Jamie Dimon, the longtime chief of JP Morgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, was under oath. The occasion was a May 2023 deposition related to several lawsuits filed against his bank over its history of involvement with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The question put to Dimon was straightforward: “When did you first learn that Jeffrey Epstein was a customer of JPMorgan?”

His answer seemed clear: “I don’t recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein until the stories broke sometime in 2019” – meaning the stories about Epstein’s arrest by federal authorities in the summer of 2019 and his death a month later in a Manhattan jail cell.

Clear, but believable? This exchange can be found in the US justice department’s Epstein files, with the digital “Epstein library”, as it’s called, tabulating 204 “results” (separate documents, though some duplicative) for Dimon, at current count, and 9,404 for his bank.

Epstein was a client of JP Morgan Chase for 15 years, from 1998 to 2013, for the last eight of which Dimon was the bank’s CEO, the position he still holds. And Epstein was not just any client, but a prized one of JPMorgan’s private bank for ultra-wealthy customers. A JP Morgan report, belatedly filed with the treasury department, flagged about 4,700 Epstein-related “suspicious activity” transactions totaling $1.1bn, including payments to women from post-Soviet countries. Through Dimon’s bank, Epstein wired hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian banks.

Not only that, a top former JP Morgan executive, Jes Staley, undermined Dimon’s sworn testimony – claiming to have communicated with Dimon on Epstein years before the 2019 arrest. And a current senior bank executive, Mary Erdoes, often said to be on Dimon’s shortlist of candidates to succeed him as CEO, was also actively involved with the Epstein account and was aware, as documents show, of Epstein’s court-affirmed status as a high-risk sex offender.

And back in 2010, two years after Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14, an aide to Epstein asked him in an email whether snacks or a meal should be prepared “for your evening appointments” with Staley, Dimon and Lord Peter Mandelson, at that time business secretary in Britain’s Labour government. Mandelson apparently aimed to get Dimon to “mildly threaten” Britain’s then chancellor, Alistair Darling, to force a retreat on a proposed supertax on banker bonuses.

It is no stretch to call Jamie Dimon a legend: the Voice of Wall Street and its Senior Statesman, easily the most recognized name in American and perhaps even global banking. “Jamie” – the given name is enough to garner a knowing nod in financial, political and media circles – acquired his legendhood in the 2008-2009 financial crisis, when he worked closely with Washington to stave off a total collapse of the banking system. He was the Last Man Standing, in the title of the financial journalist Duff McDonald’s laudatory biography, published in 2009. The book’s final sentence says it all: “At a time when true Wall Street leaders seem in desperately short supply, Jamie Dimon has emerged as a moral and managerial compass for both his industry and the country itself.”

Yet even legends are flesh-and-blood people who can screw up, to use the blunt language Dimon himself is known for. It’s time, then, to reconsider this icon. One month shy of 70, Dimon is in his Last Act, no more than a few years, he says, from stepping down from his reign as CEO, now in its 21st year. But this final stretch of his career is shaping up as a bumpy one, as Dimon tries to navigate an array of acute challenges that relate more to America’s turbulent political environment – the raging anti-elite populism of both right and left – than to the demands he faces as the manager of an enormous company active in just about every corner of the financial universe. With Donald Trump himself now demanding that prosecutors investigate Epstein’s ties to Dimon’s bank, Dimon’s once-sterling legacy stands at risk of being tarnished.

“There’s got to be more accountability from the top on down,” the Democratic senator Ron Wyden, the powerful ranking member of the Senate finance committee, told me. “Epstein was not an anonymous customer with a few thousand bucks in his checking account, he was a high-value, high-profile client of white-glove private banks, and a known criminal. It’s simply not good enough for leaders at those banks to say they never had an inkling that something was off.”

Dimon has warm personal ties with some figures in Congress. Ro Khanna, the House Democrat from California, recalled meeting with Dimon, at the banker’s office in New York, to ask for support for the city’s south Asian cab drivers – Khanna is the son of immigrants from India – in a bitter dispute with Uber. “I found him empathetic and willing to help,” Khanna told me. But when I asked the congressman, a leader of the drive to compel the justice department to release the Epstein files, whether he was inclined to believe Dimon on not being aware of Epstein until 2019, he demurred. “I will follow the evidence wherever it leads,” he said.

“I think what happened to these women is atrocious, and I’m horrified at the amount of human trafficking that takes place,” Dimon said in his 2023 deposition. “And I wouldn’t mind personally apologizing to them,” he added, for whatever role his bank could have played to report Epstein’s banking activities to the authorities quicker.

After poring over Dimon’s deposition, I did feel somewhat jarred on listening to Dimon, three years earlier, on the Coffee with the Greats podcast of Miles Fisher. In the deposition, asked whether he read the New York Post, for which the Epstein saga was prime tabloid fare, Dimon replied: “I don’t really read the New York Post.” But on the podcast, he said, “I read quickly the Daily News” at the start of every day and then “quickly the New York Post because everyone reads the New York Post”.

Simply appearing in the Epstein files does not establish guilt. Individuals may be swept up by a stray reference, an email correspondence or an associate’s empty boast.

But Dimon’s professed ignorance of Epstein’s activities as a JPMorgan Chase client is all the more remarkable given his reputation for vacuuming up every stray bit of information in any organization he is leading. “He will go several layers down,” his longtime friend Hans Morris, who worked alongside Dimon decades ago at the Smith Barney brokerage, told me. “He likes to know the facts. And whoever did the work does the talking.” Morris, it should be noted, was speaking in general terms, not in response to a particular question on Epstein.

Meanwhile, Trump, a tireless stoker of populist flames, ever in search of retribution, is making things personal with Dimon. On 22 January, he sued Dimon, as well as JPMorgan Chase, in state court in Florida, seeking $5bn in civil damages for terminating him as a client after the riot at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. Trump alleges that he and family members were put on a “blacklist” as a “result of political discrimination”. That would be one grievance. Maybe, also, Trump hasn’t forgotten the time, back in 2018, in his first term, when Dimon ranted against him, incautiously declaring: “I’m as tough as he is, I’m smarter than he is.” In 2024, Dimon’s wife canvassed door-to-door for Kamala Harris.

The lawsuit, which the bank says “has no merit”, follows attempts by Dimon to keep things peaceful in Trump’s second turn in office, the occasional barb notwithstanding, as in the banker’s criticism at Davos this year of the heavy-handed tactics of US Immigration and Customers Enforcement Officers. “I don’t like what I’m seeing, with five grown men beating up little women,” he said. The two have met amicably in the White House to discuss matters like interest rates. Dimon “is not trying to piss off anyone”, a source close to the bank said.

The effort to reach a pragmatic understanding with as difficult a figure as Trump is vintage Dimon. He is, at bottom, an accommodator, his remarkable run a testament to the principle that the race is not to the swift but to the adaptable. “If I was the government, I’d close it down,” he said of cryptocurrencies in 2023. But in a partnership between his bank and Coinbase announced last year, Chase credit card holders will be able to use their cards to buy on Coinbase not only bitcoin but also even nonsense meme tokens like Dogecoin – and they also will be able to redeem their Chase Ultimate Reward points for the USDC stablecoin.

Throughout his career, Dimon has shown a remarkable ability for “threading the needle” between his personal feelings on a matter and the needs of his bank’s customers, Mike Mayo, the veteran banking industry analyst, now at Wells Fargo Securities, told me. “Jamie Dimon can be a bully,” Mayo said, noting an incident when Dimon berated him for, in Dimon’s mind, a bad call on a stock. But he also said that Dimon will sometimes call him, out of the blue, to patch things up. In any event, as not only the CEO of the bank but also the longtime chairman of its board, Dimon does things his own way at the bank, Mayo said, unquestioned by the other directors. “No one is keeping tabs on Jamie Dimon,” the analyst told me.

In the end, Dimon may be judged by the “last act” of his Last Act – the handoff to a successor. Because JPMorgan Chase has become synonymous with his name and leadership, this won’t be an easy feat, no matter whom he chooses. “I don’t think it’s the case that JPMorgan Chase is going to do well after Jamie Dimon,” Simon Johnson, the Nobel prize-winning MIT economist and sharp critic of banking concentration in the US, told me.

A caricaturist’s drawing would highlight the nose and the ears, both of which are prominent. There’s that gravelly voice in which his upbringing in New York City’s borough of Queens can be detected, and his penchant for speaking in short, punchy sentences, sometimes with profanity (all of which, including the Queens part, can also be said of Trump). Never mind about bankers’ pinstripes: he’s often seen without a tie and in denim. “He is very approachable,” Thomas Hoenig, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a former vice-chair of the FDIC, told me.

For my own efforts to gain face time with Dimon, I began with a congenial 30-minute phone call with Joe Evangelisti, the bank’s head of media relations and a diligent guardian of access to his longtime boss. We exchanged the names of our respective dogs and agreed to try to meet in New York. So we did, several months later, at his office, after I sent Dimon, care of Evangelista, an eight-page list of questions, including Epstein-related ones. Knowing of Dimon’s fondness for reading history, I handed Evangelista a copy of my 2017 book, Madness Rules the Hour, on 1860 America on the verge of civil war. “Madness yesterday – and today?” I wrote in my inscription. Evangelista promised to give the book to his boss, but I never got the chance to interview Dimon.

Evangelista did, however, answer on the record some of my questions addressed to Dimon. As for Epstein: “We wish we never worked with him and we didn’t help him commit his heinous crimes,” he said. As for anything new divulged by the Epstein files: “Our CEO never dealt with Epstein or met him, and the files back that up.” With regard, specifically, to the email from Epstein’s assistant, suggesting that Dimon had an evening appointment with Epstein, Evangelista said: “That information was incorrect. Our CEO was never invited to that meeting or dinner.” On whether Dimon retained confidence in Mary Erdoes, whose name records 272 “results” in the justice department’s Epstein library – and whose name still appears to be on JP Morgan’s watchers’ shortlist of successors, Evangelista said: “Mary is one of the most respected executives in finance today and is deeply valued by our CEO, her colleagues and clients. Dimon has never announced a ‘shortlist’ of successors.”

On JP Morgan’s embrace of cryptocurrencies: “Jamie’s been clear that our customers have the right to buy the assets of their choice,” Evangelista told me. As for the claim the board is not keeping tabs on Dimon: “Not true. The board is completely independent, with Jamie as the only insider.”

If you want to know what Dimon thinks directly from the banker’s mouth, it helps, no doubt, to have personal connections. “My mother is friendly with Dimon’s parents,” Roger Lowenstein, the bestselling author, disclosed in “Jamie Dimon: America’s Least-Hated Banker”, his 2010 profile of Dimon for the New York Times, which drew on a months-long entrée into Dimon’s “inner sanctum”. “Dimon sees himself as a patriotic citizen who helped his country in a time of crisis,” Lowenstein writes at the top of the piece, adding at the end: “It has been a while, of course, since a banker dared to speak of his trade as a public service.”

Dimon cultivates his not-just-a-banker image by offering, in his annual Letter to Shareholders, wide-ranging assessments of the global political and economic situation, his Olympian pronouncements retailed by the cliquish New York financial press. After one such letter went out in spring 2024, he sat for a videotaped interview with Emma Tucker, editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal. Referring to his musings on the need for “revitalizing our global architecture”, as in a “reimagined Bretton Woods”, Tucker told him that this was the “kind of big thinking you don’t often hear from world leaders”.

He received similarly gauzy treatment from Lesley Stahl in her profile, last January, for CBS News’ Sunday Morning. Treating Dimon as an all-purpose American oracle, she asked him to account for the loss of popular faith in national institutions like our courts. Asked to explain his longstanding skepticism towards bitcoin, he replied: “It’s used heavily by sex traffickers, money launderers.” Sex traffickers? Here was a cue for Stahl to follow up by observing that Dimon’s bank catered to Epstein’s financial needs. Who needs bitcoin if you’ve got an in with JPMorgan Chase? Nope. The Valentine continued to the end without a single tough question on any aspect of Dimon’s stewardship of his bank – and the same for the extended, 40-minute interview Sunday Morning put online.

Big-time global banking, it can be noted, is less “public service” than a perpetual battle for dominance between turf-obsessed rhinos. Dimon is served well by his strategic patience. As he took over as JP Morgan Chase’s CEO, at the start of 2006, a boom in the US housing market was cresting, with large financial institutions of all types loaded up with securitized subprime mortgages and other exotic products. Dimon notably acted with restraint compared with Wall Street peers like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in not permitting the investment side of his bank to gorge on securities that, in the end, proved highly toxic. In March, 2008, he worked with the Fed and Treasury to acquire Bear Stearns, which was, shockingly, at risk of bankruptcy. “All hail Jamie Dimon!” Barron’s wrote, saluting “The Deal – Rhymes with Steal – of a Lifetime”.

The “steal” was that the US Federal Reserve, not Dimon’s bank, purchased some $30bn worth of Bear Stearns’ most toxic assets. JPMorgan Chase, like a number of other big banks, eventually received a multibillion-dollar capital infusion – a federal government lifeline – as part of Washington’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as Tarp.

JPMorgan Chase repaid the $25bn it received in Tarp assistance “in full and with dividends to US taxpayers”, as Dimon said at the time. Still, Tarp and the handling of the financial crisis gave birth to the rightwing, populist Tea Party movement, as many Americans wondered why a bank like Dimon’s got rescued while their retirement plans did not, and the Tea Party morphed into Maga.

The left was angry, too. In 2011, in the heat of the Occupy Wall Street protests, protesters surrounded a Seattle hotel in which Dimon was giving a speech, their aim to flush him outside and administer a “citizen’s arrest”. Police in riot gear dispersed the crowd with pepper spray. But in his speech inside the Sheraton, the banker offered sympathy for the protesters. “They’re right,” he said. “In general, these big institutions of America let them down.”

Seventeen years after the crisis, the numbers attest to Dimon’s success at, not merely steering his bank through the treacherous waters of that time, but using the crisis to inaugurate an era of accelerated growth. Size definitely matters in banking. JPMorgan Chase, with a network of about 5,000 branches extending to every state of the continental US, has an industry-leading market share of about 16% of the total deposits in US banks, up from about 10% before he became CEO. Domestic assets alone are on the order of $3tn. Worldwide, more than 300,000 employees toil under Dimon, compared to a headcount of about 170,000 when he took charge as CEO. About 10,000 of them work at the bank’s new global headquarters at 270 Park Ave, a freshly constructed sixty-story Manhattan skyscraper, designed by Foster + Partners with the close involvement of Dimon – a glass-and-steel monument to his towering stature.

Dimon prides himself on his bank’s bigness, its “fortress balance sheet”, as he likes to say, as proof of its strength. He also vigorously contests the idea that JPMorgan Chase, in banking parlance, is “too big to fail” – that is, so big that if it ever is at risk of foundering, Washington will bail it out with taxpayer money. “The term ‘too big to fail’ must be excised from our vocabulary,” he once wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

But this is wishful thinking. There is a virtual consensus among financial experts that “too big to fail” remains alive and well – despite legislation enacted by Congress in the wake of the financial crisis to snuff the market’s belief in this guarantee. And JPMorgan Chase, as the biggest of the biggest, is viewed as the epitome of a “too big to fail” bank. “Too big to fail is a fact. It is present. It is real and it will be retained as far as I can see forward,” Hoenig, the former Fed and FDIC official, told me.

As a result, “moral hazard”, another pet phrase in the banking world, also remains. That means an enormous bank like JPMorgan Chase might be induced to take more risks with its capital on the bet that Washington, no matter what, won’t let the bank go down. That might apply, say, to the risks that Dimon is now taking with his bank’s activities in the private credit market. Or to the perils of big banks like his, as primary dealers, buying ever larger amounts of US treasuries to meet the federal government’s insatiable need to finance its mounting debt. Should investors come to question the credit-worthiness of the government, the value of the Treasuries held by Dimon’s bank could plummet.

How worried is Dimon about a next financial crisis? “We are always on the watch and preparing,” bank spokesman Evangelista told me.

In the meantime, Washington has the expectation that Dimon, as Wall Street’s crisis-tested banker, is on 24/7 call to help out as needed, as he did once again in 2023, with his bank’s rescue of the foundering First Republic Bank. He embraces this savior role, a throwback to John Pierpont Morgan, the namesake for Dimon’s bank, and why wouldn’t he? With a 1994 anti-banking concentration law enacted by Congress still peskily on the books, banks that hold 10% or more of total US deposits, as his does, are not permitted to grow by acquiring other banks – except in the case of swallowing failed banks.

“I feel like we’re guardians of the financial system,” he told Stahl on CBS’ Sunday Morning. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that, better than any of his peers, he has cannily figured out how to make the financial system work to his bank’s advantage. “His role is a reflection of the pathologies of the system,” economist Johnson told me, while offering a tip of the cap: “Mr Dimon is a brilliant player of the power game around finance.”

It might be wondered whether Dimon missed his calling in making banking his sole profession on graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982. After Barack Obama’s re-election to a second term, in 2012, Warren Buffett touted Dimon for treasury secretary. “If we did run into problems in markets, I think he’d actually be the best person you could have in the job,” the financier told the television host Charlie Rose.

Perhaps, should a Democrat win the White House in 2028, there’s still time: having survived throat cancer as well as a life-threatening heart condition, Dimon surely has the stamina for the job. But his nomination would be sure to revive awkward questions about his bank’s dealings with Epstein – and what he knew of them. The likelihood, as he has said, is that he will stay on as chairman of the board for a time after handing the reins to a successor as CEO.

After reading his Letters to Shareholders over the years and listening to hours of him in varied interview settings, I came to believe that Dimon genuinely thought that what was good for JPMorgan Chase was good for America. And the other way around, too, per the famous 1950s declaration of Charles Wilson as the head of the nation’s biggest manufacturer of automobiles: “For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

But here’s the real bottom line: he beat the market. On the last trading day of December 2005, just before Dimon took over as CEO, JPM shares closed at 39.69. On the fourth Friday of this January, they closed 7.5 times higher, at 297.72, compared with 5.5 times higher over this same time span for the S&P 500 index fund. The bank recorded profits of $57bn last year. According to a calculation done by The New York Times, Dimon himself pulled in $770m in 2025 counting salary as well as bonuses, stock grants and other sources of compensation. His spokesman, however, contests that figure. “This number is nonsensical – it seems to be combining paper gains on restricted stock options and 20+ years of equity, more than half of which he purchased on his own,” Evangelista told me. “If you’re talking about what he was awarded in 2025, it would be about $39m.”

Dimon is on his fourth president as his bank’s CEO, and he could be in that chair long enough to welcome a fifth, after the 2028 election. Once known as Obama’s “favorite banker”, he won’t win that accolade from Trump, even though the ever pragmatic banker has repositioned his bank to match the Trumpian vibe, not only by giving way for his bank to embrace crypto but also by toning down the bank’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 Dimon said: “The black community has been left behind for a long time and a lot of it was structural: jobs, education, stuff like that.” He even took a knee at a local bank branch, seemingly in support of the protests that followed Floyd’s death. But now that Trump and his allies have cowed US businesses into dropping the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that blossomed after Floyd, Dimon is sending a different message to his workforce. “I was never a firm believer in bias training,” he told staff last year, according to Bloomberg.

The only issue on which Dimon has consistently pushed back on Trump is on the need for an independent Fed. And on that matter, Dimon is simply joining a large chorus: virtually everyone on Wall Street, along with the economics profession and prominent Republicans, not just Democrats, has resisted Trump’s typically nasty bid to undermine Jerome Powell to get the Fed chair to lower interest rates. On the much more controversial issue of tariffs, he notes that they could cause inflation but, but folks should just “get over it”, as he said last year as Trump was retaking office.

“Get over it” also seems to be his message, implicitly, to those who dwell on his bank’s deep ties to Epstein. Whatever he personally knew about his bank’s involvement with the sex trafficker, he set the tone and the standards for his senior executives, who cultivated Epstein’s lucrative business for years. “Jamie” didn’t act as a “moral compass” – and this wasn’t banking as a “public service”.

Paul Starobin is the former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week and the author of four nonfiction books. paul.starobin@gmail.com