https://finance.yahoo.com/video/sen-warren-grills-jpmorgan-ceo-162537657.html
6 replies (most recent on top)
Wasn't Sen. Warren pushing for Post Office to offer banking services to the 'underbanked' and solve this problem? What happened?
Shame!
Bank should collect overdraft fees from bad credit customers. Should the bank front its money for free?
remote work is great for young people. Jamie diamond is a horrible person, resign jamie
Note to Jamie: Next time send your campaign donations on time and don't be stingy, adjust for inflation or we'll have another powwow.
Sen. Warren grills JPMorgan CEO Dimon on overdraft fees
Yahoo Finance’s Brian Cheung joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss Big Bank CEOs testifying before the Senate Banking committee today.
Video Transcript
ZACK GUZMAN: Paycheck Protection Program mortgage assistance, it's all in play as JPMorgan's CEO Jamie Dimon and other top bank CEOs get grilled right now by Congress over the help that they provided earlier in the pandemic. And for more on the highlights there, I want to kick things off in the hour with Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung, who's been watching that for us today. Brian.
BRIAN CHEUNG: Well, Zack, the questioning still going on. This is expected to be quite a long hearing, as we hear from Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto right now. And very interesting to see because this is a broad oversight hearing of the six largest bank CEOs. This hearing has been all over the place. There's been questions, sometimes rants, about Hong Kong, the Georgia voting law, climate change, racial equity.
So it's really all over the place, but something that caught a lot of watchers' attention was an exchange between JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in addition to Elizabeth Warren, on the idea of overdraft fees. Keep in mind that regulators, at the beginning of the pandemic, had recommended that banks give their borrowers some help by suspending some of those overdraft policies. But take a listen to that exchange.
ELIZABETH WARREN: So Mr. Dimon, how much did JPMorgan collect in overdraft fees from their consumers in 2020?
JAMIE DIMON: Well, your-- I think your numbers are totally inaccurate, but we'll have to sit down privately and go through that.
ELIZABETH WARREN: So these are public numbers.
JAMIE DIMON: I also want to point out we did not overdraft--
ELIZABETH WARREN: Can you just answer my question?
JAMIE DIMON: We did not overdraft--
ELIZABETH WARREN: How much did JP Morgan collect--
JAMIE DIMON: We did not overdraft at the Fed account. And at any request--
ELIZABETH WARREN: So whenever-- I'm sorry, Mr. Dimon. That was-- Mr. Dimon, that was not the question. Did-- you had an automatic protection. So I'm asking, you were recommended-- the regulators recommended you offer that same kind of protection to your customers.
JAMIE DIMON: And we did.
ELIZABETH WARREN: How much, in fact, did JP Morgan collect in overdraft fees from their customers in 2020? Do you know the number?
JAMIE DIMON: I don't know the number in front of me.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Well, I actually have the number in front of me.
JAMIE DIMON: Upon request--
ELIZABETH WARREN: It's $1.463 billion.
BRIAN CHEUNG: So you can see the exchange right there, definitely heated between Jamie Dimon and Elizabeth Warren. That number was about $1.5 billion. That's how much the US, this largest bank, collected in overdraft fees. And again, regulators had recommended at the beginning that they could have suspended it. Of course, for Jamie Dimon's part, he's saying Chase Bank offered it to those who requested it.
So this is probably likely the case for the other large banks as well, to be fair. But of course, a lot of these banks getting a lot of criticism for how they acted and the extent to which they tried to help their customers' small businesses and their borrowers during the pandemic. But again, that hearing is still going on. And of course, we'll have the full coverage of that right here on Yahoo Finance.
ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, upon request, I mean, upon request, you can ask for a lot of things to be waived, not even in a pandemic. I think depending on how frugal you want to be, you can try and get some things reversed. But Brian, I mean, we were talking about how fiery this was going to be. I guess, that answers our question there in that exchange. But what else are we expecting to hear from this one? Because it sounded like you said no crypto questions were asked thus far. But obviously, wide ranging, as you highlighted for us earlier.
BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah, I mean, this is all over the place. And what's very interesting is that this was the first time, as you noted, at the top of the show, that the large bank CEOs are testifying to the Senate Banking Committee. You'll recall that about in 2019, they did appear. But that was on the House side, House Financial Services, who, by the way, will have a stab at the same six CEOs tomorrow.
But of course, the question is going to be, is this a recurring thing that the Senate Banking Committee wants to have? And the answer is probably yes because they named the hearing Annual Oversight. But even though this is the first time they've had this hearing, obviously, putting the word "annual" in there, hence that they want to do this again. But right now, it seems like a big focal point is, the issues of climate change and racial equity.
The large six banks have made a lot of measures, broadly, over the last year and more recently, generally, over trying to prioritize, for example, greener climate projects, in addition to projects that try to identify low income and minority communities. Now, on the Democrat side of things, they're arguing that the banks aren't doing enough, that it might be wallpapering. But on the Republican side of things, they're arguing that these banks may be entering too much into political territory and trying to pick sides here. So they really are trying to walk quite a tightrope in this issue here. And it'll be interesting to see in this hearing and maybe in future hearings how they [INAUDIBLE] those policies.