By Tatiana Bautzer and Nupur Anand
NEW YORK (Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon criticized several major U.S. regulatory initiatives on capital rules, card payments and open banking at a conference on Monday.
The outspoken 68-year-old executive, who heads the largest U.S. lender, criticized what he called overlapping or poorly thought-out regulations.
“It’s time to fight back,” Dimon said. Many banks are afraid to “fight with their regulators because they’ll just come and punish you more,” Dimon said. “People at the Fed have told me, because of what you’ve said and what you’ve written about, you know they’re after you.”
The Federal Reserve declined to comment.
“We sue our regulators again and again because things are becoming unfair and unjust, and they are hurting businesses. Many of these rules hurt lower-paid individuals,” he said.
As banks await new proposals under what is known as the Basel III endgame, “the devil is in the details,” Dimon said.
He referred to a July 2023 proposal by US regulators to align their standards with those of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to help the sector better absorb economic shocks.
Michael Barr, the head of Fed regulators, last month outlined a plan to increase capital at major banks by 9%, easing an earlier proposal to increase capital by 19%. It was a major concession to the Wall Street banks who had lobbied to water down the draft.
Despite the industry’s apparent victory, the plan was still shrouded in uncertainty, key details were unclear, and the November 5 US presidential election cast doubt on whether it would survive a new administration.
It will be difficult to get anything done if the proposals don’t emerge before the election, Dimon said.
The “stupid calculations” in the Basel framework included the capital surcharge for global systemically important banks and operational risk models, he said.
“The biggest problem I have with all these overlapping rules is that we don’t take a step back and say, what can we do better to make the system work better,” he added.
(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Nupur Anand in New York; additional reporting by Pete Schroeder; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Lananh Nguyen and Richard Chang)