Jamie Dimon Dong-Slaps Inquisitive Analyst in Hilarious Exchange
You just can’t make this stuff up.
So JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is participating in an investor conference call. This is the semi-regular ritual where a financial executive throws out some already heavily-airbrushed numbers for a select group of financial analysts and then proceeds, over the course of an extended conference call, to further verbally airbrush the already-airbrushed company data. Some of the analysts in these calls mostly toss softballs at the bankers, but some of them have a reputation of throwing the occasional brushback pitch, injecting unwanted or uncomfortable questions into the otherwise well-protected narcissistic bubbles in which these CEOs mostly always live
Not that I know the guy, but Mike Mayo of Credit Agricole is supposedly one of those analysts that people in the industry dislike. “Kind of a dick,” is how one friend of mine described him – but in an admiring way, if that makes sense.
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So Mayo is on this call with Dimon and he asks him a question about capital ratios, i.e. the amount of actual capital a bank has on hand as opposed to debts and liabilities. He notes that the Swiss bank UBS (which just settled in the LIBOR case, but never mind that for the moment) is saying in presentations that because it has more actual capital on hand than certain other banks – like, say, Chase? – customers should feel safer with them.
Mayo then asks Dimon if he agrees with the notion that customers should feel safer with banks that have higher capital ratios:
MAYO: I think when I hear UBS saying in a presentation, if I’m an affluent customer, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable going to a big bank with a 13 percent capital ration than to a bank with a 10 percent capital ratio, do you agree with that, or disagree?
DIMON: So you would go to UBS and not JP Morgan Chase?
MAYO: I didn’t say that – that’s their argument.
DIMON: That’s why I’m richer than you.
More here…
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