저자: 미상 · 외국인
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이 영상은 투자 전망 영상이 아니라 JP모건 체이스 CEO 제이미 다이먼의 생애를 다룬 다큐멘터리입니다. 2008년 금융위기 당시 리먼브라더스 파산, 메릴린치 매각, 워싱턴뮤추얼 압수 등 월가 붕괴 상황을 배경으로 제시합니다. 다이먼의 어린 시절과 학력(브라운·터프츠·하버드 경영대학원)을 소개합니다. 샌디 웨일 밑에서 일하며 커머셜크레딧 인수 등으로 경력을 쌓은 과정을 설명합니다. 1998년 웨일이 시티그룹에서 다이먼을 해고한 사건과 그 후 공백기를 다룹니다. 2000년 뱅크원 CEO 취임 후 구조조정, 2004년 JP모건 체이스 합병 과정을 소개합니다. 2008년 베어스턴스·워싱턴뮤추얼 인수 등 위기 중 확장 전략을 다룹니다. 이후 법적 분쟁(런던 고래 사건 등)과 2014년 후두암 투병 및 완치를 언급합니다. 영상 전체에 특정 종목·자산에 대한 향후 1~3개월 가격 방향 예측이나 매수·매도 권유는 등장하지 않습니다.
다듬은 글
In the autumn of 2008, the American financial system was coming apart. One by one, the institutions that had defined Wall Street for generations were failing, being seized by the government or disappearing into emergency mergers arranged over frantic weekend phone calls. Lehman Brothers, 158 years old, filed for the largest bankruptcy in American history.
Meil Lynch, the firm that had once called itself the Thundering Herd, sold itself in a single panicked weekend to Bank of America. Washington Mutual, the largest savings institution in the United States, was seized by federal regulators and sold in the middle of a Thursday night. Croup, once the largest bank in the world, required a government bailout that would eventually total $45 billion in direct capital and guarantees on over $300 billion in troubled assets to prevent its complete collapse.
The United States government was nationalizing institutions that the free market had built over decades because the alternative was too catastrophic to contemplate. In the middle of this destruction, one man sat at the center of the only major American bank that was not only surviving the crisis, but actively expanding through it, acquiring the casualties of other institutions recklessness at prices that would have seemed unimaginable 2 years earlier.
His name was Jamie Diamond. He was the chief executive of JP Morgan Chase. And while the rest of Wall Street burned, his bank was buying the wreckage. This is the story of how he got there. It is a story about ambition, about loyalty, about betrayal, about the discipline to prepare for disasters that everyone else has convinced themselves cannot happen, and about what happens when the most competitive person in the most competitive industry in the world is finally given the platform his abilities deserve.
Jaime Diamond was born on the 13th of March 1956 in New York City. The second of three sons born to Theodore Diamond and Theis Callos. The Diamond family had been in the financial business for two generations before Jaime arrived. His grandfather, Panos Papaditri, had immigrated from Greece to the United States in the early part of the 20th century with little money and no connections and had built a career first as a banker and then as a stockbroker.
The kind of immigrant success story that the American economy of that era made possible for people of sufficient intelligence and sufficient drive. His son Theodore, Jaime's father, had followed him into the same business, becoming a successful stock broker at Shearsen Hamill and then at Smith Barney and had built a comfortable life in the Queen's neighborhood of Jackson Heights and later in a more affluent suburb.
The household Jaime grew up in was shaped by money in the sense that financial thinking was the air the family breathed and by a moral seriousness that his parents imposed with equal consistency. His mother instilled in all three boys a directness and an ethical framework that placed honesty and fairness above social convenience.
Qualities that Jaime absorbed genuinely rather than merely performing. But alongside that moral foundation was something else, something harder and more driven. The particular ambition of a boy who has grown up surrounded by successful men and who has decided with a clarity unusual in a child that he intends to go further than all of them.
From his earliest years, the people around Jaime Diamond remembered him as someone who operated at a different level of intensity from everyone else. He was not simply competitive in the way that most ambitious people are competitive. He was competitive in the way that makes people around you slightly uncomfortable.
The kind of person who is always tracking not just his own performance, but everyone else's. who cannot encounter a ranking of any kind without immediately identifying where he sits on it and what he needs to do to move higher. His teachers recognized it. His classmates experienced it. His family lived with it.
It was the defining quality of his personality from the beginning and it never left him. He attended Browning School, a private institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he excelled academically and graduated fourth in his class. He had set his sights on Brown University, which represented for him at that age the pinnacle of what he was capable of achieving, the validation that the intensity he brought to everything was producing the results it deserved.
Brown rejected him. It was the first significant failure of his young life and the experience of that rejection. The sensation of having worked as hard as he could work and still being told that he was not quite good enough for the institution he had chosen produced in diamond in response that would become the pattern of his entire career.
He did not retreat or recalibrate his ambitions downward. He redirected them with greater force toward whatever opportunity was available. Determined to prove through results that the judgment of whoever had rejected him was wrong, he enrolled at Tus University in Medford, Massachusetts, an institution he felt did not deserve a student of his abilities and spent his freshman year attempting to transfer to Princeton.
Princeton rejected him. He was now zero for two against the Ivy League. The response was the same as before. He stopped seeking validation from institutions that would not provide it and instead committed himself to being undeniably the best student at the institution he was in. By 1978, Jaime Diamond graduated Suma Kumly from Tufts, placing him among the top students of his class and was admitted to Harvard Business School, which represented finally the institutional confirmation he had been pursuing.
The path there had been longer and less direct than he had planned, but he had arrived. At Harvard, Diamond was not a conventional business school student. Where most of his classmates wore suits and performed the professional identity the institution seemed to expect, Diamond showed up in jeans and leather jackets.
Where most of his classmates were Republicans, shaped by the finance and business culture from which they mostly came, Diamond was a Democrat and a vocal one, willing to argue his positions against whatever room he was in without particular concern for whether the room agreed with him. He was intellectually serious about the coursework in a way that went beyond the grade seeeking that motivated many of his peers.
Genuinely interested in the mechanisms of business and finance as intellectual problems rather than merely as tickets to wealth. He graduated as a Baker scholar, an honor reserved for the top 5% of the class and emerged into a job market that wanted him intensely. Every major investment bank on Wall Street extended offers.
His future measured purely by conventional metrics of compensation and career trajectory was exceptionally bright. He turned them all down. The decision was so counterintuitive that it requires some explanation. working for Sandy while the family friend who had known his father Theodore through the brokerage world and who offered Diamond a position as his personal assistant at roughly a third of what the investment banks were offering made almost no financial sense by any immediate calculation.
What it made sense by was a different calculation entirely. Sandy while was not a prestigious name or a large institution. What he was, to anyone paying close enough attention, was one of the most ferociously effective deal makers in the history of American finance. A man who had built the brokerage firm Sheerson from almost nothing through a series of acquisitions executed with a boldness and a financial intelligence that the established Wall Street firms consistently underestimated until it was too late.
Diamond looked at while and saw something that the salary figures obscured. He saw a methodology. He saw a way of operating in the world of finance that was different from and in his assessment superior to the conventional investment banking model and he decided that learning it at close range was worth more than the salary differential would ever be.
Sandy while was by the time Diamond came to work for him in 1982 the president of American Express having sold his shears brokerage to the company for $900 million. He was one of the most powerful people in American finance. He was also, despite this position, a man who burned with a competitive hunger that his institutional success had not satisfied because he wanted not merely to be president of American Express, but to run it.
And the man running it, James Robinson, had no intention of stepping aside. The relationship between while and Robinson deteriorated through the early 1980s over a series of strategic disagreements. and while eventually resigned in 1985 with Diamond quitting alongside him in a demonstration of personal loyalty that while found genuinely moving and that set the template for how Diamond understood the obligations of professional partnership.
When Diamond's mentor left, Diamond left too, regardless of the personal cost. The cost was real. Diamond was 29 years old with a young family to support and no immediate source of income. His mentor was 52 years old and widely perceived on Wall Street as a figure who had peaked. The major financial institutions had no interest in hiring Sandy while in a senior capacity.
He was not a young man. He was not a known quantity in the conventional investment banking world. And the perception that he was in some sense finished was pervasive among the people whose opinion would have mattered if it were true. They were wrong as they would come to understand over the next decade in the most emphatic possible way.
The opportunity that changed everything came from a direction that no rational observer would have predicted. Commercial Credit was a consumer lending company based in Baltimore targeting lower and middle-income borrowers with high interest short-term loans. The kind of operation that generates modest profits in good times and catastrophic losses when its borrowers stop being able to service their debts.
Its parent company, Control Data Corporation, was a computer hardware manufacturer that had acquired commercial credit through a transaction that had never made logical sense and that Control Data was now desperate to exit. By 1985, control data was in serious financial difficulty and was ready to sell commercial credit for whatever it could get.
While sent Diamond to analyze the company, and Diamond came back with a finding that exemplified the kind of contrarian financial thinking that would define his entire career. Commercial credit was on the surface a terrible business. Its return on equity was approximately 4% when comparable companies were generating 15.
Its customer service was poor. Its management was weak. And its reputation in the industry was correspondingly low. But Diamond looked past those surface metrics and saw something different. The company had significant assets that could be sold. It had enormous costs that could be cut. The gap between its actual performance and what a well-managed version of the same business could produce was not an argument against acquiring it.
It was the argument for acquiring it. The worse it was, the more room there was to improve and the more valuable those improvements would be to anyone with the management capacity to execute them. while decided to take commercial credit public, putting a substantial portion of his own personal fortune into the deal and offering 80% of the company to public investors.
Diamond, barely 30 years old, invested $425,000 of his own money, virtually everything he had into the company. They raised $850 million in the public offering. They had their platform. What followed in the first weeks of their ownership of commercial credit was a demonstration of the management philosophy that while and Diamond had developed through their years working together and that Diamond would apply with even greater force throughout the rest of his career.
They cut costs with a ruthlessness that shocked the employees who experienced it but that the financial markets rewarded immediately. 10% of the workforce was laid off in the first days. Executive perks and compensation structures that had accumulated over years of management complacency were eliminated.
The financial controls that Diamond put in place as the company's chief financial officer imposed a discipline on the organization that it had never previously experienced. Within a year, commercial credit was generating a hund00 million in profit and had achieved an 18% return on equity, more than four times what it had been producing when they arrived.
With a strong balance sheet and a demonstrated ability to generate cash, they were ready for the thing they had always been building toward, deals. On the 19th of October 1987, the stock market crashed, dropping 22% in a single day in a collapse that wiped out billions of dollars of value across the American economy and destroyed the confidence of companies and investors who had been operating on the assumption that markets moved in one direction.
For while in diamond, it was something else. It was a sale. Companies that had been priced beyond their reach 6 months earlier were now available at fractions of their former values. And commercial credit, with its strong balance sheet and its absence of the leveraged exposure that was killing other firms, had the financial capacity to take advantage of what the market panic was offering.
Over the following decade, they executed a series of acquisitions that collectively constituted one of the most remarkable runs of dealm. They acquired Promeica. They acquired Smith Barney. They acquired the Travelers Group. They merged with Salomon Brothers. And then in 1998, they accomplished what many observers had considered impossible.
Merging with City Corp, one of the largest banking institutions in the world, to create, a financial conglomerate of a scale that had no precedent in American history. Sandy while became the chief executive of what was at that moment the most powerful financial institution on earth. Throughout this decade of acquisitions, Diamond had been the essential operational partner, the person who analyzed the targets, structured the deals, and then implemented the cost cutting and management overhaul that made each acquisition produce the returns the business case had promised.
He was not a visionary dealmaker in the wild mold in the sense of being the person who identified the next target and pursued it with the personal salesmanship that while brought to the table. But he was arguably more important than the dealmaker because he was the person who made the deals work after they were done.
Anyone could buy a company. What Diamond could do was fix one. By the late 1990s, he was the president of Cityroup, the second most powerful figure in the largest bank in America, and everyone in the industry understood that he was being positioned in the natural order of succession to eventually take over from while as chief executive.
The expectation was so widely held that it had become a kind of institutional fact, something that would happen when the timing was right and while was ready to hand over the controls. What actually happened was something different and something that devastated Diamond in ways that he would talk about publicly for years afterward.
The proximate cause of the rupture between While and Diamond was the question of Wild's daughter, Jessica Bibloix, who worked within Diamond's division at Croup managing the mutual fund business. The substance of the conflict was about business strategy. Diamond believed that high-cost traditional mutual funds were a declining business model that needed to be fundamentally restructured and he pushed Jessica's division to adapt accordingly over the objections of her father.
When the time came for promotions and Jessica did not receive one, while interpreted it as a personal slight against his family rather than a professional judgment based on performance metrics, the professional relationship between two men who had worked together for 15 years began to deteriorate under the pressure of a disagreement that mixed business and family in ways that neither could fully separate.
But the proximate cause was not the whole cause. Beneath the specific conflict over Jessica was something deeper. The inevitable tension between a mentor who had given everything to build something and who was not ready to give it up and a protege who had given just as much and who believed the time for the transition had arrived.
Sandy while was not ready to retire. Jaime Diamond was not willing to wait indefinitely. The collision of those two realities produced on a day in November 1998. A brief meeting in which while told Diamond that his services were no longer required. 15 years of partnership of shared sacrifice and shared achievement ended in an encounter that Diamond has described as one of the most painful experiences of his professional life.
He went home and told his wife Judith what had happened. His youngest daughter, still a child, asked him if the family would have to sleep in the streets. He told her they would be fine. He was right about that materially. They had enough money. But the wound was real and deep. And the sense of having been in some fundamental way robbed of what he had earned through years of work and loyalty was not something that healed quickly.
He spent the better part of a year essentially unemployed. a situation that was disorienting for a man whose identity was as thoroughly bound up in his professional role as Diamonds was. He read, "He spent time with his family, his wife, and their three daughters. He thought about what had happened and what he wanted to do with whatever came next.
He turned down a number of opportunities that he considered unsuitable, unwilling to take a position that would represent a step backward from where he believed his capabilities placed him. He was waiting for something that was genuinely worth doing. In the spring of 2000, the call came from Bank 1, a large financial conglomerate based in Chicago that had been mismanaged into serious difficulty by a leadership culture that prioritized executive comfort over institutional health.
Its credit card business, which operated under the first USA brand, had been rated the worst in the industry, not because the underlying business was structurally unsound, but because the management had allowed customer service to deteriorate, hidden fees to proliferate, and operational discipline to collapse to a degree that was costing the institution, customers, and reputation at a rate that was becoming existential.
The board had fired the previous CEO and was urgently looking for someone capable of performing a turnaround of an institution that was in genuine danger of failing. There was in the board's assessment exactly one person in America with the proven track record of doing precisely what Bank One needed done.
They called Jaime Diamond. He accepted and he did something that announced immediately to everyone watching that this was not going to be a conventional management appointment. He invested $50 million of his personal fortune in bank One stock. Not stock options, not deferred compensation, not the various financial instruments through which executives customarily align their interests with shareholders while limiting their actual exposure.
cash, $50 million of his own money at risk in the company he had just agreed to run. He called it skin in the game, the principle that you should never put others at risk without being exposed to the same risk yourself. And he lived it with a literalness that made an immediate impression on every stakeholder who was paying attention.
What he found when he arrived at Bank One was worse than he had expected. The company he was inheriting was not simply underperforming. It was in genuine crisis with a culture of entitlement among senior management that had allowed costs to balloon, a technology infrastructure that was dangerously outdated, and a degree of internal dysfunction that made coherent strategy essentially impossible.
His response was immediate and without sentiment. He sold underperforming business units. He eliminated executive perks with a comprehensiveness that shocked a leadership culture accustomed to considerable comfort. He fired 12,000 employees to reduce the cost base to a level that the company's revenues could support.
He took downs of $4.4 billion in the year 2000, forcing the company to recognize losses that previous management had been accounting for in ways that obscured their true scale. The result was a reported loss of $511 million for the year and the stock went up because investors who had been watching Bank One deteriorate under management that would not acknowledge how bad things were looked at what Diamond was doing and saw for the first time in years someone who was willing to confront reality at its actual scale.
The market does not always reward honesty, but it reliably rewards the kind of honesty that comes before the recovery when a new management team demonstrates it is clearing the decks completely rather than managing perceptions. Diamond was clearing the decks and the people who owned Bank One stock understood what that meant for what would come next.
A year later, the company reported $2.6 billion in profit. The turnaround was complete. Bank 1 was now a financially strong institution with a clean balance sheet and a management discipline that had not existed when Diamond arrived. Over the following years, while the S&P 500 generated modest returns, and many financial institutions struggled with the aftermath of the dotcom collapse and the economic disruption that followed the September 11th attacks, Bank One stock produced a return of 59%.
three times the market over the same period. By 2003, JP Morgan Chase, one of the oldest and most storied names in American banking, but an institution that had been struggling to find its identity and its competitive position in the new landscape of the postgroup era, was looking for leadership that could restore the institution to the dominance that its history seemed to promise.
Its CEO, William Harrison, had reached retirement age and was looking for a successor. The merger of Bank 1 and JP Morgan Chase, announced in January 2004, was valued at approximately $58 billion. And it was understood by everyone involved that the real acquisition in the sense of the thing that would determine whether the combined institution succeeded or failed was not the balance sheet of Bank One, but the mind and the management philosophy of the man who ran it.
Diamond became the chief executive of JP Morgan Chase in December 2005. He applied to JP Morgan Chase the same methodology he had applied to every institution he had managed. Costs were cut. Incentive structures were reformed to align management behavior with shareholder interests. The balance sheet was subjected to the discipline that Diamond had been calling a fortress balance sheet for years.
an approach that prioritized the accumulation of capital and liquidity over the short-term earnings maximization that was driving his competitors to take on risk at a rate that the market was rewarding in the short run and that Diamond was convinced would destroy them in the long run. Because Diamond could see what was coming or rather he could see that something was coming even if the precise form and timing were impossible to predict.
The American housing market in the middle years of the first decade of the 21st century was exhibiting behaviors that he recognized as the signature of a bubble. Not because he had some unique analytical gift that was unavailable to others, but because he had been in financial markets long enough to understand that when everyone is making money in the same way and no one is asking the questions that would reveal the risks they are accumulating, the absence of questions does not mean the absence of risk.
Cityroup under Chuck Prince was fully committed to the mortgage back securities business. Meil Lynch was generating enormous profits from the same products. Bear Sterns had built its entire business model around mortgage securization. The music was playing, everyone was dancing, and Diamond was watching from the sidelines, reducing JP Morgan Chase's exposure to subprime mortgage products while his competitors were increasing theirs.
He was not popular for this. Reducing exposure to a product that everyone else is making money on produces in the short term, lower profits and uncomfortable questions from investors about why your bank is generating less revenue than its competitors. Diamond answered those questions with the same directness that had characterized his communication style throughout his career, explaining his reasoning, defending his judgment, and refusing to change the strategy because the market had not yet validated it.
It takes a particular kind of confidence to maintain a position that the market is currently punishing and diamond had it. In March 2008, the market provided its validation in the most dramatic possible way. Bear Sterns, the firm that had for years been one of the most profitable institutions on Wall Street and that had been deeply invested in the mortgage back securities that were now collapsing in value found itself unable to meet its obligations.
The collapse happened with a speed that shocked even those who had seen the systemic risk accumulating. In the course of a few days, the institution went from one of the most respected names in American finance to a firm in imminent danger of becoming unable to open for business on Monday morning. The Federal Reserve under Ben Bernank and the Treasury Department under Henry Pollson faced a decision.
They could allow Bear Sterns to fail and absorb whatever systemic consequences followed. Or they could arrange an emergency acquisition by a healthier institution using government backs stops to make the deal possible. There was exactly one institution that the government considered capable of absorbing bare sterns without destabilizing itself in the process.
On a March weekend in 2008, Jaime Diamond's team worked through 48 hours of due diligence on a firm whose actual condition they were only beginning to understand because the full scope of what Bear Sterns had accumulated on its balance sheet had not been disclosed even to the most senior people at the firm.
Diamond initially offered $2 per share for a company whose stock had been trading at over $170 a year earlier. The shareholders of Bear Sterns, humiliated by the offer and the circumstances that had made it possible, pushed back and the final price was negotiated to $10 per share. JP Morgan Chase acquired an 85-year-old Wall Street institution for the price of its Manhattan headquarters building alone.
The Bear Sterns acquisition was followed in September 2008 by the acquisition of Washington Mutual, the largest savings institution in the United States, which was seized by federal regulators on the night of the 25th of September 2008 and sold to JP Morgan Chase in a transaction worth approximately $1.9 billion.
Washington Mutual had been the largest bank failure in American history. JP Morgan Chase acquired its branch network, its deposit base, and its customer relationships while the federal government absorbed the troubled mortgage assets that had brought the institution down. The two acquisitions executed in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression added enormous scale to JP Morgan Chase at prices that reflected the panic of the crisis rather than the long-term value of what was being acquired.
By the end of 2008, when the full extent of the crisis had become apparent and the government had committed to the troubled asset relief program, the series of bailouts and capital injections that kept the surviving major banks from following Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy, the landscape of American finance had been permanently transformed.
Croup, the institution that had once been Sandy Wild's monument and that Diamond had spent a decade building before being expelled from it, required $45 billion in government capital and hundreds of billions in asset guarantees to survive. Its stock, which had traded above $50 in 2007, fell below $1 at the crisis's worst moments.
The institution that was supposed to be the final proof that firing Jaime Diamond had been the right decision had become instead the most dramatic possible evidence that it had been the worst decision Sandy while ever made. While himself said as much publicly and on the record, telling an interviewer that there was no question he wished Diamond had been running instead of Chuck Prince when the crisis hit.
It was a remarkable admission from a man who had spent 15 years building the largest bank in America and who now had to watch it nearly destroyed by the consequences of a decision he had made in a moment of personal peak. The decade that followed the financial crisis consolidated JP Morgan Chase's position as the dominant institution in American banking in ways that went beyond market share or balance sheet size.
Under Diamond's leadership, the bank consistently generated profits that other major institutions could not match, maintained capital ratios that gave it the flexibility to withstand shocks that damaged its competitors, and built businesses in investment banking, consumer banking, commercial banking, and asset management that operated with a coherence and a discipline that reflected the organizational philosophy Diamond had been developing and refining for three decades.
His personal life through these years was marked by a private seriousness that occasionally broke through into public view. He had married Judith Kent in 1983 while he was still working for Sandy While and their marriage produced three daughters who grew up in the shadow of their father's professional consuming intensity.
He was known among those who worked closely with him as a genuinely devoted father who made deliberate efforts to be present in his daughter's lives. Despite the demands his professional role placed on his time, his relationship with money, despite having spent his entire career in its pursuit, was less straightforward than might be assumed.
He was personally frugal in ways that surprised people who expected a Wall Street chief executive to live at the scale his compensation suggested. He drove himself to work. He ate in the company cafeteria. He answered his own emails. The gap between the public image of Wall Street excess and the private reality of his daily habits was considerable.
In 2014, he disclosed publicly that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. The announcement which he made in a letter to employees and shareholders was characteristic of his communication style in its directness, its absence of sentimentality and its immediate pivot to the practical. He told people what was happening.
He told them it was curable. He told them the treatment plan and he told them how the business would be managed during his treatment. He underwent chemotherapy and radiation, continued working throughout, and was declared cancer-free within months. The episode, while serious, had no lasting visible effect on his professional intensity or his institutional leadership.
The years following the financial crisis, also brought a series of legal and regulatory challenges that tested his leadership in a different way. JP Morgan Chase paid billions of dollars in settlements related to mortgagebacked securities sold in the years before the crisis related to the failures of Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual whose liabilities the bank had absorbed along with their assets and related to a series of compliance failures in various parts of the bank's operations.
The settlement related to the so-called London Whale trading loss in which a trader in the bank's London office accumulated a derivatives position that eventually lost approximately $6 billion was particularly damaging to the bank's reputation under Diamond's leadership because it appeared to contradict the riskmanagement discipline that had been the foundation of his public identity.
Diamond acknowledged the failures, accepted accountability, and implemented changes. His capacity to absorb criticism without being destroyed by it, to acknowledge mistakes without surrendering his fundamental confidence in his own judgment was as characteristic of him as any other quality his career had exhibited.
By 2020, Jaime Diamond was the longest serving CEO of any major American bank, the sole surviving leader from the era before the financial crisis, and the man who presided over an institution that had under his leadership grown into the largest bank in the United States by assets and by most metrics the most profitable large bank in the world.
He had achieved this by doing something that sounds simple and is in practice extraordinarily difficult. building an institution that was disciplined enough to avoid the risks that destroyed its competitors and strong enough to take advantage of the opportunities those destructions created. The story of Jaime Diamond is in many respects a story about preparation, about the discipline of building a fortress balance sheet when the market is rewarding recklessness, about the willingness to reduce profit today in order to survive tomorrow.
about the capacity to maintain conviction in a judgment that the market has not yet validated and about the patience to wait through a decade of building at Bank 1 and then at JP Morgan Chase for the moment when that preparation would finally meet its opportunity. That moment came in 2008 on a March weekend in a deal that valued one of Wall Street's oldest names at a fraction of the price of the building it occupied.
He had been preparing for it for 30 years. Sandy while fired Jaime Diamond in November 1998 because he decided his protege was not ready. What happened in the decade that followed that decision and particularly in the autumn of 2008 when the financial system that while had built came apart at the seams while the institution Diamond was running emerged as the last large bank standing is perhaps the most complete answer in the history of American business to the question of what it means to be ready.
Jaime Diamond did not inherit a throne. He was thrown out of the palace, rebuilt from nothing, and then constructed a larger and more durable palace than the one that had expelled him piece by piece over a quarter century, while the people who had doubted him watched from the wreckage of their own institutions.
That is the true measure of the most powerful banker in America. Thank you so much for watching.
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