August 5, 2026
WHEN: Today, Wednesday, August 5, 2026
WHERE: CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with JPMorgan Chase Chairman & CEO Jamie Dimon on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” (M-F, 4PM-5PM ET) today, Wednesday, August 5. Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/05/jpmorgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-on-housing-affordability-initiative.html, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/05/j-p-morgans-jamie-dimon-fed-chairman-warsh-doing-the-right-thing-with-task-forces.html, and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/05/jpmorgan-chase-ceo-jamie-dimon-market-leverage-is-high.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
LESLIE PICKER: Mel, thank you so much. And, Jamie, thank you for taking the time. We are obviously here at the lovely L.A. Coliseum ahead of the partnership that you have struck with the L.A. Olympics in '28, the other French Alps Olympics in 2030. And you're expanding your presence here in Los Angeles as well, particularly with small businesses. What's the impetus for these investments here in L.A.?
JAMIE DIMON: Yes. So we go way back on this one. First of all, welcome, everybody. We bought WaMu in like literally a week after they went bankrupt. And that formed the platform, I think 300 or 400 branches. We now have 700. And it was the number one deposit share here. And the whole time we built on top of that private banking, investment banking, and the innovation economy, and our services. So we're totally vested. And, obviously, L.A. is like 35 percent of, or so of California in total, and still a hotbed of technology, manufacturing, obviously Hollywood. And on L.A. Olympics, we're all in L.A., so we've decided to be a sponsor of that, which we're pretty proud of doing.
PICKER: And—
DIMON: A big push in small business because the Olympics is going to make sure that a lot of the contracts that serve the Olympics for that multiweek period is going to go to small business. So you want to help a lot of these small businesses get the procurements, get the contract, get the financing they need to expand their business now and in the future.
PICKER: And I believe you were the first bank branch to reopen after the Palisades fire, and you have this big housing initiative as well that you launched this week as part of your bus tour throughout California as part of the American Dream Initiative that the firm is also doing. You're allocating $750 billion through 2035 to support homeownership in the U.S. And that announcement actually was about six weeks after the U.S. housing bill was passed.
DIMON: Right.
PICKER: And I'm curious how this access to capital, as well as the removing some restrictions to build—
DIMON: Right.
PICKER: Do you think that really moves the needle?
DIMON: Yes, it'll start moving the needle. Pacific Palisades, I mean, I went there a year ago with Rick Caruso, who's just a fabulous human being. He's opening literally next week the Pacific, Village, Palisades Village. We, our branch totally burned down there, and that's been rebuilt. And he's doing it early because he wants to help accelerate, catalyze growth in that area with, if they're there, homes will come back and other businesses will come back, and so great example of collaboration between business, government trying to get things done the right way. Housing, you have two issues. One is affordable. One is affordable. So we're doing a lot of affordable housing. And more is lending, cheaper. More is lending. The other one is supply. Supply is mostly around permitting, approvals, local zoning requirements. So the bill the House passed is a very good bill, and then they have, we have to do complements to it locally. A lot of local stuff is stuff that holds it back. So, if you do both, you're going to get a lot more supply.
PICKER: And, of course, a key part of housing affordability is mortgage rates. And I want to get your thoughts on the bond market, with the recent reset, particularly on the long end. How concerned are you about this signaling a credibility test at the Fed and their willingness to actually fight inflation?
DIMON: Yes. Well, I think the more important question is, is there inflation? If there's inflation, they will have to fight it. It hasn't changed very much lately, and it's been over 3 percent now for five years. I think the world of Kevin Warsh. I think it makes tremendous sense for any moving of the Fed, any, if you give anyone a job, take a step back, look at it, think what you did, how it should be done. That's the job of a leader, and I think he's doing the right thing. I think he's raising the right issue with the task force. I'm not greatly in favor of a task force, but it's the right idea to look about how we measure inflation, what the issues are, the balance sheet. So I wish them the best. They will over time do the right thing.
PICKER: So—
DIMON: I don't think it makes that much of a difference about signaling to the Fed. I think the people are squealing like stuck pigs in that one.
PICKER: Sticking with the animal analogy, you recently called inflation a skunk at a party.
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: And so, going back to your early, earlier point about whether inflation still exists, do you still, do you sense that odor is still out there?
DIMON: Yes, so I didn't say it is. I said it could be. By that, I mean is that, are, what are the inflationary forces that are taking place? And it's at 3 percent. So, obviously, we all want to get it down, but there are forces pushing it up, some of the geopolitical situation, huge global deficits, government deficits. Ours is $2 trillion, almost $2 trillion. The rest of the world adds, it's almost 4 or 5 percent of their GDPs, huge infrastructure requirements. So, inflation is both what people expect, but it's also capital demand. And it seems to me there's a lot of demand for capital. The remilitarization of the world would be inflationary. And I don't know if these things will push the rate up, but, if they do, that could be the skunk at the party, that people won't want to be paid more money for long-term bonds. And so you just got to keep your eye on it. Hopefully, none of those things will materialize in a bad way.
PICKER: And you recently told our former colleague Wilfred Frost in a podcast that you wouldn't be a buyer of Treasuries.
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: You wouldn't be a buyer of equities at these levels.
DIMON: Yes. Yes.
PICKER: Why is that?
DIMON: Well, Treasuries, I just said.
PICKER: Yes.
DIMON: I, like already embedded in the marketplace, there are people's assumptions about inflation. My guess is that there's higher odds for that than the other ones. Equities, I shouldn't have said it that way. There are always equities you can buy, but asset prices are high. So, stock prices, however you measure them, in the top five or 10 percent of all-time measurement, but at any point in time, a stock could be a good buy. And that's true globally. So, when you look around the world, no, you shouldn't speak generically about stock prices. So—
PICKER: A lot of people have criticized market structure right now, levered ETFs, positioning and so forth. How concerned are you about the proliferation of levered ETFs on single stocks?
DIMON: Well, leverage ETFs on their own are quite small. So I'd say not really. But there is what I call market leverage, prime broker leverage, hedge fund leverage, ETF leverage, treasury arbitrage leverage. I'm double-counting some of that. So, the market leverage is pretty high. Now, of course, we manage it client by client. And so you have seen disasters that people lose a lot of money, nothing really happens. They just unwind it. But when you have that, you do have a higher chance that something will disrupt the market in a quick way and people get rattled over it. And so that is a little high. And I just saw the Fed today's going to be looking at private credit. Again, I'm not worried about that systemically, but there may be some issues that the Fed should be looking at.
PICKER: Going back to the leverage that you're talking about, obviously, a big high-profile example of that was Situational Awareness last week.
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: J.P. Morgan was the, one of the bigger prime brokers to Situational Awareness—
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: Which was a now-collapsed A.I.-focused hedge fund. How much more stress do you see out there?
DIMON: It's still there, by the way.
PICKER: Yes.
DIMON: It's that they unwound all that.
PICKER: Just smaller, smaller form.
DIMON: Yeah. Not, I think the market handled that very well. But when I talk about leverage, margin debt is the highest it's ever been. There's a lot of margin debt you don't see because it's not called margin debt. It's called other things. So it's that kind of leverage, some hidden, some public. We see a lot of it, and it's high. You know, it's not, I'm not going to say it's systemic high, it's going to cause a disaster, but it's high. The worst thing is if you have actual losses in the marketplace, which is what happened in '08. It wasn't the leverage. It was the amount of losses that were going to be realized on mortgages.
PICKER: So, as a result of that, have you been asking clients to hold more collateral because of what you're seeing in the system?
DIMON: We always adjust that. I mean, again, that's client by client. It's always adjusted. And when volatility goes up, clearinghouses and banks generally ask for more collateral. So you will you will probably see a little bit of that.
PICKER: I want to ask you about A.I. There was a Reuters report out this morning which says you have been personally reaching out to other CEOs to join an industry group known as the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure to address risks posed by A.I. There's a lot of complexity and conflicting opinions about regulating A.I., open-source versus closed, China versus U.S.-specific. Based on what you have, those conversations that you have been having and what you're seeing internally, what do you think is the best way to regulate?
DIMON: Yes, so the first thing is, Tom Fanning, who had great foresight, set this thing up a long time ago. I'm like a support cast member here to try to get more members and try to get, are we doing the right stuff and ask the questions. It's critical. This thing's called the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure. People are already members. We're just trying to strengthen it, but, obviously, with Mythos and risk to physical assets, it's incumbent upon industry to do its job, both within an industry, so a lot of industries already do it, but also across industry. We're all reliant on each other. If telecom has a problem, it could affect us. If utilities or water has a problem, it could be a huge effect in the, on banks, but also on the economy. So, most people say, yes, let's roll up our sleeves and get to work and figure out how to protect the infrastructure. And, remember, this is beyond us. So it's not just big companies. We want to help all banks. We want to, every, if you're in the utility business, you want to make sure all utilities are protected. And there are government things that are not protected. So this is just re-upping the effort to get a very serious effort to make sure we're doing all the right things about patching, understanding the risks, doing tabletop exercises, looking across industries, sharing best practices. And everyone should be, and you can start doing some of that stuff now. You don't have to wait for this to come out. So this thing is just being strengthened and formed, and hopefully will be a real positive element. And then there, and obviously work with the government. The government has its own role in this, and so this group will help interface with that and both give advice and take advice from the government.
PICKER: One thing that your CFO, Jeremy Barnum, said on your recent earnings call about JPMorgan's token expense was that it's a trivial number for the first half of the year, but you're forecasting some, quote, "meaningful acceleration in the second half."
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: How concerned are you about this trend toward tokenmaxxing and costs and how do you control them?
DIMON: Yes. Well, they will be controlled. I mean, write, you can write, there's a company I met. I met them a while ago, those are, the cocktail party I was at last night, that has, it's going to have an orchestration layer that sends your work to best for you. So it could be cheapest to deliver. It could be the most expensive. It could be the fastest. It could be the, all different things. And so people will manage the cost of tokens. And it's like you're not going to take the, your Ferrari to get gas, you know? So, right now, some of these things are very expensive. Some of the other things are 1 percent of that. And a lot of queries that people have sent into the expensive stuff could have gone to a low-cost, even no-cost query. So it's just that. It's just managing the process. And that will be managed over time. I mean, everyone knows that. There will be different ways to do it. I can do it by budgeting it differently, by only giving you so many expensive tokens and a lot more cheap tokens, and, but we will figure it out. I'm really not that worried about it. But, again, for enterprise, it's got to make sense. People aren't just going to spend more and more money where they're not getting value for it. So people will be measuring the value in multiple different ways. And I think it does bring value. So we have been doing this now for 12, 13 years, and we have over maybe 1,000 use cases. But some are just critical already to our operations, risk, fraud, marketing, design, customer errors. And it's really just starting. I mean, these new models are so good and so powerful, they also create the risk, which is why we're doing the critical infrastructure investment.
PICKER: Right. It all pulls together.
DIMON: Right.
PICKER: Also on that call, Jeremy mentioned that the firm passed on some data center financing. And I'm just wondering, kind of given that element of the business model with regard to kind of trafficking, not taking your Ferrari, I mean, I'm assuming you would take it to buy gas, but maybe not something less expensive.
DIMON: Yes. Yes.
PICKER: How much excess do you think is out there in light of kind of this rethink around expense in the business model?
DIMON: You talking about the hyperscale spending or excess spending on corporations? Which one are you referring to?
PICKER: Oh, excess spending by the hyperscalers and the data center built-out and all the financing.
DIMON: Oh, well, I mean, right. So, in my own view, and I may be wrong, it'll ultimately play out and pay out. And these people are doing real calculations, which is needed. They see what it costs to do the frontier models. They see what it costs to do inferencing. The need is going up dramatically. There, people are going to be offering more. But it's a big build. So I don't know. But if you look at specific data centers, that's different. Who's the takeout? When's the takeout? Who's responsible if the power doesn't get turned on? Who's responsible if the GPUs don't work at full function? That's projects. And you, that one, you have to analyze one by one. But we will see. It's also driving the American economy, because the increase alone is 1 percent of GDP. And next year it's going to be another 1 percent of GDP increase. And so that's, right now, people have to be hired, and you got to get steel and cement and all these things to build the data centers.
PICKER: So—
DIMON: And hopefully there will be more productivity after they're built. It takes a while to get them up and running.
PICKER: If that boom fizzles though, I mean, is that a threat to the U.S. economy?
DIMON: Well, there's two things. If they have to spend less money, that will reduce the GDP. The value from the existing data centers will probably be real. So that's two different elements. So—
PICKER: So, you're not too concerned about that reversing—
DIMON: No, not really.
PICKER: And having a more systemic impact on the economy then?
DIMON: There are a lot of things to worry about. And that's not high on the list.
PICKER: Yes, I haven't heard you mention it high on the list. That's why I figured it was worth asking.
DIMON: Right. Right.
PICKER: We're here in L.A., obviously, and you are leading a $10 billion loan package to support the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, also advising on that deal.
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: David Ellison recently penned an op-ed in "The New York Times" in defense of the deal. And I'm just curious what you think the whole thing means for the media industry.
DIMON: Yes. So, first of all, I like David quite a bit. And what I'm about to say is not self-serving, because I know people can say that, and say whatever you want. That industry is very competitive. Some people are really struggling. Some are doing well. Huge sums of money are going into it from various sources, major companies. The, what's happened, the consumer has had more and more and more content from all these various distribution sources. That's what's happening. Boards have to decide how they want to position themselves for the future. So, there, this is a very competitive market. All the people who actually know antitrust really well have already approved all this. And they looked at the broader market, the narrow market, and stuff like this. So this is going to be tough competition for David or anybody else in the business, whether or not they do this acquisition. So, that's one point. You know, to act like it's not a competitive business and that something's wrong with this, it's not great. The second thing is far more important for the future of American business, which is states overriding national policy on mergers, acquisitions that are often done by regulators or the DOJ in the, in this matter. The DOJ is an expert in antitrust. Of course things should be reviewed, but the notion that states are going to get to vote on every one of these things, I mean, you actually have a small potential to deeply damage our capital markets, our dynamic system and all these various things. And for the folks who don't know, I mean, this country is so dynamic because we have these huge markets that people compete, and, boy, do they compete. There may be examples of monopolistic behavior. But I have seen very little of that in my life. If you go to Europe and states, they can't compete, and because you can't sell goods. Basically, you can't sell goods across border because of all the bigger states. It's crippling the European economy. And if you, if we want to cripple ours, that's a good idea to start there. So I would urge people, this is not a state-by-state matter. And I know they have a, they may have a legitimate interest in it. They should be thinking about the country's interest on this one.
PICKER: The capital markets pipeline is a key moment for large banks such as yours. SpaceX reported its first earnings report as a public company trading about more than 10 percent below its issue price, obviously, the lockup expiring and so forth. Do you think that the performance of SpaceX and some of the other broader concerns about the A.I. ecosystem poses any risks to the pipelines that everyone has been so excited about this year?
DIMON: I don't know. When you talk about pipelines. first of all, IPOs open and close. In 2021, I think there were 400 in the United States. In 2022, there were 40. And then where people will take public might be quite different in one environment than another environment. And, but when you talk about an IPO, you might, specific companies. That's going to be specific to the company. That may not be the market in general. So I don't think it really does. I think, if you have really bad markets, it does. Really bad markets, IPOs can drop dramatically. So that to me would be more important.
PICKER: What about—
DIMON: Then you have to evaluate company by company what you think.
PICKER: Well, some of the bigger ones that people were expecting this year, Anthropic, maybe OpenAI next year. Any issues you think, given—
DIMON: Well, I can't talk about them in specific.
PICKER: Specific, yes.
DIMON: But there are a lot of companies that want to go public, some that don't have to. So we talk to a lot of them. And then the people who ultimately decide are the big investors, and there are very smart investors out there. It's not decided by the company selling or even by the investment bank. It's by huge investors and global investors, sovereign wealth funds, the big money managers. They will say, I want to buy this, I don't want to buy it. And, remember, they're also doing it privately. So there are a lot, there's a lot of private market activity, which is pretty close to what I would consider public at this point, where people are buying and selling pieces of these companies at the values you hear about.
PICKER: Right.
DIMON: Yes. Right.
PICKER: And I'm sure you have had those discussions this week here in California.
DIMON: Right. Right.
PICKER: On the most recent earnings call, you described the broader banking environment as, quote, "getting as close to as good as it gets. We just don't know how long it's going to last."
DIMON: Right.
PICKER: What do you see as the biggest risk to the banking environment?
DIMON: I stand by that statement. It's pretty good.
PICKER: It is?
DIMON: I mean, anyone in our business, I mean, we should, we should enjoy it, but don't think it's just because of our own genius. Markets are up and volumes are up and things, IPOs are up. High yield is up. Hyperscale is funny money. And there's kind of a global phenomenon. But the biggest, I think, we have already talked a little about rates and inflation. I would put that there. But geopolitics, I mean, and I think this is more about the free world at this point, how Ukraine, terrorism, Iran sort out, how our relationship with China sorts out. That is probably the most important. Now, whether it affects the economy, that's a different issue. I'm much more concerned about doing things that protect free, the free and Western world. You know, our military alliances, our economic alliances are critical, how we manage through that, how we manage through the end, hopefully, the proper end of these wars, is more important.
PICKER: And the Security and Resiliency Initiative turned, almost turned 1-year-old. I guess it's October that you launched that.
DIMON: October.
PICKER: What has been your experience so far?
DIMON: It's been extraordinary. And it's opened our eyes. We're learning the process. We hired people. We have Jay Horine, who is doing a great job. Todd Combs is doing a great job. We have seen hundreds of companies, hundreds of ideas. We have written research around this shipbuilding ecosystem, the pharmaceutical ecosystem, the rare earth ecosystem. More are coming. We're talking about, what's the right kind of industrial policy? All countries do industrial policy, but what's the right way to do it to get back here what we need in certain advanced manufacturing, semiconductors? And these are really complex ecosystems. We have also rolled this out to allies, which is, think of the U.K., France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Australia, Japan, South Korea. They also have this issue, and they also do a lot of things with America. A lot of ships come out of South Korea. So one of the things I did in Philadelphia, I went to the Navy Yard. It was Hanwha bringing technology in to restart the shipping business, shipbuilding business in the old Philadelphia Navy Yard, which built a lot of ships in World War II. And I read about one this morning which I can't tell you about to start a port which built a lot of the ships in World War II in another city. And so this thing is working. It's not just us, by the way. We were a teeny part of it. But when you travel around here, like, last night, I had at my table a company. It's amazing what these entrepreneurs do. There's, that's building satellites to move satellites in space, quite successful, to put them in different positions. But you need to get them there. I saw a company called Zipline, a fabulous guy running it called Keller, that started by drones, but delivering, because it wasn't allowed here for a while -- delivering medical pharmaceuticals in Rwanda to remote areas, and 17,000 lives have been saved. And now he's doing it here in certain metropolitan areas, not all of them. And just think of this. The drone costs, I don't know, $3, $5 to get there. Here, it's delivering medical supplies or food to elderly people. And compare that to delivering it by a car. You have to get a person in the car, get them started. It's 4,000 pounds of steel, drive 30 miles. The food is cold anyway. Drive 30 miles back. This is cheap, free, safe, no traffic, no traffic accidents, far less energy supply, so no CO2. So, these technologies, they're unbelievable. And, of course, you've seen the new technologies in drone warfare. And we're just doing our part to make sure we get here what we need to do here. And we do need to do it. This is it, we made, I don't like crying over spilled milk, but we made a huge mistake not recognizing the problem 10 or 15 years ago, outsourcing to potential adversaries, not to their adversaries, supplies that we need for our F-35s, our nuclear subs, our tanks, etc. So we didn't have production capability to build more missiles. We need more production capability. It needs to sit there idle sometimes so you can push a button and turn it back on when you need it for a war. And so these will all be fixed. The government is making a lot of changes now in how they do procurement, budgeting, ordering supplies ahead of time. A lot of companies could build stuff, but they needed an order from the Department of War. So we're working on all that stuff. There will be some great policies, more to come in this one. But it's been fabulous. And—
PICKER: Yes, yes, it's been quite the year. I've read the research. It's really good.
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: A month ago, you elevated Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno to co-presidents, which kind of reignited the parlor games about what JPMorgan looks like in a post-Jamie Dimon world.
DIMON: Right.
PICKER: Any updates or what the market should start thinking about in terms of timing on that front?
DIMON: That's not true. It's not a parlor game. It's the most serious thing that a company can do is who do you put in leadership. And we've got great leaders throughout the company, obviously, there are two who could replace me tomorrow. There are quality people, right heart, right mind, curiosity, grit, courage that, which is what I care about. But people say, what are you looking for, technology or, I said, absolutely not. I want a package of a person who's a leader, who's trusted, who's respected, who's curious, who's honest as the day is long, who admits flaws. Like, we make a lot of mistakes. The only way you fix them is that you acknowledge them, and so we've got that, and that nothing's changed other than the names.
PICKER: So no update on timing or anything on that front?
DIMON: No. It's exactly what I said before, so I'm not going to repeat it on the show.
PICKER: Great.
DIMON: Yes.
PICKER: Jamie Dimon, thank you so much.
DIMON: Leslie, thank you. Always fun.
PICKER: Appreciate your time.
DIMON: Folks, thank you.
PICKER: Bye from here in L.A. as part of your bus tour, your annual bus tour. Mel, I'll send it back to you.
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