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- Jamie Dimon says bankers are "dancing in the street" because they expect Donald Trump to cut regulations.
- The JPMorgan CEO said he supports wider deregulation that could make life easier for businesses.
- President-elect Trump has tasked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with eliminating government waste.
Jamie Dimon says Wall Street is whooping with joy at the prospect of Donald Trump tearing up regulations and revitalizing the banking industry in his second term.
The JPMorgan CEO told the APEC CEO Summit in Lima, Peru on Thursday that regardless of who they voted for, "a lot of bankers, they're like dancing in the street because they've had successive years and years of regulations, a lot of which stymied credit."
"You could have kept the banks equally safe but had them do more credit," Dimon said, per a Bloomberg video of the event.
The average US bank used to hold $100 of deposits for every $100 of loans it made, but now it only lends $65 for every $100 of deposits, he said.
"And if that's what you want, if for some reason the regulators think they're geniuses and that's the best way to run the banking system, so be it," Dimon said, adding that they likely didn't anticipate the credit impact.
The billionaire banker said every industry could benefit from reduced regulations that would make it easier for them to operate without harming the environment, national security, or other public priorities.
Excessive regulation in the US is "a shame, and we're doing this to ourselves, and it's a mistake," Dimon said. "I applaud any government that says, 'I'm going to make government more efficient'."
Trump announced this week that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head up a new Department of Government Efficiency that would operate outside the government.
The president-elect wrote that DOGE's goal would be to "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."
At the summit, Dimon cautioned inflation could prove stubborn, and warned that Trump will have to navigate the "most complicated geopolitical, military, and geoeconomic situation that the world has faced since World War II."