Jamie Dimon applauded Texas for its business-friendly policies and said other areas including New York City should do more to attract investment.
The chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. praised Texas’s lack of an income tax and its light regulatory touch, which have prompted companies to relocate or expand in the state. JPMorgan’s workforce in Texas has surpassed 30,000 in recent years while New York’s total has slipped to less than 29,000 from 35,000.
“Mayors and governors call you up here and they say, ‘Jamie, what can we do to get more employees?’” he told reporters Tuesday after touring a worker-training facility in Houston. “And you can look at other states, which are almost completely opposite.”
Dimon’s upbeat comments about Texas marked a shift in tone from a November visit, when he warned that the state risked undermining its business-friendly reputation with laws punishing Wall Street banks for their policies limiting work with the gun and fossil-fuel industries. In his latest comments, he instead criticized some of New York City’s elected officials, saying they were the reason Amazon.com Inc. chose not to build a second headquarters there.
“In New York City, the elected — not the mayor, not the governor, but a lot of the elected — they don’t want business,” he said. “They didn’t let Amazon come in and build a whole new thing there.”
In 2019, Amazon backed out of plans to locate part of its second headquarters in New York after criticism from politicians including US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over government incentives offered to the company. While the e-commerce giant eventually signed a lease in New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood with enough space for more than 1,500 workers, that was far fewer than the 25,000 the company had initially planned to add in Queens.
Texas has been attracting more employers in recent years, with Tesla Inc. and Charles Schwab Corp. moving their headquarters to the state from California while Caterpillar Inc. relocated from Illinois. Elon Musk recently expressed interest in shifting Tesla’s business incorporation to Texas from Delaware. His rocket maker, SpaceX, filed earlier this month to convert its incorporation to Texas.
In finance, the workforce has surged in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which during the pandemic surpassed Chicago and Los Angeles to become the No. 2 area for jobs in the industry, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Dallas area is home to more than 380,000 finance workers, trailing only New York.
Dimon said political tensions with Texas occasionally flare up, acknowledging that he gets “a little pushback” from state officials over environmental initiatives that his bank has endorsed.
“I call, I explain to them what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” he said. “That’s fine.”