JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has drawn a battle line in Washington: the Clarity Act, as written, is useless on arrival — and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is the enemy driving it.
In a Fox Enterprise interview on Friday, Dimon unloaded on the pending crypto market construction laws, calling it a risk to the monetary system and a present to an trade that desires the privileges of banking with out the obligations.
“It allows cryptocurrency firms to effectively pay interest on deposits — stablecoins or something like that — without the protection that they should have,” Dimon mentioned. “It has almost no legal protections.”
His core argument: if a crypto platform walks like a financial institution and talks like a financial institution, it must be regulated like one. Which means Anti-Cash Laundering compliance, Financial institution Secrecy Act obligations, FDIC insurance coverage, capital necessities, liquidity guidelines, and the total weight of monetary oversight that conventional banks carry. The Clarity Act, in his view, lets crypto corporations skip all of it.
The combat over stablecoin rewards sits on the middle of the dispute. Banks say permitting crypto exchanges to pay clients for holding stablecoins would speed up deposit flight from conventional establishments — a ticking clock on the enterprise mannequin that has outlined American banking for a century.
Crypto advocates counter that such incentives are a pure evolution of funds infrastructure. The invoice’s markup is approaching, and neither aspect is backing down.
Dimon additionally flagged the AML drawback with cross-border stablecoin funds.
“The first one may be legitimate,” he mentioned, “the second one may be a sex trafficker.” Once cash lands in a digital pockets abroad, it might probably transfer to a 3rd pockets, a fourth — with no visibility and no accountability. That, he mentioned, is the unresolved danger hiding beneath the optimism round stablecoin utility.
Dimon: Coinbase CEO Armstrong is filled with sh*t
However Dimon reserved his sharpest phrases for Armstrong. The Coinbase CEO, he claimed, is spending a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars} in Washington to push the laws via. “No one is going to bow down to this guy,” Dimon mentioned, calling Armstrong “full of sh*t.”
It was not the primary time — Dimon made related remarks on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos earlier this yr.
JPMorgan isn’t alone. The American Bankers Affiliation, neighborhood banks, and credit score unions are aligned in opposition to the invoice’s present kind.
Dimon made clear it is a combat — not a negotiation. “We’ll fight it,” he mentioned. “If we lose, we lose. But it will be fought.”
