If the world's big banks are riding for a fall, you wouldn't know it to look at the biggest of them all. JPMorgan's share price hit an all-time high of nearly US$119 ($187) late last week, cementing its dominance of the world ranking by market capitalisation.
In Jamie Dimon,the larger-than-life bank has a larger-than-life boss — and has had for the past 14 years.
The financial crisis was supposed to have killed off all the "masters of the universe", the uber-bankers who generated business by the billions of dollars in the run-up to 2008, and made tens of millions of dollars for themselves in the process.
Dimon may be the last true example of the species. In the face of a trade war with China, declining interest rates, mounting fears of recession and widespread concerns about asset bubbles, JP is still thriving.
Despite Dimon's warning a week ago that he was worried about zero interest rates, and that net interest margins — the spread between loan yields and the cost of financing — would be slightly crunched, JP's shares have just kept on rising.
They are now up about 180 per cent in the past decade, considerably outstripping the Dow Jones US banks index, which itself has risen nearly 120 per cent.
In his more modest moments, Dimon will talk about the team effort that stands behind the JPMorgan success story. The bank has more than 250,000 employees across 100 different markets.
Its senior executives stand out even when they leave the bank — and many of them have during the boss's time in charge, amid rumours of ruthless impatience with pretenders to his throne.
JP alumni run some of the world's biggest financial institutions, from Barclays (Jes Staley) and Standard Chartered (Bill Winters) to Bank of New York Mellon (Charlie Scharf).
In slightly lesser roles are the likes of Mike Cavanagh , chief financial officer of Comcast, and Matt Zames, president of private equity firm Cerberus. Until 2017 another JP alumnus Peter Hancock headed insurance company AIG.
And former commodities star Blythe Masters ran blockchain business Digital Asset Holdings.
JPMorgan Chase shares are now up about 180 per cent in the past decade. Photo / AP
Dimon and his bank are clearly an effective training ground for leadership. Even those who have felt ousted by the JP boss acknowledge that his intuitive management and culture of close teamwork are key to his success and that of his protégés.
Dimon's own relationship with Sandy Weill, the former Citigroup boss who first hired Dimon as an intern at stockbroker Shearson, was formative. It encapsulates his own complex relationships with a stream of up-and-coming executives.
Just as he was groomed by Weill, before ultimately falling out with him and getting fired, so his relationships with the likes of Messrs Winters and Staley sparkled before crashing and burning.
Given the success of JP, you might expect some of the top executives who were fired or left after giving up waiting for Dimon's retirement to have replicated the bank's success story at the companies they went on to run.
And yet, despite the JP gold dust, and often stellar individual reputations, almost the reverse is true. Standard Chartered's share price is down 30 per cent since Winters took charge in mid-2015. Barclays is down 15 per cent since Staley's late-2015 arrival at the helm.
And under Scharf BNY Mellon stock has fallen 11 per cent.
Each institution clearly has its own specific challenges. But there are at least three broad reasons why JP has left others behind. First, there may be an element that some of the best talent at JP has stayed at JP, while those who didn't make it there are the ones now running the rivals.
Second, the big American banks — most notably the two behemoths, JP and Bank of America — have enjoyed a buoyant decade of macroeconomic context, when smaller groups, particularly those in Europe, have been through more challenging times.
Third, scale really has been an advantage, both in absorbing the vast cost of post-crisis regulation, and in throwing off the kind of cash necessary to invest in the modernising technology that creates a virtuous circle of higher returns.
Of course, success rarely lasts for ever. And with so many storm clouds ahead, Dimon's challenge will be to maintain JP's outperformance through the bad weather as well as the good.
