Jamie Dimon Quotes

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

The efficiency, credibility, and liquidity of the financial markets have been foundational to the largest economy in the world.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company's equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.

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.

Who would you trust right now? Which bank would you trust? Which investment would you trust? Do you really want to put your money; do you want to suffer more of these losses that we just had? You know, these volatility that we see is just unexplainable by any rational standards. Nobody has any clue about how to explain this, and nobody wants to experience that. So, we hold more money back, we don't necessarily want to invest in the market and by default, people are saving more.

Be careful when you take on debt. If you take on debt personally, make sure it is small. If you take on large debt, make sure someone else is paying for it.

When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

When I hear complaints about less liquidity, remember there is such a thing as too much liquidity.

Bonds despite their ridiculous yields will not easily be threatened with a new bear market.

I never try to predict the market.

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them.

Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.

I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President.

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.

Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the [financial] industry came a rise in all kinds [of debt], both public and private.

One of the most important causes of economic crises is “running liabilities”, or short term debt that the government does not insure. The U. S. financial sector holds trillions of dollars of such debt, including uninsured bank deposits and the short-term liabilities of other financial institutions, such as overnight loans…. Amongst the potential causes of the next crisis, the massive amount of short-term debt ranks as the most probable.

Aggression at a time when the economy was growing at substantial rates and the retail lending as an industry was growing at a substantial rate was an appropriate aggression. Caution at a time when the economic environment is so uncertain is an appropriate caution.

We don't understand the equity market well, and so we deploy funds in fixed-income securities, and like any other securities, investment in those securities also need to follow the mark-to-market accounting principle.

The lesson of 2008 is that ultimately our markets are driven by confidence.

It's not that we can predict bubbles - if we could, we would be rich. But we can certainly have a bubble warning system.

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

If you don't have ample liquidity, and it's not durable, in times of stress, as you're looking for liquidity, you're forced to sell assets at declining prices, which then eats into your capital position, so it becomes this very, very negative cycle. There's no question that liquidity is sacrosanct.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

Liquidity problems can occur in central clearing, even if all counterparties have the financial resources to meet their obligations, if they are unable to convert those resources into cash quickly enough.