JPMorgan Chase opened a new 60-story corporate headquarters last year in Manhattan. Two weeks later, New York elected socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor. It’s no coincidence that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is now warning that “no city — or company or country — has a divine right to success.”
In his annual note to shareholders, published this week, Dimon noted New York has considerable advantages, including a talented workforce, but “it also has the highest city and state corporate taxes and the highest individual income and state taxes.”
JPMorgan has already shrunk its headcount in the Big Apple from 30,000 to 24,000 over the past decade. Meantime, its workforce in Texas grew from 26,000 to 32,000.
Dimon’s warning carries extra weight because it’s not a product of partisanship or small-mindedness. He has gotten along well with prominent Democrats and earned a reputation for independence during two decades at the helm of the House of Morgan.
The anti-capitalist left takes America’s economic resilience for granted, and people like Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) try to portray anyone who opposes their agenda as selfish or unpatriotic.
“People often make this a moral or loyalty issue, but it is not,” Dimon wrote. “Companies need to remain competitive in this very tough, fast-moving world. And higher taxes mean lower returns on capital and less competitiveness by their nature.”
The 70-year-old, who grew up in Queens, recalls that his hometown has faced tough times before because of poor governance. “In the 1970s, nearly half of the 125 Fortune 500 companies based in New York City left,” Dimon recalled. He said it’s inevitable that companies are going to respond to the rising price of doing business. He added that “individuals vote with their feet” as well.
“In the Sturm und Drang of today’s politics, you mostly hear about simplistic solutions like raising taxes, taxing the rich and cutting expenses,” Dimon explained, “but as any businessperson knows, you should always be asking, ‘How are you doing with what you have?’”
The CEO’s letter notes that, on average, America’s gross domestic product grew about 2 percent annually over the past two decades. Dimon believes the U.S. could easily have achieved 3 percent growth if government hadn’t erected so many roadblocks. “That 1% difference would have had an enormous impact, providing Americans with an extra $20,000 GDP per person annually,” Dimon wrote.
Growth can solve a lot of society’s problems. Even in New York.
The post Jamie Dimon’s New York warning appeared first on Washington Post.
