At JPMorgan's investor day earlier this week, CEO Jamie Dimon voiced cautious optimism that the new cohort of regulators in the Trump Administration will address what he sees as over a decade of regulatory overreach and duplication, as reported by Banking Dive.
Since the global financial crisis, Dimon argued, regulators have instituted unwieldy and overlapping regulations, pushing credit, payments, and mortgage activity outside the banking system, and increasing systemic risk via regulatory arbitrage. CFO Jeremy Barnum echoed the concern, warning that overly complex regulation creates risk, rather than reducing it. With JPMorgan sitting on $60 billion in excess capital, frustration is mounting over rules the bank views as not just costly, but incoherent.
Dimon's barbs were characteristically blunt, calling some capital calculations "asinine" and urging a rollback of supervisory sprawl. Yet while the current political winds may favor deregulation, Dimon's broader case rests on an important claim — that a simpler, better-aligned regime could produce safer outcomes and lower costs for clients.
"I think we could make the system far safer, more fail-safe, give clients better options, lower mortgages, lower costs, etc," Dimon said. "We have had no real conversations with regulators for a decade over that. They should take a step back, think about what they did, why they did it, how the interface plays."
Notably, this argument is not an inherently partisan one. Eugene Ludwig, who served as the US Comptroller of the Currency from 1993 to 1998 under President Bill Clinton, has repeatedly called for "regulatory modernization" to simplify the US's complex and layered regime. However, he has stressed that such reform must be undertaken with the delicate touch of a scalpel, not a meat axe. And, indeed, he has argued that this is an area in which the industry should take the lead.
For more from Eugene Ludwig on this topic, don't miss our 2025 Compendium.
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