CEO Dimon: Would Help Mamdani 'if I Find It Productive'

A democratic socialist is taking over New York City in Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, but one of the leading global capitalist voices, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, said he would be willing to work with Mamdani.

"I will," Dimon told CNN on Wednesday night in a wide-ranging interview, saying he had reached out to engage the mayor-elect but had not yet heard back.

"And, if I find it productive, I'll continue to do so."

Dimon spoke after Mamdani won in deep-blue New York City on a platform seeking to remake America's model from capitalism to more democratic socialist.

"I want to lift up all citizens, too," Dimon said. "I've seen a lot of mayors and governors say things like that, and they fail to do it because their policies may not be so bad, but the implementation stinks.

"So, to me, is get this stuff right. Learn.

"He's a young man, you know. Will he get good at it? I see a lot of people in big jobs, including political jobs, they grow into it.

"They're learning. They're trusting people. They're figuring it out. They make mistakes. They adjust.

"I've seen a lot of people, they kind of swell into the job. They get worse.

"I'm hoping he's the good one and that will be important for the future of New York."

But amid talk of a mass migration out of New York City, Dimon stressed the narrative has it wrong — it's already happening.

"First of all, people have left New York City," Dimon said, noting that Mamdani's election doesn't necessarily mean more JPMorgan Chase relocations to states like Texas.

"I'm not going to make quick decisions about New York, not New York, right now," he added. "New York has some great things going for it, as you know, like the human capital, the brainpower, the financial industry.

"So it's a center for us."

But, perhaps as a salvo at Mamdani, Dimon added that New York City isn't privileged when it comes to business — it still has to make money the old-fashioned way: earn it.

"New York has to compete," Dimon said. "No city has divine right to success. There are great cities everywhere.

"We now have more people in Texas than we have in New York. That didn't have to be that way.

"And so if I was any mayor of any city, I'd be thinking about what do I need to do to build a great city to help all my citizens and, you know, all the things that create good competition."

Leaving New York City as a political statement is "a bad idea," according to Dimon.

"I think it's a bad idea," he said. "I mean, you want to have a very competitive city, and I don't want to use labels. The important thing to me is policies that actually work. Do you make crime better? Do you make the schools better? Do you make the health system better?"

Thus far, most Democrat-run cities are not succeeding, despite massive government regulation, control, and spending, Dimon intimated.

"Of course, I think we have a problem," Dimon said. "I think we have not lifted up the bottom 20% of society because their schools aren't working. You know, we got to acknowledge that.

"How do you fix the schools? You got to acknowledge the problem. Their incomes didn't go up enough. I would double the earned income tax credit.

"The crime is worse in those neighborhoods. So while they're being lectured to by other people, they're the ones who go to crime-ridden neighborhoods.

"Their schools don't teach them job skills. So, yeah, we need to fix those things. Those things, in my opinion, are not Democrat. They're not Republican.

"They're not flaws of capitalism. They're not flaws of socialism. They are bad policy, badly executed.

"And you know, so if anyone who wants to fix those things, I'm all in."

Socialism and communism as blanket answers for the flaws in Democrat-run cities are just not it.

"Look, I don't know what he means by capitalism – and when I read a lot of people, they say that these laws are capitalism flaws: They're not," Dimon said of Mamdani's claims.

"You know, there's income problems in communist countries and socialist countries, healthcare problems.

"And there are bad policies that cause those outcomes. It's not necessarily capitalism. So when you say, what is your goal? I want to lift up all citizens."