Jamie Dimon doesn’t often give hour-long interviews, but when he does, he covers a lot of ground.

The JPMorgan CEO appeared on “The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost” on Monday, days after reporting the bank’s highest-ever quarterly profit of $21.2 billion, and describing an environment that is “about as good as it gets” for banks.

In his interview with Frost, Dimon, who has led JPMorgan for 20 years, through the financial crisis, COVID and the 2023 banking turmoil, covered everything from bond markets to Iran to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Here are four key takeaways that stood out.

He wouldn’t buy bonds and doesn’t fully trust inflation data.

Asked if he would buy long-term government bonds, Dimon did not respond: “Personally, no. I wouldn’t be a buyer.”

“Even if inflation were 2%, the 10-year bond should probably be between four and four and a half,” and yields are “about there today,” leaving little upside.

He noted that inflation has been above 3% for almost five years and said the official figures deserve scrutiny: “If you dig into these numbers, I mean, you dig into them, and I wouldn’t give them too much credit.”

The self-described economic historian said he can’t shake the memory of the 1970s, when inflation rose from around 3.5% to 11%.

With a global debt-to-GDP ratio close to 100% and a US deficit of 6%, he predicted that governments will wait for a crisis rather than act: “That will manifest itself with higher interest rates and the market will be shaken,” he said.

Dimon added that he has not bought shares in recent months.

Says US should squeeze Iran’s economy for a year, even if gas prices rise

With the resumption of attacks and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Dimon argued that President Donald Trump should come clean to the public and commit to a year-long economic strangulation of Iran, accepting as the cost higher gas prices, no US military deaths and no support from allies.

Dimon imagined the president laying the case directly to the American people: “He could solve it without military deaths or put 100,000 of his sons in the field.” Gas prices could rise for a year, he said, but for Dimon, that trade-off is worth it.

“Is that a better outcome than having a nuclear weapon in 10 years?” asked. “One is perhaps life or death for humanity, the other is the economy.”

AI will pay off, but “definitely not” as investors expect

Dimon believes in the technology itself: “It’s real… it will cure cancer. Your children will live to be 100.”

The investment boom is another matter. “The amount of money being spent is enormous. Will it pay for itself in total? Probably, just like the Internet did. Will it pay for itself in the expected way and in the expected time? Definitely not.”

Their model is the dot-com era: “We had Yahoo and Netscape and all these companies that went bankrupt. But Google made it, Facebook made it.”

He predicted a disciplinary reckoning as companies begin to ask, “I invest $100 million in this, what do I get?”

He is warning the mayor of New York

Dimon said he has personally confronted New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani with the numbers behind JPMorgan’s shift of staff south. The number of bank employees in New York has fallen from 35,000 to 26,000 in 20 years, while Texas has risen from about 11,000 to 35,000, he said.

When asked if there was anything City Hall could do to get the bank out of New York, where it just opened a new tower with its headquarters, Dimon steadfastly refused to rule it out: “I wouldn’t make it binary that way.”

Instead, he laid out the scorecard according to which, according to him, mayors are now classified: “It’s not just taxes, but taxes. It’s medical services. It’s hospitals. It’s social life. It’s commuting. It’s housing.”

Cities, he warned, no longer have captive employers: “There weren’t so many competitive cities; now there are many.”

He considered Texas to be the state that is doing the right thing: “They are open for business… it is easy for you to buy a house and have a family. If governments do the wrong thing, it will work adversely.”

Insecurity, not arrogance, is the worst trait in CEOs

Dimon said leaders need to recognize that they can’t know everything and trust the people around them to make decisions and tell them the truth, even if it’s hard to hear.

The best leaders, in Dimon’s eyes, have the “innate abilities to trust people, to bring out the best in them, to not be ashamed of not knowing.”

A confident leader treats criticism as a good thing, Dimon said. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings by telling me we have a shoddy product,” he told Frost.

“Customer complaints are a gift.”