Too Big to Fail [42]
Unlike Steel, Dimon had not engaged in any Murder Board role playing in his own Park Avenue office. Instead, he chose to do some last-minute preparation in the conference room, which had been lent to him by a Senate staffer so he wouldn’t have to wait in the gallery.
Dimon came up with a simple, clear line that he thought explained the acquisition of Bear Stearns succinctly: “Buying a house is not the same as buying a house on fire.” That would do it; everyone would understand that.
The message he sought to convey was straightforward: Although Fed and Treasury officials may have deserved scrutiny for their actions, he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t his job to protect the interests of the U.S. taxpayer, but only those of his shareholders. If anything, he was a little concerned that the Bear deal presented more problems for them than it was worth.
Despite his public show of humility, Dimon was well aware of what a coup the deal had been for him. From the perspective of the financial media, at least, the Bear acquisition was viewed as a home run. They had always had a bit of an obsession with him and tended to paint him as a glorified penny pincher, an executive who would cancel the office’s newspaper subscriptions to cut costs—not a real financial visionary. Now, with JP Morgan leapfrogging to the very top of the banking business, Dimon was being regarded as something akin to the reincarnation of John Pierpont Morgan, the nineteenth-century financier who helped ease the Panic of 1907.
Dimon, the New York Times said, “has suddenly become the most talked about—and arguably the most powerful—banker in the world today.” For the Wall Street Journal he was “quickly becoming Wall Street’s banker of last resort. “Barron’s opted for a simple: “All hail Jamie Dimon!”
With all the adulation he had been receiving, Dimon had become almost giddy at the prospect of speaking at today’s hearing. While most CEOs dread being hauled in front of Congress—Alan D. Schwartz of Bear Stearns had spent days reviewing his testimony with his high-powered Washington lawyer, Robert S. Bennett—Dimon considered his first chance to testify in front of Congress to be a signal honor.
The night before the hearing, he called his parents to make sure they would watch it on TV.
Jamie Dimon’s success is not an enormous surprise, as he is a third-generation banker. His grandfather had immigrated to New York from Smyrna, Greece, changed his name from Papademetriou to Dimon, and found work as a stockbroker, which at the time was hardly considered a glamorous job. Jamie’s father, Theodore—who met his mother, Themis, playing spin-the-bottle when they were twelve years old—was also a broker, and a very successful one. Theodore had done so well that he was able to move his family from Queens to an apartment on Park Avenue, where he raised Jamie and his brothers, Peter and Ted. One day, when Jamie was nine years old, his father asked his sons what they wanted to be when they grew up. Peter, the eldest, said he hoped to become a doctor. Ted, Jamie’s twin, said he didn’t know. But Jamie knew and announced self-assuredly, “I want to be rich.”
After attending the Browning School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Jamie studied psychology and economics at Tufts University; later, at Harvard Business School, he developed a reputation—as much for his arrogance as for his intelligence. Just a few weeks into the fall semester of his first year there, the professor in an introductory class on operations was going through a case study on supply chain management at a cranberry cooperative. Midway through Dimon stood up and interrupted him with, “I think you’re wrong!” As the startled professor looked on, Dimon walked to the front of the class and wrote the solution to the supply problem on the blackboard. Dimon was right, the professor sheepishly acknowledged.
After a summer working at Goldman Sachs, Dimon sought career advice from the portly, cigar-chomping, serial deal maker named Sandy Weill. Jamie’s family