Jamie Dimon flew in, sat down with the people who may soon decide how much more tax his bank pays, and said very little in public. JPMorgan’s chief executive met Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Chancellor John Healey in London on Wednesday, the Yahoo Finance report said, after a phone call with the chancellor last month.
The timing matters. Healey delivers his first Budget on Oct. 28, and he is under pressure to find billions of pounds to repair public finances knocked off course by the fallout from the Iran war. There are concerns he may raise levies on banks.
The Financial Times reported that Burnham dropped into a separate meeting between Dimon and Varun Chandra, the prime minister’s chief business adviser.
Dimon’s position
Dimon has led JPMorgan for more than 20 years and has met many chancellors. He backed Healey’s predecessor, Rachel Reeves. “They are smart and dedicated and they are working with business and collaborating, which is the only way to make things work,” he told The Sunday Times, speaking of Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer.
Reeves resisted calls to raid lenders for more tax. She called financial services “the crown jewel in the UK economy” and pushed regulators to relax rules in the City.
Earlier this year Dimon warned of “adverse consequences” if Labour went after lenders with fresh windfall taxes. “I always thought it was wrong. We’re a great citizen [in the UK]. We hire people there. We want to be bigger there. We train people there. We hire veterans there,” he said. He added that if a government goes ahead, “there’s nothing I can do, but it will over time cause decisions made that they may not like.”
The other side
Pressure to tax banks is coming from outside government too. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, argues Burnham could raise £9bn in four years just by reversing the previous Conservative government’s cut to the bank surcharge. The TUC says the money could pay for cuts to energy bills.
The Green Party has called for a 38pc windfall tax on banks to fund a tax cut for small businesses. Jane Fraser, the head of Citi, has warned that higher taxes risk making the UK a prohibitively expensive place to do business.
