“We would probably still update investors quarterly with much less stuff,” JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said on Tuesday.
Last month, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins said the agency would fast track President Donald Trump’s proposal to end quarterly corporate earnings reporting and move to semi-annual reports instead. Dimon said he would welcome such a move. But there’s much more that he would want to change.
“I think the bigger problem wasn’t just reporting quarterly, it’s forecasting, where CEOs get their back up against a wall; they have to meet these things,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
“I think it’s a small part of a much bigger problem,” he said. The U.S. has gone from 8,000 public companies in 1996 to ~4,000 today. “I’m not sure that’s good. We drive companies out of it. We have cookie-cutter governance,” Dimon noted. He also pointed to activists, litigation, cookie-cutter compensation, disclosure requirements, and “endless rules” as challenges to small companies going public.
He applauds the administration’s efforts to reduce regulation.
“You want an active market, and we’ve kind of crushed it,” he said. “If I was a regulator, I’d take a step back, look at the whole system and say, ‘How can we improve it and make it safer?’ and look at it holistically.”
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