There’s been a lot of talk recently about when Jamie Dimon will retire. Will it be two years, three or five?
The truth is, no one really knows – not even Dimon himself, people close to him tell On The Money.
The fact that banking’s best CEO is aping the indecisiveness of Hamlet on the retirement question is nothing new for the people at JPMorgan Chase. He’s 69 and he has been at the top of the nation’s biggest and most prosperous bank since 2006, so he has to leave sometime, maybe soon.
Or maybe not, Dimon privately concedes, my sources say.
Yes, the case for Dimon to leave sooner rather than later is pretty strong, and it’s something these people say he grapples with constantly. He would be going out on top, of course. JPM is on track to earn $1 billion-plus a week given first 2025 quarter results, which were in line with its 2024 performance where the bank earned $58 billion.
It’s a fitting end to a long career of success following Dimon’s firing from Citigroup at the hands of his one-time mentor, Sandy Weill. Citi’s loss was JPMorgan’s gain. Without Dimon’s deft management, Citigroup would eventually fall victim to the excesses of the mortgage-bond market, needing multiple government bailouts to survive the 2008 financial crisis and its aftershocks.
Dimon had by then resurrected his career at JPMorgan. He managed to avoid the mania and assembled what he proudly calls a “fortress balance” sheet that was able to absorb the worst of the crisis. JPMorgan was so strong at the time that the government leaned on it to scoop up troubled lenders to keep the banking system from collapsing.
There have been a few missteps along the way (the London Whale trading fiasco and some regulatory infractions). But Dimon’s steady hand — even through personal health issues (he’s survived cancer and heart surgery) — has made JPM the gold standard in banking worldwide.
Yet, the case that he should step away later rather than sooner is equally strong, and it’s one Dimon also acknowledges. His health is good, and Dimon’s vast knowledge of banking is unsurpassed. He simply knows how to run a complex organization, a bank with multitudes of business lines and he’s immersed in the business better than anyone else.
“I’ve never seen him so focused,” is how one JPM banking source described a recent meeting with Dimon.
Dimon has danced around the retirement issue in public, underscoring his inner Hamlet. He has suggested that he has around four years to go as CEO, but then he has backed off of that, saying it might be sooner or maybe later, depending on what his board of directors says.
He says he has successors in place, the frontrunner being Marianne Lake, JPM’s head of consumer banking, and that the bank will eventually need a new leader.
But he also says he’s flexible on timing, and will likely be chairman even after he gives up the CEO title. According to one source at the bank: “The board doesn’t want him to retire.”
As they say in the newsroom, the Dimon-retirement story is “developing.”
