Money and Finance

Jamie Dimon's Letter to Shareholders

After Lehman’s collapse, the global financial system went into cardiac arrest. There is much debate over whether Lehman’s crash caused it – but looking back, I believe the cumulative trauma of all the aforementioned events and some large flaws in the financial system are what caused the meltdown. If it hadn’t been Lehman, something else would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The causes of the financial crisis will be written about, analyzed and subject to historical revisions for decades. Any view that I express at this moment will likely be proved incomplete or possibly incorrect over time. However, I still feel compelled to attempt to do so because regulation will be written soon, in the next year or so, that will have an enormous impact on our country and our company. If we are to deal properly with this crisis moving forward, we must be brutally honest and have a full understanding of what caused it in the first place. The strength of the United States lies not in its ability to avoid problems but in our ability to face problems, to reform and to change. So it is in that spirit that I share my views.

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