- Jamie Dimon summoned JPMorgan staff back to the office at 9 p.m. On a Thursday night following a call from Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz, in which he said he needed $30 billion. Dimon discussed on a recent podcast how he prepared his bank for the 2008 financial crisis when no one else saw it coming.
The 2008 financial crisis plunged everyone from CEOs of major companies to individual homeowners into a state of chaos—and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon was in the trenches as well.
The boss of America’s largest bank was tasked with steering the lender through the economic meltdown after landing the top job a couple of years prior.
But the billionaire banker said he had been prepared for the crash and subsequent recession as he had seen his father—a broker—navigating slumps in the 1970s and 1980s.
As such, Dimon learned the lesson of “serve your clients, do a great job in the downs—not just the ups. Don’t celebrate the rising tide, be prepared for the tide to go out.”
The reason JPMorgan therefore fared better than other lenders, Dimon said, was because he was tough on capital, liquidity, and profitability as soon as he was CEO.
“I knew that if the shit had hit the fan early on, we would’ve had a real problem,” Dimon told the How Leaders Lead podcast in an episode released this week.
Under his stewardship, risk management was also deployed more widely, with extreme stress tests put in place to ensure that JPMorgan would survive in the face of a financial crisis.
Some colleagues told Dimon such an eventuality would never come to pass, he added: “[But] I said, ‘I don’t care if it happens [or not] … I want to know if it happens that we survive to serve our client.’
“Then the shit hit the fan, but we were ready by then.”
That preparedness also meant Dimon had built an “army” of workers to navigate such an outcome.
“People say, ‘What did you do differently?’ Nothing,” Dimon told podcast host David Novak, former PepsiCo executive and Yum! Brands CEO. “We already had teams, we already had an army, we had things to go.”
The only thing that changed was the meeting of the risk committee, which, prior to the crisis, met once a week for a couple of hours.
When the market began to collapse, “all of a sudden … it was meeting five times a day, every day, for a year,” Dimon recalled.
“And I mean, every day. I mean going to 10 p.m. And 5 a.m. Because you had Asia—we had to be up for that. We were on calls all the time with regulators of governments and clients, but the machine was working.”
Dimon, who was paid $39 million for his work in 2024, said his team was making “battlefield decisions” for clients, highlighting which individuals could deal with the stress and which couldn’t.
A $30 billion call
Dimon, 68, said one of the most nail-biting moments of the 2008 crisis was when he received a call from then-CEO of Bear Stearns Alan Schwartz.
The investment bank and brokerage had been hemorrhaging money throughout the first quarter of 2008, losing more than $19 billion from its market cap in a little over a year.
On March 13, 2008, Dimon was in a Greek restaurant with his parents when his phone rang at around 9 p.m.
He stepped out of the restaurant, and Schwartz told him: “Jamie, I need $30 billion tonight, otherwise we’re going to go bankrupt in Asia in the morning.”
“Even I said, ‘Alan, I don’t even know how to get $30 billion,’” Dimon recounted. “‘But have you spoken to the secretary of the Treasury?’ I called up our senior people and said, ‘Get dressed and go to the office.’”
Hundreds of JPMorgan staffers returned to their desks, and as they had done for their own books at JPMorgan, went through Bear Stearns’s client list line by line to see if they could finance them until the weekend.
“We did six months of work in two days, and bought Bear Stearns that night,” Dimon said. “That kind of thing is the moment where you’re breathless.”