Jamie Dimon: America Has the Best Hand Ever Dealt
"I don’t want to be Secretary of the Treasury. But I tell people this country has the best hand ever dealt of any country on the planet."
In November 2017, Jamie Dimon sat down for a fireside talk at Stanford. While most of the discussion was focused on overdone topics — careers in finance, crypto, management lessons, etc. — there was a fascinating section that went against the cynical worldview characteristic of the past several years.
The interviewer commented that Dimon had been cited as a potential Treasury Secretary pick, and asked about his interests in helping to steward the US.
There’s a relatively successful history of leaders from the financial industry playing key roles in government. Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, famously took the Treasury Secretary role under Bush ahead of the financial crisis. The need for exceptionally competent leaders is as strong as ever.
In an era where most in the business world are sour on the US government’s political machine and pessimistic about our future broadly, Dimon made an excellent case for optimism:
I don’t want to be Secretary of the Treasury. But I tell people this country has the best hand ever dealt of any country on the planet.
And most people don’t fully understand that because they don’t “make the list.”
When you have a problem, make a list and go through what really matters. I’m going to do this quickly:
We have all the food, water, and energy we need.
We have the Atlantic and the Pacific, which our Founding Fathers realized is so powerful for defending our country against wars in Asia and wars in Europe.
We have the best military the world’s ever seen, and that will be true for a long period of time.
Compared to China, and I’ll do this respectfully, China does not have enough food, water, and energy. And its neighbors happen to be The Philippines, Japan, North Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Russia.
And they’ve had border skirmishes or wars with with like 5 or 6 of those in the last 40 years. They are in a tough part of the world.
Those leaders think “We need food. We need commodities.” They need an army to protect themselves from the billions of people that surround them that aren’t necessarily so happy with them.
[…]
Nobody else has what I’m about to say:
The universities we do.
The rule of law like we do.
Low corruption like we do.
The widest, deepest, most transparent financial market the world’s ever seen. Public and private.
Hugely vibrant businesses small to large.
Does Brazil have that? India? China? Do most European countries have that whole list? Does Mexico have it?
That’s the best hand.
I must say, this is quite the compelling case for optimism. He’s right that nobody “makes the list”of what the US actually holds.
There are a few lessons I take from this:
Low corruption and rule of law are so often taken for granted. But they are precious.
Criticism of our systems, while certainly valid, feel far less dooming when contextualized against the “default” state of affairs rather than against a utopian vision.
There is nothing stopping us from solving our own problems, at least in theory. We have the resources, land, knowledge, and wonderful and diverse people. Any mistake we make as a country is self-inflicted due to poor organization, coordination, and politics. Hopefully this is an empowering message that leads to greater stewardship at all levels.
To be clear, Dimon isn’t delusionally starry-eyed when looking at the state of our country. He then calls out a number of serious problems off the top of his head: 10M people have left the workforce, there are 20M felons in America and a large amount shouldn’t be, the opioid crisis is ongoing, we blame immigration and technology for our problems but those aren’t quite worth of blaming, many kids are getting left behind in school districts (mostly poor & minority) where majority of students don’t graduate and are effectively doomed to poverty, and important jobs (electrical, plumbing, aviation, automotive, coding, etc) are not being trained for.
Many of these issues must be solved with Congress. But still: America has as good a hand as one can be dealt from the macro level. This should be exciting for any citizen (and business leader) to know — action and governance is the only true limiting factor for our long-term success.
Watch the full interview here (will auto-play starting at 20:38, the quoted portion).
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