More On The Finpol Realignment
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been communicating with Donald Trump in recent months through secret back channels, helping the president-elect hammer out a policy agenda before and since his decisive White House victory, The Post has learned.
The 68-year-old Wall Street titan — who, like 78-year-old Trump, grew up in Queens in New York City — has acted as “a sounding board” for the incoming commander-in-chief’s economic manifesto, four sources close to Trump’s transition team said.
But let's test what might be going on here. The Post refers to Dimon as "JPMorgan Chase CEO", but as we saw yesterday, Ferdinand Lundberg, who invented the term finpol, made the point that mere corporate officers, no matter how well-publicized, are just the hired help unless they hold an ownership stake in the same corporations. Is Jamie Dimon a finpol? According to Wikipedia,
James Dimon; born March 13, 1956) is an American businessman who has been the Chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of JPMorgan Chase since 2006.
Dimon began his career as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. After earning an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1982, he joined American Express, working there, under the mentorship of Sandy Weill, until 1985. The following year, at age of 30, Dimon was appointed chief financial officer (CFO) of Commercial Credit and later became the firm's president. He was chief operating officer (COO) of both the insurer Travelers and the brokerage firm Smith Barney from 1990 to 1998, when he became president of Citigroup. In 2000, he was appointed CEO of Bank One, overseeing its operations until merger with JPMorgan Chase in 2004. Dimon then became COO of JPMorgan Chase, assuming the role of CEO in 2006.
. . . He is one of three sons of Theodore and Themis (née Kalos) Dimon, who had Greek ancestry. His paternal grandfather was a Greek immigrant who had worked as a banker in Smyrna and Athens and later changed the family name from Papademetriou to Dimon. . . . Both his father and grandfather were stockbrokers at Shearson. Jamie attended the Browning School and majored in psychology and economics at Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude.
So he went to private secondary school, but he didn't go on to an Ivy, and he wasn't a WASP. This makes him prosperous middle clas, but by no means upper-class. But you can be none of these and still be a finpol -- look at Henry Ford, who didn't even attend high school. The key is whether you have ownership stake in your corporation. Back to Wikipedia,
Dimon is one of the few bank chief executives to have become a billionaire, largely because of his stake in JPMorgan Chase. He received a $23 million pay package for fiscal year 2011, more than any other bank CEO in the US. However, his compensation was reduced to $11.5 million in 2012 by JPMorgan Chase following a series of controversial trading losses that amounted to $6 billion. On January 24, 2014, it was announced that Dimon would receive $20 million for his work in 2013; a year of record profits and stock price under Dimon's reign, despite significant losses that year due to scandals and payments of fines. The award was a 74% raise, which included over $18 million in restricted stock.
For finpol purposes, the amount of his compensation is much less relevant than his ownership stake. According to The Motley Fool,
Dimon is the largest individual JPMorgan Chase shareholder, with about 7.84 million shares. Altogether, Dimon owns about 0.27% of the company's stock. Dimon earned $36 million in 2023, a 4% raise from the prior year. Dimon received a $1.5 million salary and a $5 million cash bonus. The remainder of his compensation was in company stock.
Considering that other JPMorgan Chase individual shareholders are company executives and board members who are allied with Dimon, even his 0.27% ownership stake amounts to working control. Thus he is an authentic finpol. As of November 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.6 billion, which is at the lower end of the finpol range. But what makes his membership in finpolity signficant? Back to Wikipedia:
From 1989 to 2009, Dimon donated primarily to the Democratic Party. In May 2012, he described himself as "barely a Democrat." After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, there was speculation that Dimon would become Secretary of the Treasury.
. . . Dimon has had close ties to some people in the Obama White House, including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dimon was one of three CEOs—along with Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit—said by the Associated Press to have had liberal access to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
. . . In December 2016, Dimon joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues. The forum dissolved after Trump's comments on the alt-right political violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. During Trump's presidency, Dimon supported his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, but condemned the Trump administration's immigration and trade policies.
This reflects finpolity's general ambivalence toward Trump's first term -- but now, despite his previous objections to Trump's immigration and trade policies, he appears to be supporting immigration and trade policies that are even more MAGA than they were then. According to the Post story,
Three of the sources close to Trump said the secret back channel focused on plans for cutting government spending, banking regulation, taxes and trade.
A company insider added that Trump’s top aides set up the calls, which continued after the election, to “create a bit of daylight” between the two men and stop details of the exchanges leaking.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition team declined to comment. A JPMorgan spokesman also declined to comment.
. . . On Nov. 22, The Post broke the news that Trump was also consulting with Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, a major Dem donor, on policy issues.
What makes this particularly significant is, as Lundberg has pointed out, finpolity has been generally aligned with the New Deal Democrat coalition and the Great Society. It has been tolerant of Nixon-Bush Republicanism, and it tolerated Reagan to the extent that Reagan allowed former CIA Director Bush pere to temper his conservative instincts and indeed to succeed him. But at some point late in the Biden years, things changed.There's a great deal we still have to learn.
