If you want to cut a Dimon, you must be precise.
So the brouhaha around JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon losing his chairman title is flawed to the core.
The political pitchforks are out for the only banker left standing after the 10-round steel-cage match known as the financial crisis.
There is no arguing Dimon’s performance, whether you like him or not. By almost all accounts he is the uncontested heavyweight champ of the world’s bankers.
And like most champs, he is not shy about what he thinks — even if that means calling out Washington.
He began a very public campaign to dial back the parts of new federal banking rules that hinder economic growth. Dimon even showed up and challenged Chairman Ben Bernanke at a Federal Reserve press conference about the possible excessiveness of the new regulations.
And who is trying to force a split in his role of chairman and CEO? Several of the country’s largest and most activist-charged pension plans.
These mostly unionized retirement-plan administrators with no experience in running a business of any size want to go where even Dodd-Frank intentionally didn’t go in mandating split titles.
So while it is quite obvious that it may score those pension-plan practitioners power points politically — in terms of connections and their future ambitions — forcing Dimon’s hand and potentially damaging their own investment in JPMorgan is not a brilliant idea.
To appreciate Dimon’s worth, remember the toxic financial bubble in highly leveraged real-estate lending in 2007 and 2008 that brought the global economy to its knees.
Throughout this unprecedented economic collapse, JPMorgan managed to stand tall while all the others tumbled beside it, because it didn’t stray from sound lending principles under Dimon’s iron-fisted leadership.
In 2008, when most banks were on life support, JPMorgan actually made $5.6 billion.
At that time, many bankers spent their weekends around a conference table at the New York Fed, trying to entice Dimon to extend the bank’s balance sheet to buy them.
In fact, JPMorgan was so sturdy in that storm that the Federal Reserve and Treasury worked with it to buy the failing Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual.
Yes, JPMorgan did suffer a blow when the London whale breached, and Dimon did lose a bit of credibility with his “tempest in teapot” statement. But JPM never lost a dime of client money. And the stock is up 20 percent over the last six months.
The most important thing to consider is how a company and its leaders have performed over history and under adversity. A Dimon-led bank has performed better than all the rest, period. Jamie may be a Dimon in the rough, but he’s as valuable to shareholders as the Hope Diamond.