Should Jamie Dimon Tell Us Where Our Money Is?
Jamie Dimon
Chairman and CEO
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
270 Park Avenue (I’m guessing top floor)
New York, NY 10017
Approx. Reading Time: 4 minutes
Hey Jamie,
I’m a Chase customer with an obvious question that hinges on a nagging observation.
This all starts with me driving down the freeway whilst hands-free talking on the phone. Suddenly, it occurs to me: I currently do not know where EITHER my car keys OR my smartphone actually ARE. I know they’re somewhere in the car doing whatever NFC Bluetoothery makes the talking and the driving HAPPEN. But they may be wedged into a seat, a coat pocket, maybe even rattling around the TRUNK. Think of this moment as the last straw to burst the bubble on the camel’s back of THIS elephant in the room:
1. No one knows how ANYTHING works anymore
Sure, there are niche experts in cars, computers, chemicals, pickleball, appliances, quantum physics, osmosis, fiber arts, fintech, the human brain. SMARTY pantses! I’m just saying, the average person is driving through LIFE with little idea of how most things that they interact with and DEPEND upon daily really function.
Back in the olden days, it didn’t seem to bother folks much. There’d be an eclipse and they’d come up with some fanciful MYTH about an angry sun god. We learned this history in TINTIN. Or, someone would catch cold and, of course, it’s time to call in the LEECH doctor. The more progress we made on all that stuff (thanks, SCIENCE!), the more we man-made stuff most people will never grasp, and the more the knowable universe unfolded. SO, here we are. In a world where we increasingly know more, and increasingly know there’s too much to EVER know.
Which leads me directly to the core question that I have for you, Sir Jamie:
2. Where’s my money?
Let me clarify that I bank with you guys, and I’m not particularly worried that I won’t be ABLE to use the dollars that are currently ascribed to me SOMEWHERE in your databases. You don’t have to hand this question over to an eager young corporate comms person to assure me I’m protected by a series of social and legal agreements between banks, accountholders, etc. I’m just ASKING, could you tell me, or anyone, where their money is physically located? Assuming I asked. Which I just DID.
They’re building data centers at a Matrixian clip. My money, presumably, is in one of them. Maybe it’s in Pahrump, Nevada or in Jeff Bezos' Beverly Hills basement (I hear he still runs some of AWS outta there to save a few bucks because his wife really likes SHOES, as do I). Who knows? But don’t you think I have the RIGHT to know, you know, exactly where my money IS?
I should be able to go visit it, confirm it’s there, COUNT it. Maybe scatter it on the floor and make cash ANGELS in it (we’d use 1’s to be sure the pile was big enough for a serviceable angel. And you might also have to chip in, I hate to tell you).
It makes total sense that I should know…AND ALSO it would be a TERRIBLE idea to tell me. And THIS is the modern world in a nutshell, Sir Jamie.
So I guess I’m not looking for an address, I understand there may be HACKER types looking to cat burglar into your server rooms and they’d probably go right for MY account. Just my luck! Maybe your computer money storage people don’t even tell YOU, Sir Jamie Dimon, where all the money lives. Maybe only a taciturn custodian named HANK, holstering a giant keyring and a canister of compressed air, is the only person on EARTH who knows exactly where my allocated bits and bytes are stored. That guy’s a GEM!
I will say, my blind, 80 year old MOM is absolutely crystal clear in her mind that all her savings are stored safely behind 18 inches of American STEEL at a branch on San Francisco’s Geary Street. I don’t have the heart to tell her every dollar she has is just a series of
e-lectric 1’s and 0’s floating somewhere between Delaware and Bakersfield and viewable through my phone ANYWHERE on earth. (Aside: if you meet my mom, please do NOT tell her the story about briefly losing, even within the confines of my own motor vehicle, the very phone that we use to access her accounts and manage all her affairs).
Sure, anytime we toddle down to the branch to get a little spending cash, some gets forked over. Somehow, they siphon her earmarked dollars from the backroom to that little drawer there at the teller desk and the illusion is REINFORCED.
Whatever the answer to this question is (and I’m looking for one that is both conceptual and yet VERY tangible), it does PROMPT a suggestion for how to direct all of your marketing dollars:
3. Be the Most Real Bank!
Imagine the confidence the entire global financial system requires of all participants today. To have taken the fruits of all your labors and installed them in some metal box of wires somewhere in a cooled warehouse surrounded by barbed wire where you will quite literally NEVER see it. It’s so safe from marauders that even its owners can’t get to it? How CONVENIENT!
Meantime, we’re getting ready to DOUBLE down, handing all the money over the robot overlords who must be just licking their chops. The robots are all hanging out in the break room absolutely crying with laughter about how if people don’t understand how money works NOW they will NEVER understand Blockchain or AI financial advisors, and yet they’ll still buy up mountains of Doge Coin, or whatever.
It’s stuff like this that explains why Terrence Howard can go on The Rogan Show and announce that 1 X 1 = 2 and THOUSANDS of people react like “See!? I KNEW it! Nothing is real! All the science and business and media people made up math just to TRICK us!”
That’s why I think you should put your best people on a new initiative: Real Money. Chase lets you see, touch, feel, FROLIC with your money. Because it’s REAL and it exists in physical space. Come SEE it! Toss it about! We’ll even loan you some of Sir Jamie’s, for HEFT!
We could at least trot HANK out there to vouch for it.
Remember the GOLD standard and that Fort Knox deal? Me either. But I love the idea of having the right to show up in Kentucky if I get a notion, and tell some burly, perplexed GUARD that I’m here to collect my net worth in gold BULLION as is my right as an American dollar owner. It seems FAIR! I love the idea that I hand him, like, an official Demand Note (it would be on parchment with lots of fancy stamps and intricate patterns and flourishes) where on one side it has dollars and the other has gold and in between there’s an equals:
_____ = _____
$ Au
The guard goes in the back and retrieves his bespectacled banker BOSS who comes back squinting at the form shaking his head and muttering something like “FML, I knew this was possible, but I never thought it would happen.” So then about 20 minutes later they’d wheel out a parmesan-wheel size hunka shiny gold and shave me off a CHUNK (not that BIG a chunk, sorry to say), measure it to the penny on a nuclear scale (if such a thing as a nuclear scale exists, though if it did no one would know how it really WORKS), and send me on my way. I’d go to my local Chase and deposit it, of course. But not before feeling that reassurance that my money EXISTS, has weight and mass and it’s SHINY and makes SOUNDS if you drop it in your pocket.
Maybe this is a big JPMorgan Chase brand PIVOT, or maybe just a promotional gimmick. Give it to your best peeps to decide—it’s all YOURS! Chase could be the only bank that lets people VISIT their money, go get it, put it under their mattress for a night, bring it back the next day. Celebrities could borrow it to wear as jewelry to the Academy Awards®. Or you could just blindfold customers for security purposes and take them to Jeff Bezos’ basement upon request. There could be a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket secret map “Show Me My Own Money” sweepstakes. There’s a wide RANGE, is what I’m saying.
Sure, there’s a few deets to work out. And again, it’s BOTH a terrible risky idea that makes a TON of sense. But I tell you this: they will LOVE this on TikTok, you’ll have Gen Z eating out of the palm of your hand on top of the world.
Anyway, think about it.
Phineas Bling
ADDRESS WITHHELD
PS: Thanks for buying up First Republic, I liked those guys.
PPS What would be SO hilarious is if you wrote back, “Easy, yer money’s in Fresno.”
PPS Don’t get me started on the cash illusion—that’s a topic for a future letter.
