# JPMorgan Chase The largest bank in the United States — about $4 trillion of assets, the product of the 2000 merger of J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan and the 2008 absorption of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual at the government's request — and the archetype of the institution whose failure the state has decided is unthinkable ([[SIFI]]). Run since 2005 by [[Jamie Dimon]], the last of the crisis-era chief executives still in place, it is regulated at the holding-company level by the [[Federal Reserve]] and, for its national bank, by the [[OCC]]. It is in the vault for three reasons that pull in different directions. ## The counterparty of last resort In every recent crisis JPMorgan has been the buyer the government calls: Bear Stearns in March 2008, Washington Mutual that September, [[First Republic Bank]] in May 2023 ([[Silicon Valley Bank]] has the sequence). Each rescue made it larger, and each confirmed the argument the [[Financial System Hub]] and [[The Banking System]] pages make about concentration: the too-big-to-fail problem is solved, repeatedly, by making one bank bigger. Dimon has used the standing that gives him to speak as the industry — on regulation, on the deficit, on the Fed's independence, which he defended again in January 2026 when the Justice Department opened a criminal inquiry into the Fed and its chair. ## Epstein JPMorgan banked [[Jeffrey Epstein]] from 1998 to 2013, after his 2008 conviction, and settled the victims' class action for $290 million and the U.S. Virgin Islands' suit for $75 million in 2023. Senator [[Ron Wyden]]'s 67-page report of **August 4, 2026** — "Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein's Sex Trafficking" — found the bank had flagged more than $1 billion of Epstein-related transactions as suspicious only after his 2019 arrest and death, years after cutting ties; the bank's answer was that it "acted appropriately on what we knew, when we knew it." (Deutsche Bank and Bank of America drew parallel findings.) Its former private-banking chief Jes Staley was found by the bank's own suit to have concealed the relationship. ## The President's bank JPMorgan closed the Trump Organization's accounts in 2021, weeks after January 6. In August 2025 the President signed the executive order on "politicized or unlawful debanking" ([[Debanking]]), and on **January 22, 2026** sued the bank and Dimon personally in Miami-Dade state court for at least **$5 billion**, alleging the closures were political. The bank's answer: "we do close accounts because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company." The suit sits beside the Fed inquiry and the credit-card-rate-cap fight as the second term's campaign against the one institution in finance that has not needed its approval. On the deals side, the bank's Strategic Investment Group co-led the August 2026 [[Base Power $1B Series D]] under its Security and Resiliency Initiative — a systemically important balance sheet taking equity in venture-stage infrastructure, which moves the exposure from the loan book to the equity book and the regulatory conversation with it. ## See Also - [[Jamie Dimon]] · [[Federal Reserve]] · [[OCC]] · [[SIFI]] · [[The Banking System]] · [[Financial System Hub]] · [[Financial System Timeline]] - [[2008 Financial Crisis]] · [[First Republic Bank]] · [[Silicon Valley Bank]] · [[Goldman Sachs]] - [[Jeffrey Epstein]] · [[Ron Wyden]] · [[Debanking]] · [[Donald Trump]] · [[Base Power $1B Series D]]