JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon undergoes emergency heart surgery
JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon is recovering from emergency heart surgery, the bank said.
The 63-year-old experienced a tear in his heart’s main artery which was caught early and treated successfully, JP Morgan said in a publicly-released internal memo.
Dimon is “awake, alert, and recovering well” after the surgery yesterday morning, the memo said.
JP Morgan’s co-presidents and co-chief operating officers, Daniel Pinto and Gordon Smith, are running the bank while Dimon recovers.
“As we always have done, this is a time for all of us to stay focused on our important responsibilities,” said Pinto and Smith in the memo.
“We know you all join us in wishing Jamie our very best and a smooth and speedy recovery.”
Dimon has led JP Morgan for over a decade, turning the bank into a global behemoth through crisis-era acquisitions and opportunistic market share grabs, and is a larger-than-life figure on Wall Street.
He has often publicly expressed opinions on issues ranging from immigration to healthcare, and has mocked financial regulators and joked about becoming US president.
Analysts described Pinto and Smith as capable hands to run JP Morgan in Dimon’s absence, but said the health scare raised new questions about Dimon’s eventual successor.
“The bottom line is that Dimon is often viewed as a steady hand for the banking industry during turbulent times (like we are in now),” said KBW analyst Brian Kleinhanzl.
“Not having him at the helm of JPMorgan is a modest negative.”
News of Dimon’s surgery comes shortly after JP Morgan began implementing emergency risk management plans in London amid fears over the coronavirus epidemic.
Sales and trading staff in the bank’s markets team were told in an internal memo yesterday that they would be split between different officers from Monday as a “precautionary measure” to limit the number of infections among staff in the event of an outbreak.