Facebook’s Libra Is ‘Neat Idea That’ll Never Happen,’ Dimon Says

Michelle F. Davis, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- Count the chief of the biggest U.S. bank among doubters of Facebook Inc.’s effort to create a cryptocurrency.

“It was a neat idea that’ll never happen,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said Friday on a panel at a conference hosted by the Institute of International Finance in Washington.

Dimon said the idea wasn’t particularly unique and pointed to his own firm’s stablecoin, JPM Coin. The Libra Association, the group that will oversee the digital currency, took a blow last week when several key partners, including Mastercard Inc., Visa Inc. and EBay Inc., abandoned the project.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Dimon and Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman talked about their own firms’ technology efforts and the risks that come with those developments. JPMorgan is spending more than $11 billion this year on tech, while Gorman said his firm’s budget is $4 billion.

Gorman said the financial industry went from first choice to last choice for tech talent after the crisis, but has become more competitive for the top people.

Gorman said he’s concerned about hidden risks as more banking data moves to the cloud. Dimon issued a warning to customers: If they give a fintech access to their banking account and that firm is hacked, it could be on the hook for any missing money from the account, not JPMorgan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle F. Davis in New York at mdavis194@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steve Dickson