smaller banks are like, you know, this is not fair. You guys are looking at it uh and we don't want it look like you're strong and we're weak. And I totally agree with them. So, we have to figure out how to help everybody in this and uh and as we expand it to expand it safely.

[00:07:19]If you give mthos to a company and they give it to a thousand people as opposed to a very select group of people, you are putting, you know, kind of very powerful weapons in the hand of maybe someone who wants to hurt your company like the insider threat type thing. So, we got to be very thoughtful. We've learned a lot in the process. There's still a lot to do. I I agree and I think that the White House and and Congress is working on this morning, noon, and night because we realize that now because of the anthropic breach that we saw. Um AI can actually work against humanity even though there are a lot of positives here.

[00:07:50]>> It's not working against humanity. So it could be used by bad guys to do a lot of bad things, you know, and like I said, it could be the individual guy. It could be one person has the has the fingertips a very powerful weapon that you know if they don't like a bank or an oil company refinery or a television company they can do huge damage and so we got to get smart. I think we're going to need like a mini Manhattan project in this one. I don't think this settles itself by by us just doing this kind of stuff.

[00:08:14]>> At the same time you've been using AI.

[00:08:15]Tell us about the use cases that you've used within JPM >> and we've used it since 20 first time we ever used it 2012. Wow. Yeah. Like people think it's new. It's not that you it was and of course it's gotten much more powerful since then but think of risk fraud under marketing prospecting note takingaking coming up with questions like this uh idea generation uh uh resolving errors you know building agents who can do things that people can't do and we can read 100,000 documents you know in seconds that unbelievable if you ask like how many contracts have this closing it uh it's just powerful stuff it'll make a lot of people more productive you know it uh uh people you can wake up in the morning could tell you what you need to do or what happened overnight that isn't in this thing and so you know it's going to do a lot of things and it's early >> I mean these and these new models are just far more powerful than the ones we had a year ago >> so do you think that that will replace jobs >> yeah look it's a big issue and I my view of this is it will create a lot of jobs it may replace jobs all technology has done that we had 40 million people working in farms and now we have a million and a half okay we're a far more productive society those people went to cities and specialized in something else. That's why we have productivity.

[00:09:28]So I think in the big run it's a plus.

[00:09:31]You know make America more productive, America wealthier, it may cause job loss for faster than it should. And you we need to plan for that a little bit. So my view is don't panic over it. Take take a deep breath and have a plan in place. So the government for example every local every community has community colleges and local unions trained people in the trades and but and every community has different needs.

[00:09:54]Every school should be teaching people skills they need. Actually today there are 8 million jobs open today that can't be filled because they don't have people can do them. So if we do that we'll have a system in place that can adjust much more quickly. Yeah, >> the system, you know, our system always adjusted, but it had a little more time.

[00:10:10]And so, uh, instead of panicking, let's let's take some actions that we that that no regret actions that cost no money that we should be doing anyway.

[00:10:16]That's that would be my view of it.

[00:10:18]>> Well, it's coming at us fast. There's no doubt about it. Jamie, I want to get your take on housing. You launched this American Dream Initiative um back in March and you're trying to help expand opportunity in terms of housing and getting Americans able to take out a mortgage. Tell us about that. Yeah. So this is another one that came out of like what can we do and it's also a deep recognition. There's part of our society that's not doing well. You know it's the think of the bottom 20% 30% of the income scales and you know they're the ones who have their jobs wages did not go up for 20 or 30 years. There's more crime in their neighbor neighborhoods more the schools are filling their kids and it's a recognition that you're not going to solve all of America's problems until we attack that. That by the way, you know, Democrats and Republicans know we still haven't fixed it with all this policies and all this money. We still haven't fixed it. It's almost the same that it was obviously lives are actually better, but it's almost the same was years ago. And so we just want to say, okay, the American dream is important to have a cohesive America people where people actually feel opportunity. And you read all the time that people say it's unfair. I don't have opportunity.

[00:11:17]So that's what that is. It's housing, it's small businesses, it's financial education, it's we call them vital institutions. So it's financing local schools, hospitals, uh roads, infrastructure, things like that. Um so and very important, it's the skill side.

[00:11:32]So we're going to double down. We did the same thing. Okay, we already do it.

[00:11:35]We're good at it, but let's let's double down. And so you mentioned small business where we went from we're going to go from financing seven for financing seven million. You serve seven million today >> 10 million and we'll get it done. You know, at least we're going to try. And so and we one of the largest affordable housing uh companies in the country.

[00:11:53]They're a couple of few bigger, but we're going to try to double that in 5 years. And you know, and and as we do that, do policy. A lot of what holds back. Housing is policy. It's, you know, it's bad local policy or state policy or sometimes federal policy that needs to be changed.

[00:12:07]>> Well, one of wasn't one of the big issues the fact that we didn't have enough supply of housing.

[00:12:11]>> Yes, that's policy. They can't get the land. They can't build a second floor.

[00:12:15]You can't build a second uh uh you can't build a single single family in that plot. you have to have two stairways when they only need one. I mean it I can go on and on. You know then the studies show that in California it cost 40% more to build affordable housing and you know in other state and some states have got it right. So there are lessons to be learned. I think we can reduce the cost of mortgages by 50 basis points by changing regulations around securization origination and servicing that were so excessive they increased the cost for no good reason and they didn't really reduce risk. So, I think we do that and not change the risk profile. And it would make afford mortgages much more affordable at the $150,000 range.

[00:12:56]>> And that's a big deal because those people want to buy a home is to start a home. And when they buy a home, where do they leave?

[00:13:02]>> They leave a rental.

[00:13:03]>> So, it actually creates more rental unit. So, it's deflationary in my opinion. And and I've been begging the government to change this for 10 or 15 years and we still haven't done it.

[00:13:11]>> Well, what I've learned is everything is about policy, right? I mean, look at the policy in New York right now and in California. You've got people leaving California because of this potential billionaire's tax. What do you want to say about Madani in New York?

[00:13:23]>> I think I think good the other good policy is free. I feel like telling the politicians don't don't try to raise more taxes or spend more money. Sit down and fix policy. And I think you can go 1% faster. I I literally believe that.

[00:13:34]And you and the public knows you can't get certific occupancy. You can't get roads built. The bridges the Baltimore bridge was supposed to be built by now is another five. I go on and on and on.

[00:13:46]>> You've been talking about this for so long.

[00:13:47]>> It's frustrating. It hurts. It's embarrassing. And it always hurts the the civilians of our country. And so, uh, so I had a great meeting with Madami, meaning it was pleasant. Uh, you know, but I said everything I wanted to say. You did >> about what America does, about what JP Morgan does, about my grandparents came here for the same reason his parents came here to be part of this country.

[00:14:06]They were Greek immigrants who never finished a little bit Italian by the way, who never finished high school. uh what we do for affordable housing for medical for wellness for that we that we bank schools cities states hospitals countries and we and yes we make mistakes and there were good part I went through cities have to compete which he had read my chairman's letter and I said the competition you know there's taxes there's there's individual taxes there's corporate taxes there's real estate taxes there are other hidden taxes and there then there's quality of life which has nothing to do with ideology it's like crime police sanitation hospitals And you know, I want him to succeed and and I said somewhere that I want him to succeed and we'll see what he does.

[00:14:47]>> What did he say? And and I my opinion was made he was very polite. It was very earnest. We had a very good conversation, but I said everything I wanted to say. And so then the press comes out right to headline. I wasn't avoiding anything. I mean, but it was that's what I should do is and he said what he wanted to say. And I got told about affordable housing and child care.

[00:15:04]Most people want it. If you do it badly, it will be a disaster. It the thing is do it right. There are studies that can tell you how to do it right. Get people who know what they're doing and implement uh uh proper policies and um uh so we'll look we'll see. And I look I've seen and I said this too. I've seen mayors grow into the job. I mean he's running a city with 300,000 employees now. He's never had a job like that.

[00:15:28]I've seen mayors who just they fail abysmally because they they can't administer themselves out of a paper bag or they or ideology blinds them to practical realistic real world policy.

[00:15:39]And so we'll see. And then, you know, if I can help him do the good stuff, I'd be happy to do that.

[00:15:43]>> Yeah. But Jamie, give me a break. He did a video in front of Ken Griffin's house.

[00:15:46]I mean, you know, that's a security issue.

[00:15:49]>> I agree that I my guess is he probably regrets that, but you got to ask him that.

[00:15:53]>> Yeah. Okay. Before we end, it's graduation season and you got today's graduates really worried. They see you, this incredibly successful person who came from nothing. Like you just said, your your grandparents came um from Greece into America and you hit it big and they don't know what is going to happen because of AI losing jobs. They don't know if they're going to have the opportunities. What's your advice to today's 2026 graduates?

[00:16:17]>> How are they going to get a job?

[00:16:18]>> I I think I I think they're going to do great. Okay. They critically inherit this planet that was built for them just like I inherited this stuff my parents did and my grandparents came in with nothing. So the the notion that we don't have this unbelievable country the our system morphs it will create jobs learn how to think learn how to earn respect have EQ learn how to communicate learn have a heart have empathy all that you'll have a great life >> well how did you learn and the >> how did you learn all of that >> well I know I I would go back to my parents and you know maybe heritage have a purpose in life like life liberty and the pursuit of happiness the pursuit of happiness was not happiness the way people talk about today it was purpose have a purpose in life that you pursue Sue like and for some you know for Thomas Jefferson it was farming for Alexander Hamilton it was banking and manufacturing you know and for others it's teaching for some it's being a reporter have a purpose in life treat everyone well like everyone who walks this planet like and don't you know fight the bullies if you can uh uh do the best you can make the world a better place that's it that's all I ever wanted to do and but I but I work I mean I've my parents you you work you earn you got I got to earn it every day >> work hard >> I tell people the notion that somehow I go and I can coast. I can't.

[00:17:30]>> No, you can't. That's right.

[00:17:31]>> And and here we are ahead of the 250th anniversary of America and it's almost uh what 230 plus years for JP Morgan.

[00:17:38]You were one of the first companies to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

[00:17:41]>> 227 years. Alexander Hamilton was one of the founders as was Aaron Burr. In fact, we have the pistols on. You should come to our floor to house all these flags.

[00:17:49]We have a flag from the USS Constitution. We have a flag a couple flags from Omaha Beach and one from the top of uh Puahawk. one of the twos in the top of Pontah Hawk June 6 1944 right after the Rangers took it >> and and it is we had a hundred veterans there last night and there a lot of tears in the room we have them from the Vietnam War Korea George Patton's penant uh uh Apollo missions and you will be very just walking around it's very touching people should understand this country that what it created for people whatever it flaws and we can always look at them and improve upon them but they better learn what it did because and if they don't like it let let them go visit in some of these other countries.

[00:18:26]They'll learn the hard way.

[00:18:28]>> Absolutely. Jamie, thank you for sitting down with us today.

[00:18:30]>> Thank you.

[00:18:31]>> Great to see you, Jamie Diamond. We'll be right back.