JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon issued a thinly veiled warning to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday, saying crushing taxes and red tape are already sparking a “large exodus” of businesses out of the Big Apple.
In his annual letter to shareholders, the 70-year-old Queens native stressed the Big Apple faces stiff competition from other financial centers both in the US and abroad, suggesting that the hard-left Hizzoner’s tax-and-spend policies would do nothing to help swell City Hall’s coffers.
“Cities — like individuals, companies, and countries — need to compete,” Dimon wrote, “No matter who you are, you need to deal with reality and the truth.
“The truth is that while New York City has much going for it, particularly for financial companies (because of extraordinary local talent), it also has the highest city and state corporate taxes and the highest individual income and state taxes,” the Wall Street veteran continued.
“People often make this a moral or loyalty issue, but it is not,” he added, stopping short of mentioning Mamdani by name.
After winning office last year on campaign promises to “tax the rich,” the democratic socialist mayor has been pushing a menu of tax hikes— including increasing New York’s corporate rate from 7.25% to 11.5% and slapping a 2% personal income tax increase on anyone raking in more than $1 million a year.
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul would have to approve any fiscal blueprint proposed by Mamdani, who says hikes are necessary to plug a black hole in the Big Apple’s finances. NYC’s bean counter-in-chief, Comptroller Mark Levine, has predicted that could be as much as $12 billion within the next two years.
The Post has sought comment from City Hall and Hochul’s office.
“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,” Dimon wrote.
The Wall Street veteran pointed to a clear pattern: wealthy New Yorkers and major companies are already voting with their feet.
“You can already see a fairly large exodus of people and jobs out of some states with high taxes and high expenses,” he stated.
Dimon’s letter echoed recent comments from Steve Fulop, CEO of the Partnership for the City of New York.
He pointed to companies including Marc Rowan-led Apollo Global Management , which is reportedly scouting locations in Texas and Florida for a second US headquarters.
“Apollo’s move is not an isolated case,” Fulop said Sunday on 77 WABC Radio’s “Cats Roundtable.”. “It reflects a broader trend tied directly to competitiveness and business leaders feel that some elected officials are tone deaf to the broader economic environment and have no realistic long term plan to fix the affordability crisis beyond raising costs which will only further the challenges.”
JPMorgan’s gigantic new headquarters opened on Park Avenue just last year, but Dimon warned he, too, could move more jobs out of New York unless there is a shift in policy.
“While New York City is still our company’s global headquarters, we have shrunk our headcount in the city, from 30,000 a decade ago to 24,000 today, and increased our headcount in Texas, from 26,000 in 2015 to 32,000 today. This trend will likely continue,” the exec wrote.
He added that the shift can sometimes spell “a disaster for a city” — just as it did in the 1970s, when nearly half of the 125 Fortune 500 companies based in New York fled due to soaring taxes, office rents, and labor costs.
The top money man’s annual letter to shareholders has become a tradition since he became chief executive.
In recent years, the missive has moved beyond focusing on JPMorgan’s performance to sharing Dimon’s thoughts on politics, foreign policy, and even military spending.
Dimon said the US-Israeli war on Iran means there is “the potential for significant ongoing oil and commodity price shocks, along with the reshaping of global supply chains, which may lead to stickier inflation and ultimately higher interest rates than markets currently expect.”
But he indicated that he was broadly supportive of the Trump administration’s decision to take out Tehran’s leadership and stop the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
“We should not turn a blind eye to the role the current regime in Iran has played in fostering terrorism and killing thousands of people, including Americans and many of its own citizens, over many years,” he wrote. “That threat must be addressed in an appropriate manner.”
Two key topics went unmentioned in this year’s letter that have been the focus of clashes between America’s top banker and the commander-in-chief.
One was a recent lawsuit brought by President Trump against JPMorgan and Dimon for closing his bank accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
The other was a Justice Department probe into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the central bank’s $2.5 billion renovations of its Washington, DC, headquarters.
GOP lawmakers and White House insiders accused Powell of lying to Congress about the work during testimony last summer, prompting US Attorney Jeanine Pirro to step in and order the probe.
But Dimon, speaking during a media call to unveil the bank’s fourth-quarter results in January, defended Powell, saying “anything that chips away” at the central bank’s independence “is not a good idea.”
The bank is set to release its latest numbers for the first three months of 2026 on April 14, according to a statement posted on its investor relations website.
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