Jamie Dimon is a jerk

I have to laugh at people talking about how great JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is because of his New York Times editorial, "Jamie Dimon: Why We’re Giving Our Employees a Raise". A sampling:

WAGE stagnation. Income inequality. A lack of quality education. Insufficient training and skills development.

Issues like these have led approximately two-thirds of Americans to believe that the next generation will be worse off than the last. And it is true that too many people are not getting a fair opportunity to get ahead. We must find ways to help them move up the economic ladder, and everyone — business, government and nonprofits — needs to play a role.

At JPMorgan Chase, we’re starting by giving thousands of employees a raise.

Our minimum salary for American employees today is $10.15 an hour (plus meaningful benefits, which I’ll explain later), almost $3 above the current national minimum wage. Over the next three years, we will raise the minimum pay for 18,000 employees to between $12 and $16.50 an hour for full-time, part-time and new employees, depending on geographic and market factors.

Isn't that special?

Let's compare that to this piece of news from this Bloomberg article from January:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. boosted Jamie Dimon’s pay 35 percent, tying most of the package to future performance after a record share of investors rejected the bank’s compensation practices last year.

The bank awarded Dimon, its chief executive officer and chairman, $27 million for 2015, up from $20 million a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing Thursday. The package includes $20.5 million in performance share units, a new pay element tied to future targets. Proxy advisers had complained last year that the company lacked concrete goals for its executives. Dimon also got a $5 million cash bonus and a $1.5 million salary.

Mind you, it wasn't that he didn't deserve it:

Under Dimon, who has led JPMorgan since 2006, the bank managed to increase profit last year 12 percent to a record $24.4 billion despite stagnant revenue...The company’s shares climbed 5.5 percent in 2015, outperforming the 3.5 percent decline of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index.

Of course, you have to look at what is in the "special sauce" of success:

He accomplished that by trimming expenses almost 4 percent to $59 billion. 

No doubt some of that expense cutting was more than a few of those employees that MIGHT have gotten a raise over the next three years. Good luck to the rest of those employees. For their sake, I hope Dimon doesn't cut any more expenses.

June 13, 2016: JPMorgan Chase to lay off 90 in Houston
May 24, 2016: J.P. Morgan's Bank for the Rich Is Cutting About 100 Jobs
May 28, 2015: JPMorgan expected to cut more than 5,000 jobs by next year
February 25, 2014: JPMorgan to cut 8,000 jobs

That is just a little of Dimon's "stellar" work over the last few years. Do you still want to applaud his generosity now?

So when he wrote his editorial in the New York Times, "Why We’re Giving Our Employees a Raise", he should have said, "Because they aren't here any more."