On the morning of 7 April this year, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, published his annual letter to shareholders. The head of America’s largest bank reflected on “the brutal murder of George Floyd and the racial unrest that followed” (the week after Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Dimon was among the first CEOs publicly to take the knee, while visiting a branch in New York) and described how the bank was “fully engaged in trying to solve some of the world’s biggest issues – climate change, poverty, economic development and racial inequality”.
Later that day, Dimon and the board of JPMorgan Chase published another document, their proxy statement to the bank’s annual shareholder meeting. In it, Dimon and his board recommended voting against proposals aimed at helping make the changes he had claimed to support. One called for the bank to undertake a racial equity audit; another asked that it review its practices on political lobbying. Neither proposal was passed. The statement also revealed that Dimon – whose letter had opined, a few hours earlier, that the “fault line” in his fractured country “is inequality” – is paid 758 times the median American income.
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