Jamie Dimon doesn’t want to hear your thoughts about running his bank.
The JPMorgan CEO railed against some of the bank’s “lazy” shareholders on Wednesday, flogging them for voting to split his CEO and chairman roles and for getting uncomfortably close to voting to reject his $20 million pay package.
On May 19, 38 percent of the bank’s shareholders voted to reject Dimon’s total compensation after two proxy voting companies, ISS and Glass Lewis, said that it didn’t align his incentives with the bank’s long-term goals.
During an industry conference, the 59-year-old CEO chided those investors who dared rebuke him.
“God knows how any of you can place your vote based on ISS and Glass Lewis,” he said in response to a question about splitting his dual roles. “If you do that, you are just irresponsible, I’m sorry, and you probably aren’t a good investor, either. And you do — some of you here do it, because you’re lazy.”
While this is the first time that Dimon, who underwent cancer treatment in the last year, has addressed the shareholder vote, it’s only the latest in a recent string of defensive postures against shareholders.
After Wall Street rival Goldman Sachs said JPM would be worth more split up into parts, Dimon and other bank bigs have doubled down on the “bigger is better” approach.
“In a capitalist world, OK, you better be giving the customer more — better, faster, quicker — or you lose,” Dimon said in defense of the business at a company event in February.
He’s also raged against the government earlier this year — saying that the company was “under assault” from regulators — and his own management team for “stepping in dog s–t.”
Dimon, who’s been JPMorgan’s CEO since the end of 2005 and its chairman since 2006, also used his roughly 51 minutes at the conference to opine on the markets and the bank’s recent guilty plea for rigging global currency markets.
The Federal Reserve is likely to raise its benchmark interest rate, which has been hovering near 0 percent for more than six years, sometime this year when unemployment falls below 5 percent, Dimon predicted.
The outspoken bank chief also said that the guilty plea was “a terrible thing” to go through, and the bank would probably lose some business because of it.
Representatives for ISS and Glass Lewis declined to comment.