Jamie Dimon Has Found a New Thing to Be Wrong About

Jamie Dimon is in the strata of rich guys whose opinions on just about anything are periodically deemed newsworthy. On any given week, a Google News search for the JPMorgan CEO will surface results regarding his thoughts on everything from artificial intelligence to the stock market and—this week—fossil fuels. In his annual letter to shareholders, released earlier this week, Dimon spouted off about the White House’s temporary pause on approving new liquified natural gas export terminals, erroneously calling it a “cancellation of future liquified natural gas (LNG) projects.” (It’s a pause.) The decision was “wrong” and “enormously naïve,” he wrote, made only “to pacify those who believe that gas is bad and that oil and gas projects should simply be stopped.” Dimon did not mention the fact that the U.S. is continuing to export record volumes of both oil and gas.

Dimon fancies himself an important man with important ideas. He is also a man with a lot of bad ideas: Dimon was the champion and “personal banker” of defamed WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, extending nearly $100 million in mortgages and other loans to Neumann personally. “We make terrible mistakes sometimes and we apologize for it,” Dimon said last summer after JP Morgan paid $290 million to settle lawsuit alleging that the bank’s funding of Jeffrey Epstein enabled him to traffick young women. Back in 2013, not long after financial sector gambling nearly cratered the global economy, JP Morgan Chase was fined $920 million for “unsafe and unsound practices” after its trading operations generated about $6 billion in losses. In 2016, the bank paid $264 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Reserve to resolve allegations that it’d hired the relatives of Chinese officials in order to win banking deals.