Jamie Dimon Quotes

It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.

It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital.

Compelling large banks to hold more capital reduces their risk of failure, but as the last financial crisis [the Meltdown of 2008] demonstrated, during a wide-spread panic, investors and lenders lose all faith in the values banks have assigned to their assets, and many mistrust the banks that claim to have enough capital.

Complexity and interconnectedness matter as much as size in assessing risk in banking.

The financial crisis revealed important weaknesses in many areas of our financial system.

Separating out banks and investment banks right now under Glass-Steagall would have very big implications to the liquidity and the capital markets and banks being able to perform necessary lending.

The financial crisis was linked to the fact that banks had excessive leverage and too many risky assets. The solution is not to try to dictate to banks what they can do or not do, but to require them to strengthen their capital to absorb potential losses and hold less risky assets.

Loss-absorbing capacity among banks is substantially higher as a result of both regulatory requirements and stress testing exercises.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

Among other objectives, liquidity guidelines must take into account the risks that inadequate liquidity planning by major financial firms pose for the broader financial system, and they must ensure that these firms do not become excessively reliant on liquidity support from the central bank.

The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.

In September 2008, the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete. We ended up where banks couldn't liquidate their risk, and the system tended to freeze up.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.

I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

Securitization was one of the most brilliant financial innovations of the 20th century. It freed up a lot of capital. If it had been done responsibly, it would have been a wondrous thing because nothing is more stable, there’s nothing safer, than the American mortgage market.... It worked for years. But then people realized they could scam it.

Banks are employing risky derivatives strategies to goose up returns….the interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full blown financial crisis.

We are optimistic with respect to thrifts .... I don't think that there is any cause for undue concern and I would reject any suggestion that we are in the midst of some sort of a major systemic problem with respect to any element of our financial services industry.

Since 1840 the United States has had 12 systemic banking crises and Canada has had none …. It all has to do with politics.

The failure of one regional bank, assuming it is following a traditional model, will not threaten the entire system.

We have put in place policies through supervision and regulation that has greatly enhanced the safety and soundness of the banking system.