The term "too big to fail" must be excised from our vocabulary.
Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn't have them, we'd still be living in tents and eating buffalo.
It's offensive to me to be called a cost cutter.
Well, if you were the American public, you saw a catastrophe. In general, you would say, "The biggest institutions of America - Washington, broadly, and Wall Street, broadly - they're to blame." And, broadly, they're right.
We use technology to make it cheaper, better, and faster for the client. And then if you have the most flow, you can win. Now, having said that, Silicon Valley wants to take on this business. They think they see an opening.
JPMorgan Chase are among the most successful global investment banks, most successful global asset managers, and, in the United States, one of the most successful retail and commercial bankers. We do a great job for customers.
I have gotten disturbed at some of the Democrats' anti-business behavior, the sentiment, the attacks on work ethic and successful people. I think it's very counter-productive.
We invested in the downturn and we never stopped serving our clients.
Companies are returning a lot of money to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. And a lot of people say that's not a good use of capital. I think that's normal reallocation of capital.
I do believe that some of these regulations made the markets more volatile, and it remains to be seen how bad that can be.
Banks don't want certain asset classes, and that's created opportunities for private equity, hedge funds, Silicon Valley. In this case I think he was referring to some of the European banks shedding assets, and the big buyers are probably not going to be big American banks. Someone like Blackstone may have a very good chance to buy those assets, leverage them, borrow up a little bit, and do something good there.
Part of the concept of the euro zone was to establish a common market. The banks were going to bank across all their countries like we bank across states. But that concept got killed for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't get into. That was a good concept, by the way. It may yet return, because there are huge economies of scale in banking. That's another thing people don't quite get.
But in general, as countries get wealthier, there's going to be more savings, which means you're going to have intermediation. So part of it is just the huge growth in wealth, and part of it was globalization - these companies, these clients getting much bigger and much more global.
They'll [China] probably be a fully developed nation. The road there just is not going to be that easy. You're going from a macromanaged, top-down economy to a market-managed, micromanaged type of economy, with all the potential corruption issues, SOE [state-owned enterprise] reform, and market reform that come with it.
You cannot prove this in real time, but when economists 20 years from now write a book on the recovery, it may well be entitled, It could have been much better.
The yen is trading where it's trading because people are guessing about people's future interest rates, dollar and yen and about the future growth potential of the economies. And, if this policy works, then the yen will probably strengthen.
It's good for America when the rest of the world grows, because you can sell more to the rest of the world.
As a matter of fact 25% of our U.S. investment banking business comes out of our commercial bank. So it's a competitive advantage for both the investment bank - which gets a huge volume of business - and the commercial bank because the commercial bank can walk into a company and say, "Oh, if you need X, Y and Z in Japan or China, we can do that for you."
Banks also have to say no to customers. We can't always give clients what they want; it may not be in the client's best interest.
The "third arrow" (of structural reform) is critically important. Japan has some of the best companies in the world, and if you look at their technology, their capability, it's extraordinary.
If you can't use dividends, it's not a bad thing to give it back to your shareholders. They'll use it somewhere else.
My guess is the big Chinese banks will be in 100 countries by then. They will have very sophisticated operations, and they may very well have bought banks around the world in countries that allow it. I mean, I don't think the American government would allow them to buy JPMorgan. But they will be able to buy a sizable big bank in the U.S. at some point. Whether they do or not, or if it's allowed or not, I don't know.
I am struck that so many of our leaders in the U.S. forget how strong our country can be.
The transaction reflects our disciplined strategy of investing capital in core businesses where we can leverage scale and expertise for competitive advantage. In addition to being a great strategic fit, the deal is compelling financially.
Let's look at lending, where they're using big data for the credit side. And it's just credit data enhanced, by the way, which we do, too. It's nothing mystical. But they're very good at reducing the pain points. They can underwrite it quicker using - I'm just going to call it big data, for lack of a better term: "Why does it take two weeks? Why can't you do it in 15 minutes?"
