James "Jamie" Dimon (born March 13, 1956) is an American business executive. He is the current chairman, president and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, one of the Big Four banks of the United States, and has served as a Class A director of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve since January 2007. Dimon was named to Time magazine's 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2011 lists of the world's 100 most influential people. He was also named to Institutional Investor's Best CEOs list in the All-America Executive Team Survey from 2008 through 2011. He was named the CEO of the Year in 2011.
 

He received a $23 million pay package for fiscal year 2011, more than any other bank CEO in the United States.
 

Early life
 

Dimon was born in New York City to Theodore and Themis Dimon. He is of Greek descent and attended Browning School. He has an older brother, Peter, and a fraternal twin brother, Ted. Dimon's father and grandfather were both stockbrokers at Shearson.
 

He majored in psychology and economics at Tufts University. During one summer's break from Tufts, he worked at Shearson. After graduating, he worked in management consulting for two years before enrolling in the Harvard Business School along with classmates Jeffrey Immelt, Steve Burke and Seth Klarman. During the summer's break at Harvard, he worked at Goldman Sachs. He graduated in 1982, earning a Master of Business Administration degree as a Baker Scholar. After graduation, Sandy Weill convinced him to turn down offers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers to join him as an assistant at American Express. Although Weill could not offer the same amount of money as the investment banks, Weill promised Dimon that he would have "fun". Dimon's father, Theodore Dimon, was an executive vice president at American Express. The younger Dimon came to Weill's attention when Theodore passed along an essay that Jamie had written.
 

Career
 

In a power struggle, Weill left American Express in 1985 and Dimon followed him. The two then took over Commercial Credit, a consumer finance company, from Control Data. Dimon served as the chief financial officer, helping to turn the company around. Through a series of unprecedented mergers and acquisitions, in 1998 Dimon and Weill were able to form the largest financial services conglomerate the world had ever seen, Citigroup. Dimon left Citigroup in November 1998, after being fired by Weill during a weekend executive retreat. It was rumored at the time that he and Weill argued in 1997 over Dimon's not promoting Weill's daughter, Jessica M. Bibliowicz, although that happened over a year before Dimon's departure. Many other accounts cite other, more substantive, issues as the real reasons. In his 2005 University of Chicago Graduate School of Business Fireside Chat and 2006 Kellogg School of Management interviews, Dimon confirmed that Weill fired him.
 

In March 2000, Dimon became CEO of Bank One, the nation's fifth largest bank. When JPMorgan Chase purchased Bank One in July 2004, Dimon became president and chief operating officer of the combined company.
 

On December 31, 2005, he was named chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase and one year later, on December 31, 2006, he was named chairman of the board.
 

In March 2008 he was a board member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and CEO of JPMorgan and made decisions in connection with the $55 billion loan to J.P. Morgan to bail out Bear Stearns.
 

Under Dimon's leadership, with the acquisitions during his tenure, JPMorgan Chase has become the leading U.S. bank in domestic assets under management, market capitalization value, and publicly traded stock value. JPMorgan Chase is also the No. 1 credit card provider in the U.S.
 

In 2009, Dimon was considered one of "The TopGun CEOs" by Brendan Wood International, an advisory agency.
 

On September 26, 2011, Dimon was involved in a high-profile heated exchange with Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada, in which Dimon said provisions of the Basel III international financial regulations discriminate against U.S. banks and are "anti-American".
 

On May 10, 2012, JPMorgan Chase initiated an emergency conference call to report a loss of at least $2 billion in trades that Dimon said were "designed to hedge the bank's overall credit risks". The strategy was, in Dimon's words, "flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored". The episode is being investigated by the Federal Reserve, the SEC, and the FBI.
 

After JPMorgan's $2 billion loss, Paul Krugman criticized Dimon as the point man in Wall Street's fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in "proprietary trading", basically speculating with depositors' money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything's under control. Apparently not.

 

The key point, wrote Krugman, "is not that the bet went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees".
 

Dimon commented on the Volcker Rule in Jan'2012, "Part of the Volcker Rule I agreed with, which is no prop trading. But market making is an essential function. And the public should recognize that we have the widest, the deepest, the most transparent capital markets in the world. And part of that is because we have enormous market making. If the rules were written as they originally came out; I suspect they'll be changed, it would really make it hard to be a market maker in the United States.” 
 

Federal TARP Funds
 

As head of JPMorgan Chase, Dimon oversaw the transfer of $25 billion in funds from the U.S. Treasury Department to the bank on October 28, 2008, under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This was the fifth largest amount transferred under Section A of TARP to help troubled assets related to residential mortgages. It has been widely reported [27] that JPMorgan Chase was in much better financial shape than other banks and did not need TARP funds but accepted the funds because the government did not want to single out only the banks with capital issues.
 

JPMorgan Chase advertised in February 2009 that it would be using its capital-base monetary strength to acquire new businesses.
 

By February 2009, the U.S. government had not moved forward in enforcing TARP's intent of funding JPMorgan Chase with $25 billion.[25] In the face of the government's lack of action, Dimon was quoted during the week of February 1, 2009, as saying,
 

JPMorgan would be fine if we stopped talking about the damn nationalization of banks. We've got plenty of capital. To policymakers, I say where were they? ... They approved all these banks. Now they're beating up on everyone, saying look at all these mistakes, and we're going to come and fix it.
 

JPMorgan Chase was arguably the healthiest of the nine largest U.S. banks and did not need to take TARP funds. In order to encourage smaller banks with troubled assets to accept this money, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson allegedly coerced the CEOs of the nine largest banks to accept TARP money under short notice. JPMorgan Chase was also the first of the largest banks to repay the TARP money.[citation needed]
 

Relations with the Obama Administration
 

Dimon is a Democrat and worked in Barack Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago.
 

After Obama won the 2008 presidential election, there was speculation that Dimon would serve in the Obama Administration as Secretary of the Treasury. Obama eventually named the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy Geithner, to the position.
 

Following the acquisition of Washington Mutual by JPMorgan Chase, Obama commented on Dimon's handling of the real-estate crash, credit crisis, and the banking collapse affecting corporations nationwide, including major financial institutions like Bank of America, Citibank, and Wachovia:
 

You know, keep in mind, though there are a lot of banks that are actually pretty well managed, JPMorgan being a good example, Jamie Dimon, the CEO there, I don't think should be punished for doing a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio.
 

Dimon is influential in the Obama White House with close ties to some there, including former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dimon is one of three CEOs—along with Lloyd Blankfein and Vikram Pandit—said by the Associated Press to have liberal access to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Nonetheless, Dimon has often publicly disagreed with some of Obama's policies.
 

On the May 15, 2012, episode of ABC's The View, Obama responded to a question from Whoopi Goldberg regarding JPMorgan Chase's recently publicized $2 billion trading losses by defending Dimon against allegations of irresponsibility, saying, "first of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we've got", but added, "it's going to be investigated."