Jamie Dimon: “It’s almost an embarrassment being an American citizen!”
What a difference six months has made – Last January, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon couldn’t stop talking about the “moment of opportunity” at the start of the Trump Presidency. At the time, he believed what many Republicans believed: that with the election behind us, the President would appoint a cabinet that could assemble policy plans even if he didn’t oversee them directly, that Congress would support those plans, draft legislation and reform that was in parity with White House policy and the President would sign it. Ah- what dreams may come…
In my day job, I must have listened to 200 or more bank earnings calls, and JPMorgan’s is one of the most important. They are generally stale and rehearsed- almost like a State of the Union address. So it’s hard to imagine this was an off-the-cuff exclamation by a long-standing, experienced leader. But it was in some ways comforting to see an uber-conservative, powerful, connected person like Jamie Dimon feel as helpless as the rest of us as we near the second fight over an Obamacare repeal that increasingly seems to be going sideways, with bank reform, tax reform and a real budget plan still over the horizon.
Wall Street has much to fear from this stagnation. Much of the “Trump Rally” of early 2017 was due to expectations of a “lightning fast” administration that expected to already have unilaterally repealed Obamacare, put out a new budget with sweeping tax cuts, a $1 trillion (with a ‘T’) infrastructure plan, higher interest rates, a boost in GDP growth, and a massive re-vamp of Dodd-Frank alongside sweeping policy changes for bank capital plans. As the train backs up from a 2017 agenda to 2018 at best, a whole year of growth that may already be “baked in” to 2017 earnings (especially in financials) looks more and more like over-optimism… and the pain of that shortfall will be shouldered heavily by Dimon.
It feels like something’s gotta give, and my guess – maybe even my hope – is that it’s the Senate filibuster. Maybe the 60 vote cloture rule really is a relic of a lost era – when the point really was just to make sure all sides had a chance to speak (not to hold hostage the democratic process), and filibusters were rare – rather than the universal means to halt any legislation at all. Senators – this is why we can’t have nice things.
It’s time to pick an agenda and go. Repeal or move on. Obamacare is important, but tax and budget planning are the backbone of GDP projections, corporate growth and earnings, and a myriad of corporate planning objectives for the next 5 years. The Senate has set its time table based on their internal politics, and the country has spoken – that just can’t be the timeline. Godspeed, Senator McCain, I wish you a speedy recovery. But it isn’t just about one vote. It’s time to get this past us and move on to the next phase of economic growth- or by October, the “Trump Rally” may yet be another bear market.
(No Claps Yet)
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