I've been regulated my whole life. We have progressive taxes. It's not a free-market free-for-all. I completely understand that society has a perfectly legitimate right to put in structures and regulations and rules that make it fairer, better, cleaner.
People always say to me, "What if it doesn't work?" If it doesn't work, we redouble our effort. We're not going to cry like a bunch of babies. We're going to redouble our effort.
I wanted to start by saying that the eurozone - there are two reasons they formed the European Union. One is for political peace and rationalization. And I think that's a good thing for a continent that went through hundreds of years of wars.
Europe is the most complicated place, in my opinion.
I also believe that most of the emerging economies have a fairly large amount of foreign exchange reserves, relative to 10 years ago.
A lot of these things have hurt the average American. When they look at the banks and they say, "Well, the bank's talking its own game," I am telling you, what we've done in mortgage lending, our inability to have proper regulations around mortgages, has hurt average Americans. First-time buyers, immigrant buyers, prior defaults, self-employed, because they can't get a mortgage. Will it make a big difference to JPMorgan Chase? No, but you're hurting my fellow citizens. Let's go at it, and let's fix it.
I don't think that [normalization] necessarily is going to damage the emerging economies.
When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.
If you went to all those little towns in America, JPMorgan was there in good times and bad times, and, in fact, helped a lot of people through the tough times. And we know that's when they need us the most.
I think the free-enterprise system has been great for society. That doesn't mean it's completely perfect. And also, when people say capitalism, I'm not really sure what they mean.
I haven't studied it deeply, but the American banks started the crisis with far more capital and what I would call "good liquidity." The riskiest funding is unsecured wholesale funding. It's the most fickle. Not repo, which the government focused on, too. Unsecured. JPMorgan Chase had almost none of that - virtually zero.
Look, in any system, you want highly ethical people who really understand issues to form policies and make tough decisions. You need all the right people in the room. But there's a general view in Washington now by many politicians that if you ever were on this side, you're conflicted for being on that side.
If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that's business. I'm doing it because I'm serving you; I'm not doing it because I want to be universal.
I don't like the term "universal bank." The Chinese government legitimately wants to have a very strong economy. When they talk about SOE reform, they know that's part of it.
If you're making all your money simply betting on interest rates, that's not a business. Flow is a business. On the outside, they look the same for a while. But when you dig into them, no, they weren't exactly the same.
Any good job is a good job. This whole concept of a dead-end job? It's not true. I've heard it my whole life. Jobs lead to dignity. If you're good at the first, then you can get the second. Jobs lead to household formation. Jobs are a better solution for society.
Prime Minister Modi [Narendra] is strong enough, and he's accomplished much.
India is a huge democracy. Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi has ambitions to try to fix the infrastructure, the rules, taxes, education, and to lift up the Indian people. And we're hopeful that that's going to create positive momentum.
We do all that [ represent companies], because we have a lot of research in Japanese companies, and that research educates investors around the world. It allows us to sell stocks and bonds in Japanese companies.
We had a lot of gridlock on a lot of issues. But, the American system is pretty resilient.
Over the longer term, China will grow by about 6% or 7% per year. The Chinese authorities usually react pretty quickly to unfolding economic events, and you've seen them recently change a whole bunch of policies to be more conducive to growth. They have the power and capability to macromanage the economy - to accomplish their growth objectives - which means they're pretty much going to come close to what they say is going to happen.
We take smaller companies and middle-sized companies, all around the world, and we do currency exchange for them; we raise bonds and equities for them; and we do inventory finance, trade finance, and custody of assets.
Manipulating currencies is when you're going into the marketplace and buying something in large amounts to depress the value of the currency.
If I ran the whole place like it was my way or the highway, we would not be as good a company. I'm going to have mistakes - they'll be made on my watch and will embarrass me. But I'll also make sure the company learns from them so it can become a better company.
The best thing to do is muddle through and maybe, over time, create a solution of that, if someone really wanted to exit, the legal basis on which you could exit. Because right now there almost doesn't exist one.
