Morning Coffee: How to intimate you're ready to leave your $36m job at JPMorgan. Bewilderment strikes HSBC after restructuring
For very good reasons, most banks discourage people from talking about politics on the trading floor or in the office. Even more than sports, religion or Bitcoin, it’s an area where really destructive bad blood can be created in a very short space of time. Jamie Dimon knows this as well as anyone, having had to quickly apologize for making some ill-considered remarks about the Chinese Communist Party in his time. So it’s unsurprising that, despite his normal willingness to talk about issues of the day, he has a firm policy of never endorsing Presidential candidates.
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However, Jamie is a registered Democrat, and apparently in private conversation he has gently indicated that he might consider taking a post in a Kamala Harris administration, if there is one. That’s despite having had a phone call “like two dogs in a fight” with her when she was attorney-general of California negotiating a mortgage misselling settlement, and despite having made enough Trump-adjacent remarks earlier in the campaign to have had to put out a press release denying rumours that he was officially on Team MAGA.
Why would someone consider breaking the habit of a lifetime, even in private and to “three people who asked not to be identified discussing his politics because Mr. Dimon was speaking privately”? Well, maybe a feeling of patriotic duty. And also the small matter of accelerated vesting and extremely favourable capital gains tax if he was compelled to sell his mountain of JPMorgan stock in order to avoid conflicts of interest.
For someone in Dimon’s position, it must feel slightly tempting to consider making a clean break at the end of an incredibly successful career, rather than
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