Jamie Dimon, grappling with multibillion-dollar legal costs and rising capital requirements at JPMorgan Chase & Co., lashed out at U.S. regulators for putting his bank “under assault.”
“We have five or six regulators or people coming after us on every different issue,” Dimon, 58, said Wednesday on a call with reporters after New York-based JPMorgan reported fourth-quarter results. “It’s a hard thing to deal with.”
JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, posted a drop in fourth-quarter profit amid $990 million of legal expenses, about double what some analysts predicted. The legal costs, mostly tied to probes into currency rate-rigging, follow even bigger payments in 2013 related to mortgage bonds sold before the 2008 crisis by JPMorgan and two firms it acquired.
New Federal Reserve rules that exceed the global standard also could mean JPMorgan needs more than $20 billion in additional capital by 2019.
“The regulators clearly want even more capital,” Dimon said. “We’ll meet those requirements. But those measures aren’t a measure of risk at all. It is simply a measure of size. This company is as sound as it gets.”
Dimon, who was lauded during the crisis for JPMorgan’s role in buying Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc.’s bank units, has criticized the government for penalizing JPMorgan for those firms’ actions.
