Jamie Dimon has handed Andy Burnham’s day-old government both a vote of confidence and a warning shot. The JP Morgan chief executive says he wants London to remain the US bank’s home “for a long period of time”, but whether Britain stays attractive as a place to do business rests on the new prime minister and his chancellor reviving growth.
“The new chancellor [is] going to need good policies that actually cause growth. So I’m praying that they get policy right [as] government after government get it wrong,” Dimon, who has run the bank since 2006, said in an interview with The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost, released on Tuesday.
For the owners of Britain’s small and medium-sized firms, that is the question of the moment put with unusual bluntness. When the boss of America’s largest bank says he is reduced to prayer, smaller businesses waiting on the same policy decisions might be forgiven a similar approach.
Burnham formally succeeded Sir Keir Starmer on Monday, promising a “new political and economic model” for Britain and arguing that MPs had fallen short for decades in creating the conditions for lasting and more equal growth. He enters Downing Street with eight in ten SME owners already braced for impact, so Dimon’s cautious optimism will be read closely on both sides of that divide.
The man charged with answering Dimon’s prayer is John Healey, the surprise pick for No 11 after early favourites Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood lost out. Burnham has also promised to set out measures to ease the cost of living as soon as Tuesday, and has hinted at lifting the earnings threshold at which workers first pay income tax, frozen at £12,570 since 2021.
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