JPMorgan finances $230 billion in first year of $1.5 trillion initiative

Dimon says security plan will exceed $1.5 trillion target

JPMorgan Chase financed $230 billion of projects through its $1.5 trillion national-security initiative during the initiative’s first year, the bank said Monday. The “security and resiliency initiative” is meant to ensure the largest U.S. bank is doing its part to protect the economy from supply-chain disruptions and threats from abroad.

The figure includes the $125 billion merger of Dominion Energy and NextEra, which bankers acknowledged they would have completed with or without the new program. The single transaction accounts for more than half of the announced total.

Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute that the initiative has allowed JPMorgan to take risks it normally couldn’t through the bank’s regular lending channels, including by working with companies at an earlier stage than the bank normally would. “We are doing things with companies at an earlier stage than JPMorgan would normally do,” Dimon said. “We’ll blow way past that trillion and a half dollars.”

The initiative is one of JPMorgan’s latest flagship projects, leveraging its more than $4 trillion balance sheet to invest in companies and projects that executives see as critical to the U.S. economy. It does so by directly investing in defense contractors, energy suppliers and heavy industrial companies, as well as arranging loans and other investments for them.

The $1.5 trillion program was announced a year ago as the Trump administration began to take stakes in nationally important firms, including Intel and U.S. Steel. JPMorgan was advising MP Materials, the largest rare-earths manufacturer in the country, when the Pentagon acquired a 15% stake in the company last year. Dimon wished JPMorgan had invested alongside the Department of Defense — an experience that helped spur the bank’s initiative.

The Wall Street Journal reported the initiative is also serving as a stand-in for Dimon’s political ambitions. As he has passed the 20-year mark as JPMorgan’s CEO, he has shown more desire to try to shape national policy, especially as he appears to have abandoned any plans to run for political office one day. “I would love to be president,” Dimon said to a crowd of JPMorgan employees in San Francisco this summer. “But I have a great job, and I could do a lot of great things from this perch.”

Last month, JPMorgan announced a partnership with the state of Michigan and Ford Motor to deploy more than $2 billion to help subsidize new manufacturing companies that can plug gaps in supply chains.

Dimon said money cannot solve all U.S. economic problems, which include an inadequately trained workforce and permitting rules that hold up companies from pushing ahead on investment. “A lot of those vendors need help, and often it’s not capital,” Dimon said in the WSJ Leadership Institute interview.