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Jamie Dimon

Jamie Dimon ... CEO of JPMorganChase ... Jamie Dimon Opens Up About His Cancer Battle: “You Wonder: How Could It Possibly Be Me?”

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Jamie Dimon Opens Up About His Cancer Battle: “You Wonder: How Could It Possibly Be Me?”

Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo, Merrill Lynch’s Stan O'Neal, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, Merrill’s John Thain, Bear Stearns’s Jimmy Cayne, and Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld. Photo Illustrations by Sean McCabe; By Jeremy Bales/Bloomberg/Getty Images (Lewis), by Diane Bondareff/Polaris (O'Neal), Michael Brown/Getty Images (Building), by Andrew Harper/Bloomberg/Getty Images (Cayne), by Eric Thayer/Reuters/Landov (Thain), © Shawn Thew/EPA/Corbis (Fuld), by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI/Landov (Mozilo).

Most of the C.E.O.’s who led Wall Street to the brink of collapse got huge payouts as their firms went under, while some rode out the maelstrom. In Vanity Fair’s April Issue, William D. Cohan catches up and looks back with some key players, 7 years later. In this excerpt from the full article, he speaks to JPMorgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon about the days and years following the 2008 crisis.

Jamie Dimon, the 58-year-old chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, remembers well the various pieces of the crisis that seemed to climax with the collapses of Lehman Brothers, A.I.G., Wachovia, and Citigroup, then nearly of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. “There were some breathless moments, like ‘Oh my God, the whole American system is in trouble,’ ” he says in his office high above Park Avenue. “It is important to remember industrial production was dropping 10 percent. People were talking about major layoffs. The market was down.” He believed the government should do everything in its power to stop the hemorrhaging. “I also didn't think that they had an easy answer,” he continues, “but I remember saying to Hank [Paulson] and Tim [Geithner] several times, ‘Just come out punching. Try one thing. Try another thing. It eventually will work because eventually you will win.’ The Federal Reserve is that powerful. They could buy every asset in the world if they had to. They were very courageous and their actions stemmed the tide.”

He says that the critics of TARP and other bailout schemes that benefited Wall Street proclaim “a million different ways it could have been better” and that even Geithner complains about “collateral beneficiaries” of the bailouts—“the people who were saved that shouldn't have been saved or made money that shouldn't have made money”—but Dimon believes these critics fail to see the bigger picture. The decision to rescue A.I.G. and other companies “helped save the system,” he says, and he is unapologetic about how important it was for collateral payments to be made to A.I.G.'s counter-parties, such as Goldman, which got $12.9 billion, and Société Générale, the big French bank, which got $11.9 billion of taxpayer money. Unfortunately, he notes, this gave critics all the ammunition they needed to vilify Wall Street and its bankers: “In hindsight—again, this is pure hindsight, not criticism—once we did TARP, big banks were damaged for 20 years, whether or not you needed it. The refrain became ‘The banks were bailed out.’ ‘The bastards were bailed out’ and ‘They caused the problem and they paid themselves a lot of money.’ As American citizens, if you believe all banks were bailed out, you would hate banks. I would, too.”

He doesn't believe that just the banks were bailed out; he believes the American way of life was preserved, whether it was General Motors, or money-market funds, or commercial paper, or increasing depositor's insurance to $250,000. “Damaging the whole bank system that way also damaged the country,” he says. “It damaged a belief in the system. In hindsight, if you look back, what really saved the system wasn't TARP and it wasn't the stress test. What really saved the system was the wall of liquidity that the Fed put up…. Businesses had liquidity and the market started to come back and the confidence returned.”

In retrospect, Dimon says, a better way to rescue the system may have been to dismantle the banks that screwed things up. “If management ruined their companies, their boards should have been fired, management should have been fired,” he continues. “I support the clawbacks. I think that’s perfectly fine. The American public would have received some sense of justice being done.” He thinks there should have been some differentiation between well-run banks and poorly run banks: “If you said to me, how do I feel about some of these C.E.O.’s who walked away with $50, $100, $150 million and their company blew up? Terrible. It's outrageous. I agree with them. Everyone says that's bad. If this company went bankrupt, we should all give back the money we earned in the last five years or more. You wouldn't have to ask me.”

Instead, what happened, Dimon says, is that every banker got tarred with the same broad brush. “What happened with TARP is it just became every banker’s scarlet letter,” he says. The damage the financial crisis did to the banks’ reputations will take a generation to repair. “That is the way it’s going to be probably in my working lifetime,” he says. “What happened was too damaging. The general population is too mad.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Dimon makes clear he would not have rescued Bear Stearns if he had it to do over again. “In a new world we wouldn't buy Bear,” he says. “There was just too much litigation afterwards, and we were held responsible for their historic mistakes.” He’s right about that. Since June 2011, using its shareholders’ money, JPMorgan Chase has paid more than $35.2 billion in fines and penalties related to various scandals, frauds, and mistakes that came to light because of the financial crisis, including a mammoth $13 billion fine paid in November 2013 to the federal government and several states related to the pre-crisis underwriting of mortgage-backed securities at both Bear Stearns and JPMorgan itself.

In the wake of that settlement—record-breaking at the time—the JPMorgan board gave Dimon a raise to $20 million from $11.5 million. In 2014, the bank earned $21.8 billion in profit—its most ever—and the board maintained Dimon's total compensation of $20 million. His 8.1 million JPMorgan Chase shares are worth around $480 million these days.

Dimon's world was turned upside down last June as he was embarking on a three-week trip to Asia and noticed a swollen gland on the right side of his face, under his jawbone. He couldn't see it, but he felt it there when he was shaving. “Just a little bump,” he recalls. He went on the trip anyway, figuring it would go away. “It felt normal to me,” he says. When he got back home he went to see his doctor. “To him it felt a little hard,” Dimon continues. “To me, it felt like a normal puffy lymph gland. So, between the hardness, it being on one side, and my age, he said, ‘You need to get a PET scan right away and be braced for bad news.’ ”

Understandably, he was afraid: “You go for the PET scan, the guy says, ‘Well, most people that come in here for this have cancer.’ ” He had the scan. Then the doctors took a biopsy. “They confirmed it was cancer,” he says.

A day after he was diagnosed, Dimon called Lee Raymond, the former C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil and the lead director on the JPMorgan Chase board. Raymond was supportive, as were his fellow board members. “Don’t worry about the company,” they told him. “Don't worry about us. Focus on yourself and family.”

Dimon appreciated that because, he says, he knew he was in a battle. He scheduled his radiation treatments for seven o'clock in the morning, when few other patients were there. They fitted a mask to his face and bolted him down to the table to make sure he would not move, and then with laserlike precision the machines administered the treatment. He also had six full days of chemotherapy. He lost 35 pounds. His body was burning some 4,000 calories a day because of the treatment. “It was hard to eat,” he says. “Your throat hurts. You have no appetite. Everything tastes just absolutely terrible. So you literally just search for the foods that you can get down.” Into this group fell oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and milk shakes.

He could not help but think of his own mortality. “You wonder: how could it possibly be me?,” he says. “Well, of course it could happen to you. You have it. Then, of course, you wake up every morning and you hope it's a bad dream. Then you wake up. I have cancer. I have to go to treatment again. Then I have to wait three months to find out if it worked. Even then you're bracing for ‘Well, we have a problem. It spread.’ You think, I may die. What are you going to miss?”

In early December, Dimon got the good news that he is cancer-free. His doctors won't declare him completely cured until three years have passed and there is no evidence of the disease. He has regained some of the weight he lost but still looks thinner than before. He occasionally gets tired and takes quick naps, but he has begun exercising again. “Not quite like I used to,” he says. “I don’t have my full appetite and taste back yet, but I feel good. It’s nice to be healthy and back at work.”

He is not yet sure how the bout with cancer has changed him. He believes the way he can still make the most difference for the world is at JPMorgan. “I really mean that,” he says. He talks about jobs that can be created through providing capital to companies. He talks about how the firm has hired 8,000 military veterans and is investing in Detroit. He feels great about these things. “So that’s what I can do,” he says. “That’s my contribution—running a sound, healthy company that serves millions of customers well and employs hundreds of thousands of people. What else am I going to do? I’m not an artist. I’m not a writer. I'm not a musician. I’d love to be a tennis player or musician. I'm not.”

Maybe when he retires he will consider philanthropy. But, with his health much improved, he makes it clear that he has no plans to leave his company anytime soon. “I think our company has done well in very challenging times,” he says. “I love my job and this company, so if it were up to me it would be about five years or so, but that's up to the company’s board to decide.”