Dimon Says Regulators Make It Difficult for Companies to Go Public

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Tuesday (Oct. 8) that regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. have made it difficult for companies to go public.

Speaking in a Bloomberg Television interview from London, Dimon said rising expenses from litigation and regulatory filings have contributed to the number of initial public offerings (IPOs) lagging at a time when public market valuations have surged, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

“I think it would be incumbent for us to make it easier and cheaper to go public, and we have to figure out a way to do that,” Dimon said, per the report.

Dimon also addressed bank mergers during the interview, saying that more midsize banks in the U.S. should be allowed to merge and that the government should not get involved “in every single little bank deal,” according to the report.

On other topics, Dimon said that inflationary forces remain in place even though the Federal Reserve was right to cut the interest rate last month, that geopolitics are his biggest concern, and that the U.S. deficit is inflationary and must be deal with, per the report.

Dimon said Sept. 20 — two days after the Federal Reserve lowered its benchmark interest rate by one-half percentage point — that he is skeptical that the U.S. economy will see a soft landing.

“I am a little more skeptical than other people. I give it lower odds,” Dimon said during The Atlantic Festival.

Dimon has been warning for over a year that inflation could remain sticky due to deficit spending, a “remilitarization of the world” and other drivers.

In April, Dimon detailed concerns over inflation’s impact and said that “persistent inflationary pressures” and other factors like wars, geopolitical tensions and quantitative tightening will be unpredictable, despite many economic indicators continuing to be favorable.

His remarks included in JPMorgan Chase’s April 12 earnings release said, “We have never truly experienced the full effect of quantitative tightening on this scale. We do not know how these factors will play out, but we must prepare the firm for a wide range of political environments.”