Dimon’s $770 Million Windfall Shows How Banking Is Great Again.

Dimon’s $770 Million Windfall Shows How Banking Is Great Again
The Trump administration is lifting regulations, and deal making is heating up. For Jamie Dimon, being JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive was more lucrative in 2025 than ever.

Jan. 5, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET
For nearly 15 years, Jamie Dimon, the bank chieftain, has carried around what might as well be a talisman when he sees regulators, elected officials and journalists.

At just the right time in meetings, he breaks out a single-page printout that he calls a “spaghetti chart.” On it, Mr. Dimon’s underlings have crammed, in tiny type, a comically complicated flowchart meant to represent the various laws and regulations to which his company, JPMorgan Chase, is subject.

The theatrics have finally worked.

The Trump administration is not just taking apart regulations but attacking whole regulatory agencies that date back to the 2008-9 financial crisis and were meant to keep banks from giving in to their worst impulses. Regulators have also made it easier for banks to peddle in risky assets again, like cryptocurrency, and President Trump paused enforcement of foreign anti-bribery rules.

The deregulatory bonanza alone makes it the best time in a generation to be a banker.

But there’s more! Falling interest rates and a permissive set of antitrust overseers are helping reverse a lull in the lucrative business of arranging mergers and acquisitions, as the $100 billion bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Bros. Discovery shows. Once imperiled real estate loans look steadier, thanks to the rebound of in-office work. Stocks are near record levels, the bond market had its best year since 2020, and gold and silver have soared — all of which feeds the trading businesses that keep Wall Street’s profit machine humming.

In other words, as analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods recently put it, there is “something for everyone.” Big bank stocks rose 29 percent in 2025, almost doubling the gain of the U.S. market overall. Smaller lenders and community banks, which tend to have a narrower focus on areas such as residential mortgages and consumer checking accounts, also gained, but performed considerably less well.

For Mr. Dimon and his counterparts, this means paydays closer to the scale of hedge fund managers or Silicon Valley start-up founders than the caretakers of old-line lenders.

A combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciation in his allotment of the bank’s shares yielded roughly $770 million in 2025 for JPMorgan’s chief executive, according to the company’s disclosures. The bank’s stock rose 34 percent last year.

He gets first pick at failed banks, of course he’s winning. Always