CEO of America’s biggest bank says US, China need ‘real engagement’ to resolve issues

HONG KONG – JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon said on Wednesday the United States and China need to have “real engagement” to resolve their tricky security and trade matters.

“You’re not going to fix these things if you are just sitting across the Pacific yelling at each other. So I’m hoping we have real engagement,” Mr Dimon said, answering a question about Sino-US decoupling at the three-day JPMorgan Global China Summit in Shanghai.

Mr Dimon is on his first visit to China since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and his first

since he joked in 2021 that JPMorgan will outlast China’s Communist Party,

sparking outrage in China and prompting him to express regret.

The CEO of the biggest US bank said the countries’ disputes over security and free and fair trade issues are all “resolvable”, and that he favours East-West “derisking” rather than decoupling.

“I liked the fact that Janet Yellen, Secretary of Treasury, President Biden, the national security adviser and Secretary of State have been talking about derisking,” Mr Dimon said.

“Let’s not try to decouple. Let’s not try to hurt China, the Chinese people.”

JPMorgan has, in recent years, boosted its China presence with newly acquired licences or increased stakes spanning securities, funds and futures.

The Communist Party chief of Shanghai shook hands with Mr Dimon on Tuesday, telling him the city hopes JPMorgan would continue to promote investment in the financial hub by international financial institutions.

But the expansion in China has not been all smooth sailing, taking longer than the US bank anticipated.

“It will be a longer journey than we would wish to gradually build up scale and reputation to do business,” its China CEO, Mr Mark Leung, said in a Bloomberg interview on Wednesday. REUTERS