JP Morgan Chase

JP Morgan Chase is by far the largest financial institution in the U.S., with $4 trillion in assets in the first quarter of 2026, up from $1.6 trillion at the end of 2007. Second in total assets is Bank of America with $2.7 trillion.

$4 trillion.  Think about that.

Do you know what $1 trillion is? Spending at $1 a second, it would take you almost 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion. And JP Morgan has $4 trillion.

That’s the same amount as the total net worth of the bottom 50% of U.S. households: $4 trillion.

The systemic risk posed by the giant corporation is best captured by the Office of Financial Research’s Bank Systemic Risk Monitor, which the office has published and refined since 2014.

JP Morgan Chase leads the list, of course, mainly because of its vast interconnectedness with other financial institutions. It’s only #5 in leverage, though, and for short-term wholesale funding like repo it’s way down the list at #10, which may help explain why JP Morgan is often the last man standing in a panic.

In 2008, JP Morgan triggered the run that collapsed markets worldwide when it demanded sudden repayment of its repo loans from investment bank Lehman Brothers, Lehman couldn’t immediately repay and the Fed let it fail.

With the collapse of Lehman Brothers, our interconnected financial markets crashed.

“As a scholar of the Great Depression, I honestly believe that September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression. If you look at the firms that came under pressure in that period. . . only one . . . was not at serious risk of failure. So out of maybe the 13 — 13 of the most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2009. (Editor’s note: Italicized boldface is mine.)

Regulators intervened, JP Morgan got its money back, and it came through the 2008 crash and ensuing Great Recession just fine.

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Editor’s Note:  The following section is RepoWatch’s April 2011 description of the systemic risk that JP Morgan Chase represented to the financial markets at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. 

JP Morgan is the quintessential too-big-to-fail bank company.

It has $2.1 trillion in assets, second only to Bank of America with $2.3 trillion.[1]It has tripled in size in the past decade.[2] It is planning an aggressive expansion oversees.[3]

But more importantly, JP Morgan is too interconnected to fail.

That’s because it is deeply enmeshed in the market that posed much of the systemic risk during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, the repurchase, or “repo,” market:[4]

-JP Morgan is one of two clearing banks[5] for the most prominent corner of the U.S. repurchase market, the so-called tri-party market, where at the time of the crisis JPM was clearing for both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.[6]In that pivotal tri-party role, JP Morgan wields one of the most powerful levers in modern finance. (Update: In 2018 JP Morgan Chase gave up its role as one of the nation’s two clearing banks for the tri-party market. The remaining clearing bank is Bank of New York Mellon.)

In 2008 JP Morgan withheld tri-party financing from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, triggering their collapse – which caused the Reserve Primary money market fund to break the buck – and intensifying fears that Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and maybe even JP Morgan itself would be next.  This was the seminal systemic risk most responsbile for the Federal Reserve’s dramatic intervention in the financial markets in 2008, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

-JP Morgan itself is one of the nation’s largest repo dealers, with $222 billion in loans and $263 billion in borrowings outstanding at the end of 2010.[7] 

-JPM’s broker-dealer subsidiary, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, is one of the 20 Primary Dealers authorized to do repos with the New York Fed.[8]

-Money market funds and hedge funds are critical players in the repurchase market.[9] JP Morgan has the nation’s second-largest money market fund family[10] and the nation’s largest hedge fund group.[11]

The JPM global bank holding company is also a leader in two other key areas of systemic risk during the crisis: Credit derivatives and securitization. Last year it had the most derivatives contracts of any U.S. bank holding company,[12] and it was the world’s largest dealer of credit default swaps, the credit derivatives[13] that helped fuel the housing bubble and felled insurance giant AIG. Before credit markets collapsed, JPM was the second-biggest commercial bank sponsor of asset-backed commercial paper (ABCPaper), which securitization companies sold to raise money.[14]

Some critics find JP Morgan’s trajectory under CEO Jaime Dimon disturbing because they believe the company’s size and interconnectedness gives JP Morgan an unfair competitive advantage and will force another taxpayer bailout at the next crisis.

“Jaime Dimon clearly wants to become too big to fail, too interconnected to fail, and – above all – too global to fail,” blogged M.I.T. economist Simon Johnson.15]  “This is terrific corporate strategy – and very dangerous for the rest of us.”

But Dimon said in the Washington Post he believes no company should be immune from failure,[16] not even JP Morgan.

Our company, J.P. Morgan Chase, employs more than 220,000 people, serves well over 100 million customers, lends hundreds of millions of dollars each day and has operations in nearly 100 countries. And if some unforeseen circumstance should put this firm at risk of collapse, I believe we should be allowed to fail.

 

Editor’s note: I collected the following footnotes for my own use, to help me keep track of some of  my online sources. I’m leaving them here in case they’re helpful to you, too, even though some links disappear over time.

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