JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase and Co.
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: JPM; Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 component
Industry	Banking, financial services
Founded	1 December 2000 by the merger of J.P. Morgan and Co. and Chase Manhattan; earliest predecessor founded 1799
Founder	Aaron Burr (Bank of the Manhattan Company); J. P. Morgan (J.P. Morgan and Co.)
Headquarters	270 Park Avenue, New York City, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Jamie Dimon (chairman and chief executive), Marianne Lake and Doug Petno (co-chief executives of the operating businesses), Jeremy Barnum (chief financial officer)
Products	Retail and commercial banking, investment banking, asset and wealth management, credit cards, payments, custody, treasury services
Revenue	Approximately US$180 billion (2024)
Employees	Approximately 320,000
Website	jpmorganchase.com

JPMorgan Chase and Co. is an American multinational financial services company headquartered in New York City and incorporated in Delaware. It is the largest bank in the United States by assets, the largest bank in the world by market capitalisation, and among the most systemically important financial institutions in existence. It operates in more than 100 markets and holds assets of approximately US$4.4 trillion.

The company is the product of more than 1,200 predecessor institutions combined over two centuries, of which the principal lines are the Bank of the Manhattan Company, chartered in 1799 by Aaron Burr; Chase National Bank, founded in 1877 and named after Salmon P. Chase; Chemical Bank, founded in 1824; Manufacturers Hanover; the First National Bank of Chicago and Bank One; and J.P. Morgan and Co., the house built by J. P. Morgan which for a period around 1900 exercised more influence over American industry than the federal government.

Its modern form was established by the merger of J.P. Morgan and Co. with Chase Manhattan in 2000 and by the acquisition of Bank One in 2004, which brought Jamie Dimon, chief executive since 2005 and the longest-serving leader of any large American bank. Under his direction the firm acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the 2008 crisis and First Republic Bank in 2023, each in a transaction arranged by regulators and each enlarging a bank already at the statutory limit for deposit share.

History

The Manhattan Company and the New York lines, 1799 to 1955

The oldest predecessor was chartered on 2 April 1799 as the Manhattan Company, ostensibly to supply fresh water to New York City after a yellow fever epidemic. Aaron Burr had inserted a clause permitting surplus capital to be employed in any lawful business, and the company opened a bank within six months, giving the Democratic-Republicans a financial institution to set against the Federalist-controlled Bank of New York and the First Bank of the United States. Alexander Hamilton, who had founded the Bank of New York, assisted with the charter without noticing the clause, and the enmity that culminated in their duel in 1804 derived in part from the episode. The water works were inadequate and were eventually sold to the city; the bank continued for a century and a half.

Chemical Bank was established in 1824 by the New York Chemical Manufacturing Company under a similar arrangement, a manufacturer's charter used to conduct banking, and became one of the largest banks in the country.

Chase National Bank was founded in 1877 by John Thompson and named after Salmon P. Chase, the Treasury Secretary who had created the national banking system and who had no connection with it. It merged in 1930 with the Equitable Trust Company, controlled by the Rockefeller family, making it the largest bank in the world at the time, and David Rockefeller led it from 1969 to 1981, a period in which the chairman of a New York bank functioned as something close to a private foreign minister.

Chase National merged with the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1955 to form Chase Manhattan Bank, a transaction structured so that the smaller Manhattan Company acquired the larger Chase in order to preserve the 1799 charter, which contained privileges the newer bank did not have.

J. P. Morgan and the house of Morgan, 1871 to 1935

John Pierpont Morgan joined Drexel, Morgan and Co. in 1871, which became J.P. Morgan and Co. in 1895. Its business was arranging capital for railways and industry, and its method was to impose order on markets it regarded as ruinously competitive, reorganising bankrupt railways under its control in a process contemporaries called Morganisation and placing its own representatives on the boards of the companies it financed.

Its transactions defined the period. Morgan assembled United States Steel in 1901 by combining Carnegie Steel with nine other companies, creating the first corporation capitalised at more than a billion dollars and, at the time, an entity larger than the federal budget. It financed General Electric, International Harvester and AT&T.

During the Panic of 1907 Morgan personally organised the rescue of the American financial system, locking the presidents of the leading trust companies in his library until they agreed to commit funds, because no central bank existed to do it. The episode demonstrated both his power and the danger of depending on one man's judgement, and it led directly to the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. The Pujo Committee of 1912 and 1913 investigated the concentration of financial control it termed the money trust and found that Morgan partners held 72 directorships in 47 corporations.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 required the separation of commercial from investment banking, and J.P. Morgan and Co. chose to remain a commercial bank, with several partners including Henry S. Morgan and Harold Stanley leaving to found Morgan Stanley in 1935. Morgan Grenfell in London, the firm's British affiliate, became independent and was eventually acquired by Deutsche Bank.

Consolidation and the 2000 merger

American banking consolidated with extraordinary speed from the mid-1980s, as restrictions on interstate banking were removed and as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed the remaining separation of commercial and investment banking.

Chemical Bank acquired Manufacturers Hanover in 1991 and Chase Manhattan in 1996, taking the Chase name in each case because it was better known, so that the surviving institution was Chemical operating as Chase. Chase then acquired the investment banks Hambrecht and Quist in 1999 and Robert Fleming in 2000.

On 13 September 2000 Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan and Co. announced their merger, completed on 31 December, creating JPMorgan Chase and Co. The logic was that Chase's balance sheet and payments business combined with Morgan's advisory relationships and its name, which carried standing with corporate clients that Chase did not.

Bank One, Jamie Dimon and the crisis, 2004 to 2010

Jamie Dimon had built Citigroup with Sandy Weill and had been dismissed by him in 1998. He became chief executive of Bank One in 2000, a Chicago bank assembled from Banc One of Ohio, First Chicago and NBD of Detroit and in considerable disorder, and repaired it over four years.

JPMorgan Chase acquired Bank One in July 2004 for approximately US$58 billion in stock, with the explicit understanding that Dimon would succeed William Harrison as chief executive, which he did on 31 December 2005. He became chairman in 2006.

Dimon's conduct before the crisis is the foundation of his reputation. He reduced the firm's exposure to subprime mortgage securities from 2006, declining business that competitors took, maintained what he called a fortress balance sheet with capital and liquidity well above requirements, and consequently entered 2008 in a position no other large American bank occupied.

In March 2008 the Federal Reserve asked JPMorgan Chase to acquire Bear Stearns, which had become unable to fund itself. The initial price of US$2 a share, against a price above US$170 a year earlier, was raised to US$10 after shareholder objection, and the Federal Reserve assumed US$29 billion of the least attractive assets through a vehicle named Maiden Lane. On 25 September 2008 the Office of Thrift Supervision seized Washington Mutual, the largest savings institution in the country, in the largest bank failure in American history, and sold its banking operations to JPMorgan Chase for US$1.9 billion, giving the firm a retail branch network in California, Florida and the Pacific Northwest that it had lacked.

The two acquisitions made JPMorgan Chase the largest bank in the United States. Dimon has subsequently said on several occasions that he would not do either again, because the legal liabilities inherited with them, particularly Washington Mutual's mortgage practices, cost the firm many billions of dollars in settlements for conduct it had not engaged in.

The firm accepted US$25 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program in October 2008, which Dimon has said it neither needed nor wanted and accepted because the Treasury required every large bank to take it so that acceptance would not signal weakness, and repaid it in June 2009.

The London Whale and the settlements, 2012 to 2016

In 2012 the firm's Chief Investment Office in London, which managed excess deposits, accumulated a very large position in credit derivatives through a trader, Bruno Iksil, whose size in the market earned him the name the London Whale. The position was intended as a hedge and became a directional bet; when it moved against the firm and the position could not be exited without moving the market further, losses reached approximately US$6.2 billion.

Dimon initially described reports of the position as a tempest in a teapot, a remark he retracted. The firm paid approximately US$920 million in fines to American and British regulators, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations produced a detailed report finding that traders had mismarked positions and that risk limits had been repeatedly breached and then raised, and two traders were charged, with proceedings eventually dropped.

A sequence of settlements over crisis-era conduct followed. In November 2013 the firm agreed to pay US$13 billion to the Department of Justice and other authorities over the sale of mortgage-backed securities, then the largest settlement ever reached between the American government and a single company, of which approximately four fifths related to conduct at Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. In January 2014 it paid US$2.6 billion over its failure to report suspicions about Bernard Madoff, who had banked with Chemical and its successors for two decades and whose account activity the firm's own staff had identified internally as inexplicable.

Dimon's long tenure and First Republic, 2016 to 2026

The decade after the settlements was the most profitable in the firm's history and among the most profitable of any bank anywhere. Its returns on tangible equity exceeded those of its competitors consistently, its share of American deposits, credit card spending, investment banking fees and markets revenue all rose, and its market capitalisation exceeded the combined value of several of its domestic rivals.

In March 2023 the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank produced a run on regional banks. JPMorgan Chase organised a US$30 billion uninsured deposit injection into First Republic Bank by eleven banks, which did not stabilise it, and on 1 May 2023 acquired First Republic from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after a weekend auction, recording an immediate accounting gain of approximately US$2.6 billion. The transaction required a waiver of the statutory prohibition on any bank holding more than ten per cent of national deposits, which JPMorgan Chase already exceeded, and Dimon acknowledged publicly that the government had asked the firm to act.

The acquisition drew criticism from those who consider the concentration of American banking already excessive, and the observation that the largest bank in the country had been enlarged by each of the three major banking crises of the century was made by legislators of both parties.

Dimon, chief executive since 2005, has been the subject of succession speculation for more than a decade. In 2024 the firm elevated Marianne Lake and Jennifer Piepszak to run the consumer and commercial and investment banking operations respectively, with Piepszak subsequently declining consideration for the chief executive role and moving to chief operating officer, and Dimon has indicated that his remaining tenure is measured in a small number of years while declining to be specific.

The Morgan era in detail

Morganisation and industrial reorganisation

J. P. Morgan's method rested on a belief that competition among capital-intensive industries was destructive and that order imposed by a banker who controlled their financing was preferable. Applied to the railways, which had built duplicate lines, cut rates to below cost and entered bankruptcy in very large numbers during the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, the method involved reorganising the capital structure, reducing fixed charges, placing Morgan partners or nominees on the board and coordinating rates with neighbouring lines.

By 1900 the firm controlled or influenced railways representing a substantial proportion of American mileage, including the New York Central, the Erie, the Northern Pacific and the Southern. The Northern Securities Company, formed in 1901 to combine the Northern Pacific and Great Northern, was dissolved by the Supreme Court in 1904 in the first successful antitrust action of the Roosevelt administration, and Morgan's reported reaction, that the President should send his man to see Morgan's man and fix it up, became the standard illustration of how the financier understood the relationship between private power and government.

United States Steel, assembled in 1901 by buying Carnegie Steel for US$480 million and combining it with Federal Steel and eight other producers, was capitalised at US$1.4 billion at a time when the entire federal budget was approximately US$500 million. Andrew Carnegie named his own price, which Morgan accepted without negotiation; Carnegie afterwards said he should have asked for more and Morgan agreed that he would have paid it.

The Panic of 1907

The failure of an attempt to corner the copper market in October 1907 produced runs on the trust companies that had financed it, and the panic spread. The United States had no central bank, and Morgan, then seventy and nominally retired, organised the response from his library on Madison Avenue, assessing which institutions were solvent, directing funds to those that were and allowing others to fail, and on one occasion locking the presidents of the trust companies in the room until they signed a commitment of funds.

The episode ended the panic and demonstrated that the financial stability of the largest economy in the world rested on the judgement of a private individual, a conclusion that both the public and the Congress found unacceptable. The National Monetary Commission that followed produced the proposals that became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and the Pujo Committee's investigation of the money trust, in which Morgan testified shortly before his death in 1913, provided the political impetus for the Clayton Antitrust Act and for the restriction of interlocking directorates.

The First World War and after

J.P. Morgan and Co. acted as the purchasing agent in the United States for the British and French governments from 1915, arranging approximately US$3 billion of war supplies and taking a commission on all of it, and arranged the Anglo-French loan of US$500 million, the largest foreign loan raised in the United States to that date. The firm's position made it a target: a bomb exploded outside its Wall Street offices in September 1920, killing 38 people, in an attack never solved and generally attributed to anarchists, and the marks remain in the building's façade.

J. P. Morgan Jr. led the firm after his father's death and through the Pecora hearings of 1933, at which it was established that the firm had maintained preferred lists allowing favoured public figures to buy securities below the offering price, and that Morgan and his partners had paid no income tax for several years through the use of losses. The revelations contributed directly to the Glass-Steagall separation and to the Securities Act of 1933.

The crises

JPMorgan Chase and its predecessors have been present at most of the financial disruptions of the past century, frequently on the side of the organisers.

In 1998 the Federal Reserve Bank of New York convened the major Wall Street firms to rescue Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose failure threatened its counterparties; J.P. Morgan participated and Bear Stearns alone refused, a decision remembered when Bear Stearns itself failed a decade later.

In 2008 the firm acquired Bear Stearns in March and Washington Mutual in September at the request of regulators, and its clearing operation for tri-party repurchase agreements, through which the securities industry funds itself daily, placed it at the centre of the market's operation; the firm's decisions about extending intraday credit to Lehman Brothers in the days before that firm's failure were subsequently examined in the bankruptcy examiner's report and disputed.

In March 2020 the disruption of Treasury and repurchase markets at the onset of the pandemic required Federal Reserve intervention on an unprecedented scale, and the largest banks' willingness or otherwise to use their balance sheets to intermediate was central to the episode. Dimon argued afterwards that capital and liquidity rules had prevented the banks from acting as they otherwise would.

In March 2023 the firm organised the US$30 billion deposit injection into First Republic and then acquired it, and its share price rose as depositors moved to the largest institutions, a pattern that illustrated the practical effect of the too-big-to-fail question: in a panic, the perception of implicit support attracts deposits to the institutions whose size created the concern.

Risk management

The firm's risk organisation is among the largest in the industry and its practices have been studied closely, both for what they prevented and for what they did not.

Its value at risk models, stress testing, and the practice of running the firm's own severe scenarios independently of the regulatory ones, are conventional. What has distinguished it is the insistence, attributed to Dimon, on what he calls the fortress balance sheet: capital, liquidity and reserves maintained above requirements at a cost in returns, on the reasoning that a bank's principal risk is not any particular exposure but the loss of market confidence, and that the only defence is visible strength.

The London Whale was a failure of exactly this system. The Chief Investment Office's positions were not captured adequately by the risk models, a model change increased permitted risk at the moment the position was growing, limit breaches were reported and overridden, and the position was valued by the traders who had established it. The Senate report described a control environment that had been permitted to weaken because the unit had been profitable, and the firm subsequently restructured the office and its oversight.

The other recurring difficulty is conduct rather than market risk: the settlements described above concern what employees did rather than what markets did, and the firm's exposure to that category is a function of the number of people it employs and the number of businesses it operates.

Business

The firm reports through four segments, and its size in each is a substantial part of why it is profitable: a bank that is the largest in several businesses at once obtains information, funding and operating leverage that a specialist does not.

Consumer and Community Banking

Trading as Chase, this segment serves roughly half of American households through approximately 4,700 branches and a very large digital operation. It is the largest credit card issuer in the United States by purchase volume, the largest originator of card lending, among the largest mortgage lenders and auto lenders, and holds the largest retail deposit base in the country.

The Chase Sapphire cards, introduced in 2009 and extended with the Sapphire Reserve in 2016, reoriented the premium card market. The Reserve's launch, with a US$450 annual fee and a sign-up bonus worth considerably more, attracted so many applications that the firm ran out of the metal cards and took a charge of several hundred million dollars against the first year's earnings, and it established the competitive pattern in which issuers compete on benefits funded by interchange fees.

Chase has also expanded branch coverage deliberately into states where it had none, opening several hundred branches from 2018 in a programme that reached all of the contiguous United States, a strategy conducted at a time when the industry was closing branches and which reflects a judgement that physical presence still determines primary banking relationships.

Commercial and Investment Bank

Combined in 2024, this segment contains what were previously the corporate and investment bank and commercial banking.

The investment bank has led global league tables for investment banking fees for most of the past fifteen years, advising on mergers and acquisitions and underwriting debt and equity. Its markets business, trading fixed income, currencies, commodities and equities, is the largest in the world by revenue and has increased its share consistently since 2008, principally at the expense of the European banks.

Payments is among the least visible and most valuable businesses in the firm. JPMorgan Chase moves in the region of ten trillion dollars a day through its treasury services, operates as a correspondent bank for institutions worldwide, and is among the largest merchant acquirers, processing card payments for retailers. The business is unglamorous, requires enormous scale and technology investment, and produces recurring revenue insulated from market conditions.

Securities services provides custody and fund administration for assets measured in the tens of trillions of dollars.

Commercial banking serves mid-sized companies, real estate investors and government entities, and was substantially enlarged by the First Republic acquisition.

Asset and Wealth Management

J.P. Morgan Asset Management manages several trillion dollars across mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, alternatives and institutional mandates. The private bank serves very wealthy families and is among the leading such businesses in the world, and the segment was enlarged considerably by First Republic's wealth business, although a substantial number of that firm's advisers left in the period following the acquisition.

Businesses in detail

Cards and payments

Chase is the largest credit card issuer in the United States by purchase volume, with well over US$1 trillion of annual spending on its cards. Its portfolio includes the Sapphire family, the Freedom cash-back cards, and a very large number of co-branded cards issued with partners including United Airlines, Southwest, Marriott, Hyatt, Disney, Amazon and Instacart.

Co-branded cards are among the most contested assets in consumer finance. An airline or hotel group sells its loyalty currency to the issuer, which distributes it to cardholders, and the arrangements are worth billions of dollars a year to the partner; the contests to win or retain them, such as the competition over the Amazon portfolio or the American Airlines arrangement, are conducted between issuers at terms that leave little margin.

The economics rest on interchange, the fee a merchant's bank pays the cardholder's bank on every transaction, set by the card networks and amounting to roughly two per cent on premium cards. Merchants have litigated and lobbied against it for two decades, and the Credit Card Competition Act proposed in the United States, which would require that transactions be routable over a second network, is opposed by the issuers as an attack on the revenue that funds card rewards.

Mortgages and consumer lending

The firm is among the largest mortgage originators and servicers in the United States, though it reduced its presence in lending to borrowers with lower credit scores after the crisis, concluding that the legal and servicing risk exceeded the return. Dimon has said publicly that the regulatory treatment of mortgage servicing has made the business unattractive for banks, which is part of why non-bank lenders now originate the majority of American mortgages.

Auto lending, student lending, which the firm exited in 2013, and unsecured personal lending complete the consumer portfolio.

Markets

The markets business trades and makes markets in government and corporate bonds, currencies, commodities, equities, derivatives and financing. It has been the largest such business in the world by revenue for more than a decade, having taken share consistently as the European banks retrenched.

Its scale produces an informational position that is itself valuable: a firm that sees a very large proportion of the flow in a market understands the positioning of its participants in a way smaller competitors cannot, a fact that is commercially advantageous and which regulators watch.

The business is also the source of most of the firm's conduct risk. The spoofing penalties, the foreign exchange settlements and the London Whale all arose within it, and the firm has restructured supervision repeatedly in response.

Asset management

J.P. Morgan Asset Management manages funds across equities, fixed income, multi-asset, liquidity and alternatives, and its money market funds are among the largest in the world. It has grown its exchange-traded fund business rapidly, particularly in actively managed products including covered-call strategies that became among the fastest-growing funds of the 2020s.

Its alternatives business includes private equity, real estate, infrastructure and private credit, the last being the area of greatest growth across the industry as lending has moved from bank balance sheets to funds, a movement the firm participates in as an asset manager while arguing as a bank that it should be regulated more closely.

Custody and treasury services

Securities services holds assets in custody measured in the tens of trillions of dollars and administers funds worldwide. Treasury services moves money for corporations and for other banks, and JPMorgan Chase is among the small number of institutions through which the dollar payment system actually operates, clearing for correspondents in countries where no American bank has a presence.

The business's significance exceeds its revenue. Access to dollar clearing is what makes American financial sanctions effective, and a bank in this position is an instrument of that policy whether or not it wishes to be, required to decline business that its government has prohibited and exposed to penalty if it does not.

The Chase branch network

Chase operates approximately 4,700 branches, the second largest network in the United States after Bank of America's, and is the only large bank to have expanded it materially in the past decade.

The decision, announced in 2018, was to open several hundred branches in states where Chase had none, principally in the South and the interior West, and by 2021 the bank had a presence in all of the contiguous states for the first time. The reasoning was that the primary banking relationship, which determines where a household keeps its deposits and therefore the bank's cheapest funding, is still established in person for most people, and that branches also generate small business and wealth relationships that digital channels do not.

The strategy was contrary to the industry's direction. Competitors were closing branches, digital-only banks were growing quickly, and the received view held that a branch network was a legacy cost. The results have supported Chase's judgement: it has gained deposit share in the new markets, and its cost of deposits has remained below those of banks dependent on rate-sensitive online funding, an advantage that became significant when interest rates rose in 2022 and depositors moved money in search of yield.

The firm has simultaneously reduced the size of individual branches, staffed them differently, and moved routine transactions to its applications, which are used by more than 50 million people and which are consistently among the most highly rated banking applications in the country.

Research and analysis

J.P. Morgan Research employs several hundred analysts covering equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and economics, and its work is used across the industry. Its economists' forecasts, its emerging market bond indices, which are the benchmarks against which a very large proportion of that asset class is managed, and its global manufacturing survey are among the reference points of international finance.

The firm's index business has an influence that is rarely noticed. A decision to include a country's bonds in the EMBI or GBI-EM indices, or to exclude them, moves tens of billions of dollars of passive investment, and the criteria are set by a private company. India's inclusion in the GBI-EM index announced in 2023 was expected to attract very large inflows to that country's government bonds and was reported as a national economic event.

Its research has also produced controversy of the kind common to the industry, including the 2003 global settlement with the New York attorney general over conflicts between research and investment banking, in which JPMorgan Chase was among ten firms paying a combined US$1.4 billion and agreeing to structural separation of the functions.

Commercial real estate and the office

The firm is among the largest commercial real estate lenders in the United States, a position enlarged considerably by the First Republic acquisition, and the sector's difficulties since 2022 have been a recurring subject of its disclosures.

The office market in particular has been damaged by durable changes in working patterns, with vacancy rates in several major American cities at historic highs and valuations of older buildings falling by very large proportions. Banks holding loans against such properties face losses as the loans mature and cannot be refinanced at the original valuations, and regional banks with concentrated exposure have been the focus of concern.

JPMorgan Chase's own exposure is comparatively small relative to its capital and is concentrated in multifamily rather than office property, and it has increased reserves against the sector progressively. Dimon has described the problem as manageable in aggregate and severe for particular institutions and particular buildings, an assessment that has so far proved accurate.

The firm's own return-to-office requirement, and its construction of a very large new headquarters, constitute a position on the question that is commercial as well as cultural.

Global operations

The firm operates in more than 100 markets, and its international business is principally wholesale: investment banking, markets, treasury services, custody and asset management, rather than retail branches.

It has attempted international consumer banking twice in recent years. Chase UK, a digital bank launched in September 2021, was the firm's first retail banking operation outside the United States and had attracted around two million customers by 2024, with a stated intention to extend into continental Europe; its losses in the early years were substantial and were presented as investment. The firm also acquired the British robo-adviser Nutmeg in 2021.

Its largest offices outside the United States are in London, where it employs around 20,000 people and where Canary Wharf is its European headquarters; India, where it employs more than 50,000 in technology and operations across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai; Singapore and Hong Kong; and Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

Its position in China has been complicated. It obtained full ownership of its Chinese securities joint venture in 2021, one of the first foreign banks to do so, at a point when American policy was moving in the opposite direction, and Dimon's remark in 2021 that the firm would outlast the Chinese Communist Party produced an immediate apology, an episode illustrating the narrowness of the space within which large banks operate in that market.

Buildings

The firm's headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, completed in 2025, is a 423-metre tower designed by Foster and Partners and is the largest all-electric office building in New York. It replaced the 1960 Union Carbide Building on the same site, a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill design that was the tallest building ever voluntarily demolished, a decision criticised by preservationists both for the loss of a significant modernist building and for the embodied carbon involved.

383 Madison Avenue, built for Bear Stearns and acquired with it, and 277 Park Avenue house other operations. 23 Wall Street, the House of Morgan built in 1913, stood for a century as the firm's symbolic home and was sold in 2008; its exterior still carries the damage from the 1920 bombing.

Chase Manhattan Plaza, completed in 1961 and commissioned by David Rockefeller, was the first modernist skyscraper in the financial district and is credited with beginning the postwar redevelopment of Lower Manhattan; it contains Jean Dubuffet's Group of Four Trees and Isamu Noguchi's sunken garden, and the art collection Rockefeller established there became among the largest corporate collections in the world.

Technology

JPMorgan Chase spends more on technology than almost any company outside the technology industry, in the region of US$17 billion a year, and employs approximately 60,000 technologists, a workforce larger than that of many software companies.

The spending reflects the nature of the business. A bank of this size runs several thousand applications, many decades old, processes payments that cannot fail, and is required by regulators to demonstrate resilience and to produce data on demand. A substantial proportion of the budget is consumed by maintaining what exists rather than by building what is new, a proportion the firm has reduced deliberately through a programme of modernisation and migration to cloud infrastructure.

Its work in areas beyond ordinary banking technology includes Onyx, a blockchain unit whose JPM Coin permits institutional clients to move dollars between accounts continuously rather than during banking hours, and which processes very large daily volumes; a substantial research group in artificial intelligence, led for several years by Manuela Veloso of Carnegie Mellon, working on fraud detection, document processing and trading; and quantum computing research directed at optimisation and cryptography.

The firm has also been an aggressive consumer of external technology and an occasional combatant. Its dispute with the data aggregation companies over access to customer account data, and its decision from 2025 to charge for programmatic access that had previously been free, has been contested by financial technology companies as an attempt to restrict competition and defended by the bank as recovering the cost of infrastructure others use without contributing to.

Digital assets and financial technology

JPMorgan Chase's relationship with cryptocurrency has been publicly contradictory and commercially consistent. Dimon described bitcoin as a fraud in 2017 and said he would dismiss any trader found dealing in it, retracted the specific remark shortly afterwards, and has continued to describe the asset as without intrinsic value while maintaining that customers are entitled to buy what they wish.

The firm meanwhile built one of the largest institutional blockchain operations in banking. Onyx, established in 2020 and subsequently renamed Kinexys, operates a permissioned network on which JPM Coin, a deposit token representing dollars held at the bank, moves value between institutional accounts continuously rather than within banking hours, processing volumes in the billions of dollars daily. Its Liink network exchanges payment information between banks, and its Digital Financing business conducts intraday repurchase agreements settled on chain, which reduce the collateral tied up in the market.

The distinction the firm draws is between public permissionless cryptocurrencies, which it regards as speculative and as conduits for illicit finance, and the use of distributed ledgers within regulated arrangements, which it regards as a settlement technology. The distinction is coherent and has not prevented the firm being accused of hypocrisy by both sides.

In financial technology more broadly the firm has behaved as an incumbent with resources. It has acquired or invested in a considerable number of companies, including the payments company WePay, the healthcare payments company InstaMed, the British robo-adviser Nutmeg, the restaurant technology company The Infatuation, the carbon platform Cleantech and the renewable energy developer El Paso Electric's parent. It has also litigated and negotiated with the data aggregators that connect customer accounts to third-party applications, seeking payment for access that had been free, a dispute that determines whether open banking in the United States develops on terms set by regulators or by the largest banks.

Financial history

The firm's results since 2005 describe an institution that grew through every environment. Net income was approximately US$8.5 billion in 2005, fell to US$5.6 billion in 2008, recovered to US$17.4 billion in 2010, and rose through the following decade to US$29.1 billion in 2019, US$48.3 billion in 2021, and above US$50 billion in 2023 and 2024, figures that exceed the profit of any bank in history and of all but a small number of companies in any industry.

Its assets grew from approximately US$1.2 trillion at the time of the Bank One merger to approximately US$4.4 trillion. Its market capitalisation, around US$140 billion in 2005, exceeded US$800 billion by 2025, making it the most valuable bank in the world by a considerable margin and, at times, more valuable than the next several American banks combined.

The share price has compounded at a rate substantially above the banking sector and above the broader market over the period, and the firm has increased its dividend consistently and repurchased shares in very large volume, at times exceeding US$20 billion a year. Dimon has repeatedly declined to repurchase shares at prices he considered excessive, a discipline unusual among chief executives whose compensation depends on the share price.

The firm's cost discipline is conventionally measured by the overhead ratio, the proportion of revenue consumed by expenses, which it has maintained in the mid-fifties, better than most universal banks. Its efficiency derives substantially from scale: a bank processing twice as many transactions on the same systems has a structural advantage that no amount of management can substitute for.

Naming and identity

The firm's name preserves two of its predecessor institutions and discards more than a thousand others. The order, JPMorgan before Chase, reversed the relative sizes of the merging companies, Chase having been considerably the larger, and reflected the judgement that the Morgan name carried standing with corporate and institutional clients that no amount of marketing could create.

The rendering has varied. The corporate entity is JPMorgan Chase and Co.; the wholesale businesses trade as J.P. Morgan, with full stops, a form used continuously since the nineteenth century; the consumer bank trades as Chase; and the firm announced in 2025 that it would adopt JPMorganChase as a single word for corporate purposes, a change of the kind that occupies designers and nobody else.

The Chase octagon, introduced in 1961 and designed by Chermayeff and Geismar, was among the first abstract corporate marks adopted by an American bank and has survived with only minor revision for more than sixty years, an unusual persistence in an industry that has rebranded repeatedly. It is generally said to derive from the shape of a primitive coin or from a stylised water pipe, a reference to the Manhattan Company's original purpose, though the designers have described it as simply a geometric form chosen because it was distinctive and reproducible at small sizes.

Competition and the structure of American banking

American banking is unusually fragmented by international standards and unusually concentrated at the top. Approximately 4,000 banks remain, down from more than 14,000 in 1985, and the four largest, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, hold roughly 40 per cent of deposits between them.

The structure arose from the historic prohibition on interstate banking, which produced a very large number of small institutions, and from its removal in 1994, which produced three decades of consolidation. The statutory cap preventing any institution from acquiring another if the result would exceed ten per cent of national deposits was intended to arrest the process; JPMorgan Chase exceeded it through organic growth, which the cap does not address, and was granted a waiver to acquire First Republic.

The consequence is a market in which the largest banks compete principally with one another, with a long tail of regional and community institutions serving local markets, and in which the fastest-growing competitors are not banks at all: payment companies, asset managers running private credit funds, consumer lenders funded in capital markets, and the technology companies that intermediate the customer relationship.

Dimon has argued for years that this last category represents the real competitive threat and that regulation applying to banks and not to those performing the same functions produces risk that is moved rather than removed. Critics observe that the argument is convenient for a bank seeking lighter regulation, and that a substantial proportion of the activity concerned migrated from banks precisely because banks were found to have conducted it badly.

Corporate affairs

Jamie Dimon

Jamie Dimon has led the firm since 2005 and is the most prominent banker in the world. He worked for Sandy Weill from 1982, was instrumental in assembling the businesses that became Citigroup, and was dismissed in 1998 in a personal rupture that has been extensively documented.

His management style is direct to the point of abrasiveness, he is unusually visible in public policy debate, and his annual letter to shareholders, which runs to tens of thousands of words and ranges well beyond the firm's own affairs into immigration, education, infrastructure, geopolitics and regulation, is read across the industry and in government.

His influence has attracted criticism as well as respect. The combination of the chairman and chief executive roles has been challenged at the firm's annual meeting repeatedly and has survived, most notably in 2013 after the London Whale, when a substantial minority of shareholders voted to separate them. His relationships with successive administrations, and the periodic suggestion that he might take public office, have been the subject of continuous comment, and he has declined it consistently.

Employees and locations

The firm employs approximately 320,000 people, making it among the largest private employers in the United States. Its headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, a new building of 60 storeys completed in 2025 on the site of the demolished Union Carbide Building, is among the largest office towers constructed in New York in decades and was built to house some 10,000 employees.

Its principal locations besides New York are Columbus, Ohio; Plano, Texas; Wilmington, Delaware; Chicago; Jersey City; London, where Canary Wharf houses the European headquarters; Bournemouth; Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, where the firm employs more than 50,000 people; Manila; Buenos Aires; and Warsaw.

Dimon has been among the more insistent executives on the return of staff to offices, requiring five days a week for the great majority of employees from 2025, a position he has defended on the grounds of training, culture and creativity and which has produced internal objection.

Finances

JPMorgan Chase reported revenue of approximately US$180 billion and net income above US$50 billion in 2024, figures exceeding those of any bank in history. Its return on tangible common equity has been in the high teens or low twenties, well above its cost of capital and above its competitors, and its Common Equity Tier 1 ratio has been maintained comfortably above requirements.

Its earnings derive roughly evenly from net interest income, the difference between what it earns on assets and pays on liabilities, and from fee income across investment banking, asset management, payments and cards, a balance that makes results less sensitive to interest rates than those of banks dependent on lending alone.

The firm has argued persistently against the level of capital required of it, particularly the Basel III endgame proposals published in 2023, which it said would require substantially more capital without corresponding benefit and which were significantly reduced in the final rules.

Leadership and succession

JPMorgan Chase has had a small number of leaders relative to its size and complexity. Chase Manhattan was led by David Rockefeller from 1969 to 1981 and subsequently by Willard Butcher and Thomas Labrecque. Chemical was led by Walter Shipley, who became chief executive of the combined Chemical-Chase institution and handed to William Harrison in 1999. Harrison led JPMorgan Chase from the 2000 merger until 2005 and arranged the Bank One acquisition that brought his own successor.

Jamie Dimon has held the position since 31 December 2005 and the chairmanship since 2006, a tenure exceeding that of any other leader of a large American bank in the modern era and comparable in length only to that of Rockefeller at Chase.

Succession has been managed openly and at length. A series of senior executives have been identified publicly as candidates and have subsequently left to lead other institutions, among them Charlie Scharf, who became chief executive of Visa and then Wells Fargo; Bill Winters, who became chief executive of Standard Chartered; Jes Staley, who became chief executive of Barclays before his removal over the Epstein matter; Matt Zames; Mike Cavanagh, who became co-chief executive of Comcast; and Gordon Smith. The firm's ability to produce leaders for other institutions is generally cited as evidence of its management development, and its inability to retain them as the consequence of a chief executive who has not left.

The current arrangement places Marianne Lake in charge of consumer and community banking, Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh over the commercial and investment bank, Mary Erdoes over asset and wealth management and Jennifer Piepszak as chief operating officer, having withdrawn from consideration for the top role, and the board has indicated that a successor will be selected from among the operating leaders.

Culture and management practice

The firm's internal culture is conventionally described as demanding, hierarchical and unusually consistent, and derives substantially from Dimon's own practice.

He is known for a level of detailed engagement with operating numbers unusual in an institution of this size, for reading materials in advance and for conducting meetings by interrogation, and for an insistence on what the firm calls the management discipline: monthly business reviews covering every product and geography, a requirement that bad news be reported immediately, and a stated intolerance for the political manoeuvring he regards as the principal disease of large organisations.

The firm also maintains an operating committee of around fifteen people who meet frequently and are expected to understand businesses other than their own, and it rotates executives between divisions deliberately, a practice that has produced the leadership bench described above.

The external presentation of the culture is Dimon's annual shareholder letter, which since 2005 has grown into a document of considerable length addressing the firm's businesses and then, at greater length, the condition of the United States. Its subjects have included the mortgage market, capital regulation, the structure of the healthcare system, immigration policy, the deterioration of public infrastructure, the risks of fiscal deficits, the war in Ukraine and the effects of artificial intelligence. It is read as a statement of the establishment's view and is criticised on the same basis.

Political activity and public policy

JPMorgan Chase is among the largest corporate participants in American policy debate. It spends substantially on lobbying, employs former officials, and its political action committee distributes to both parties, and Dimon has for two decades been the industry's principal public advocate.

His positions have been consistent: that capital requirements are excessive and are driving activity into less supervised parts of the financial system; that the regulatory architecture, with several agencies supervising the same institution, produces contradiction and cost; that the United States requires investment in infrastructure, skills and housing supply; and, on subjects unrelated to banking, that policy should be made by people who understand how businesses actually operate.

He has described himself as a capitalist and a Democrat, has declined suggestions that he stand for public office or serve in an administration, and has been consulted by presidents of both parties. His criticism of particular policies, and his firm's business before the agencies that make them, has produced the objection that no bank of this size should have an executive with this degree of access, an objection he has not directly answered.

The firm also conducts substantial research and data publication through the JPMorgan Chase Institute, using anonymised transaction data from its own customers to produce evidence on household cash flows, small business survival, the effects of stimulus payments and local economic conditions, work that has been used by policymakers and academics and which no public agency could produce because the data does not exist elsewhere.

Climate and sustainability

JPMorgan Chase has been identified in successive reports by environmental organisations as the largest financier of fossil fuel extraction in the world, having provided several hundred billion dollars of financing to the sector since 2016.

The firm's stated position is that it finances the energy system as it exists, that the companies producing hydrocarbons are also those with the capital and engineering capability to build alternatives, and that withdrawing financing would transfer the business to institutions subject to less disclosure without reducing production. It has set intensity targets for the emissions associated with its lending in several sectors, committed to facilitate US$2.5 trillion of financing for climate and sustainable development by 2030, and established a Center for Carbon Transition.

It left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance in January 2025, alongside every other large American bank, following political pressure from state officials who had characterised such arrangements as collusive and had threatened to exclude participating banks from state business. The departures were criticised by environmental organisations as capitulation and defended by the banks as a change of form rather than of substance.

Shareholder resolutions on climate have been put to the firm's meeting annually and have been defeated.

Diversity and employment

The firm's US$30 billion racial equity commitment of 2020 covered mortgage lending and refinancing for Black and Hispanic households, financing for affordable rental housing, capital for small businesses in under-served communities, and spending with diverse suppliers, and the firm has reported progress against the components annually.

It has also faced litigation and enforcement over discriminatory practices, including the 2017 Justice Department settlement of US$55 million over mortgage pricing and the 2018 settlement with Black financial advisers, and reporting has documented incidents including the recorded treatment of a Black customer in an Arizona branch in 2019, which produced a public apology and management changes.

Its employment practices generally have become a subject of attention as the firm has grown into one of the largest private employers in the United States. It raised its minimum wage in stages to between US$20 and US$25 an hour depending on location, expanded apprenticeship and second-chance hiring for people with criminal records, and publishes pay gap data. Its return-to-office requirement from 2025, applying five days a week to almost all employees, was among the strictest imposed by any large employer and prompted an internal petition and considerable external comment.

Notable people

Figures associated with the firm and its predecessors include J. P. Morgan and J. P. Morgan Jr.; Thomas W. Lamont, who managed the firm's international business between the wars and negotiated with governments on its behalf; Russell Leffingwell; David Rockefeller, whose 35 years at Chase made him among the most internationally connected private citizens of the twentieth century; Walter Shipley and William Harrison, who assembled the modern institution through mergers; and Jamie Dimon.

Sandy Weill, who built Citigroup and from whom Dimon learned and by whom he was dismissed, is a central figure in the firm's history without ever having worked for it, since the rupture between the two produced Dimon's availability to Bank One and therefore the leadership of JPMorgan Chase.

Blythe Masters, who worked on the development of credit default swaps at J.P. Morgan in the 1990s, is associated with an innovation whose later misuse contributed materially to the financial crisis, and whose original purpose, transferring credit risk off a bank's balance sheet, was both legitimate and, in the form the market subsequently took, catastrophic.

Controversies

Mortgage securities and the crisis settlements

The November 2013 settlement of US$13 billion resolved claims that the firm and the institutions it had acquired had misrepresented the quality of the loans underlying mortgage securities sold to investors. It comprised a US$2 billion civil penalty, US$4 billion in consumer relief and the remainder to investors and state authorities, and the statement of facts accompanying it recorded that employees had been aware that loans did not meet stated standards and that the securities had been sold nonetheless.

The apportionment of responsibility was contested. Dimon argued publicly that approximately 80 per cent of the conduct concerned Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, which the firm had acquired at the government's request, and that penalising it for their conduct would deter any bank from assisting in a future crisis. The Department of Justice's position was that an acquirer takes the liabilities with the assets.

Separate settlements over mortgage servicing, including the National Mortgage Settlement of 2012 and actions over robo-signing, in which foreclosure documents were executed in bulk without the verification they attested to, added several billion dollars.

Bernard Madoff

JPMorgan Chase and its predecessors held Bernard Madoff's principal business account for approximately twenty years. In January 2014 the firm entered a deferred prosecution agreement and paid US$2.6 billion, including a US$1.7 billion forfeiture, over two felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering programme and failing to file a suspicious activity report.

The record showed that the firm's own employees had noted the implausibility of Madoff's returns and the pattern of his account, that a report had been filed with British authorities in 2008 stating that the returns were too good to be true, and that no corresponding report was filed in the United States. The firm did not admit that any employee had known of the fraud.

Jeffrey Epstein

The firm banked Jeffrey Epstein from 1998 until 2013, five years after his 2008 conviction, and internal communications disclosed in litigation showed that compliance staff had raised concerns repeatedly and that the relationship had been retained, principally because Epstein referred wealthy clients. Jes Staley, the executive who managed the relationship and who later became chief executive of Barclays, was found by British regulators in 2023 to have misled them about the nature of his dealings with Epstein and was banned from senior positions in British finance.

In 2023 the firm settled a class action brought by Epstein's victims for US$290 million and a suit brought by the United States Virgin Islands for US$75 million. It did not admit liability, and it pursued Staley for indemnity in a separate action that was settled.

Market conduct

In September 2020 the firm paid US$920 million, the largest penalty ever imposed for spoofing, to resolve charges that traders on its precious metals and treasuries desks had for eight years placed orders they intended to cancel in order to move prices, and entered a deferred prosecution agreement. Several traders were convicted, and the head of the precious metals desk received a prison sentence.

The firm has also paid penalties over foreign exchange manipulation, over the recommendation of its own funds to clients without disclosing the conflict, over the Bernie Madoff and London Whale matters described above, and, in 2021, US$125 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission and US$75 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the use by employees of personal messaging applications for business communications, the largest of a set of penalties imposed across the industry for the same conduct.

Other matters

The firm has been criticised over its financing of fossil fuel extraction, being consistently identified in reports by environmental organisations as the largest such lender in the world, a position it defends on the grounds that the transition requires the participation of existing energy producers and that withdrawing capital does not reduce demand.

It has faced claims concerning the treatment of Black employees and customers, settling a Securities and Exchange Commission matter in 2017 and a class action by Black financial advisers in 2018 for US$24 million; and it paid US$55 million in 2017 to settle Justice Department claims that it had charged Black and Hispanic borrowers higher mortgage rates than white borrowers of comparable credit.

Its acquisition of Frank, a college financial aid platform, for US$175 million in 2021 produced litigation in which the firm alleged that its founder Charlie Javice had fabricated the great majority of the four million users claimed; she was convicted of fraud in 2025.

Regulation

JPMorgan Chase is supervised by the Federal Reserve as a bank holding company, by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as a national bank, by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as an insured institution, by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for its markets activities, and by national authorities in every jurisdiction in which it operates.

It is designated a global systemically important bank and carries the highest capital surcharge of any institution, reflecting its size, complexity, cross-jurisdictional activity and the degree to which other institutions depend on it. It is subject to annual stress testing, to resolution planning requiring it to demonstrate that it could be wound down without public funds, and to the total loss-absorbing capacity requirements designed to ensure that its creditors rather than taxpayers bear losses.

Dimon has been among the most prominent critics of the accumulated weight of post-crisis regulation, arguing that capital requirements have been raised beyond what safety requires, that the multiplicity of overlapping regulators produces contradiction, and that activity has been driven into less regulated parts of the financial system where it is harder to observe. The counter-argument, made by regulators and by academic economists, is that the largest banks would not exist in their current form without the implicit public support their status confers and that capital is the price of it.

The question of whether the firm is too large has been raised repeatedly, including by Federal Reserve officials, and its deposit share exceeds the statutory ten per cent cap on acquisitions, which is why the First Republic transaction required a waiver.

Philanthropy and public commitments

The JPMorgan Chase Foundation and the firm's corporate responsibility programme commit substantial sums to economic development, and the firm announced in 2020 a US$30 billion commitment over five years to advance racial equity through mortgage and small business lending, affordable housing finance, and supplier and employment measures.

Its Detroit programme, begun in 2014 with an initial US$100 million and subsequently enlarged, provided capital and technical assistance to that city following its bankruptcy and has been cited as a model of corporate urban investment, though evaluations of such programmes generally find effects that are real and modest.

The firm also operates one of the largest corporate employee volunteering programmes and funds apprenticeship and skills initiatives, and its research arm, the JPMorgan Chase Institute, uses anonymised data from the firm's own accounts to publish research on household finance, small business cash flows and local economies, producing evidence that is not otherwise available at that scale.

Predecessor institutions

JPMorgan Chase's corporate genealogy incorporates more than 1,200 institutions, and the firm maintains a published family tree of them. The principal lines are as follows.

The Manhattan Company (1799), chartered by Aaron Burr as a water utility with a clause permitting banking, became the Bank of the Manhattan Company and merged with Chase National in 1955.

Chemical Bank (1824) grew from a manufacturer's charter into one of the largest American banks, and its management ultimately controlled the combined institution: Chemical acquired Manufacturers Hanover in 1991 and Chase Manhattan in 1996, taking the acquired name each time.

Manufacturers Hanover (1961) was itself the product of a merger between Manufacturers Trust and the Hanover Bank, and had been the fourth largest American bank.

Chase National Bank (1877), named for Salmon P. Chase, merged with the Rockefeller-controlled Equitable Trust in 1930 and became the world's largest bank.

J.P. Morgan and Co. (1871 as Drexel, Morgan) financed American industrialisation and remains the source of the name under which the firm conducts its wholesale business.

First National Bank of Chicago (1863) and NBD Bancorp of Detroit merged in 1995, combined with Banc One of Columbus in 1998 to form Bank One, which JPMorgan Chase acquired in 2004.

Bear Stearns (1923) was among the most aggressive Wall Street firms and the only one to decline to participate in the 1998 rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, a refusal recalled when it required rescue itself.

Washington Mutual (1889) grew from a Seattle savings institution into the largest thrift in the country and failed in the largest bank failure in American history.

First Republic Bank (1985) served wealthy clients in coastal cities with very large mortgages at low rates funded by uninsured deposits, a combination that proved fatal when interest rates rose and depositors moved.

The list also includes Robert Fleming, Hambrecht and Quist, Cazenove's American operations, Highbridge Capital, Instinet's clearing business, Bank One's card operations and a very large number of regional institutions absorbed over two centuries.

Brands

The firm operates a deliberate two-brand structure. Chase is used for consumer and commercial banking in the United States and is among the most recognised brands in American retail financial services. J.P. Morgan is used for investment banking, markets, asset management, private banking and commercial banking outside the United States, and carries associations of institutional seriousness and of very long standing that the firm has protected carefully.

The division is unusual in that a single company maintains two identities of comparable strength aimed at different customers, and it reflects the judgement that the qualities a household wants from a bank and those a sovereign wealth fund wants are not the same and would be diluted by combination. The blue octagon used for Chase dates from 1961 and is among the earliest examples of abstract corporate identity in American banking, and the Morgan name has been in continuous commercial use since 1871.

Competition

JPMorgan Chase competes across more businesses than any other financial institution.

In American consumer banking it competes with Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, with the regional banks, and increasingly with financial technology companies and with the deposit-taking operations of brokerages. In credit cards it competes with American Express, Capital One, which acquired Discover in 2025, and Citigroup.

In investment banking and markets it competes with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and the European banks, of which Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank are the principal remaining competitors, and with the independent advisory firms in mergers and acquisitions.

In asset and wealth management it competes with BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, UBS and the private banks.

Its structural advantage is that very few competitors are present in all of these, and that the businesses feed one another: a corporate client's treasury business supports the lending relationship, which supports the advisory mandate, whose principals become private bank clients. The corresponding risk is that an institution of this complexity is difficult to manage and difficult to resolve, which is the substance of the regulatory concern about it.

Assessment

JPMorgan Chase is the most successful large bank of the modern era by almost any measure: profitability, market share, credit ratings, the durability of its leadership and its performance through crises that damaged or destroyed its competitors.

The reasons generally given are the conservatism of its balance sheet, which Dimon has maintained at a cost in returns during good periods and which has repeatedly permitted the firm to act when others could not; the breadth of its businesses, which diversifies earnings and provides information; the scale of its technology investment; and a management continuity extending over twenty years in an industry where five is more usual.

The criticisms are equally consistent. The firm has paid tens of billions of dollars in penalties over two decades for conduct spanning mortgage securities, money laundering controls, market manipulation, discriminatory lending and the maintenance of relationships with clients whose activities its own staff had identified as suspect, which suggests either that the controls of the best-run bank in the world are inadequate or that the penalties are a cost of business. It has grown through each of the crises of the century by acquiring failed institutions at the government's request, so that the response to excessive concentration has repeatedly been more concentration. And its resolution in a genuine failure, though planned in detail, has never been tested and could not be without consequences for the world economy.

Both accounts are accurate, and the tension between them describes the position of large banking generally rather than of this firm in particular.

Timeline

Key dates include the Manhattan Company's charter on 2 April 1799; the founding of Chemical Bank in 1824, Chase National in 1877 and Drexel, Morgan in 1871; the formation of United States Steel in 1901; the Panic of 1907; the Pujo hearings of 1912; the Glass-Steagall separation and the founding of Morgan Stanley in 1935; the Chase Manhattan merger of 1955; David Rockefeller's leadership from 1969; Chemical's acquisitions of Manufacturers Hanover in 1991 and Chase in 1996; the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999; the JPMorgan Chase merger completed on 31 December 2000; the Bank One acquisition in July 2004 and Jamie Dimon's succession on 31 December 2005; the acquisition of Bear Stearns in March 2008 and of Washington Mutual on 25 September 2008; the TARP investment and its repayment in 2009; the London Whale losses in 2012; the US$13 billion mortgage settlement in November 2013 and the US$2.6 billion Madoff settlement in January 2014; the spoofing penalty in September 2020; the Epstein settlements in 2023; the acquisition of First Republic on 1 May 2023; and the opening of 270 Park Avenue in 2025.