JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon warns UK chancellor not to hike taxes on banks

Banking Titan Tells New UK Chancellor: Leave the Tax Rates Alone

Wanderstayfinder.com – The first budget of John Healey’s tenure as chancellor is already drawing fire from the most powerful voice in global banking. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase — the largest bank on Earth by assets — placed a phone call to the new chancellor urging him to resist pressure to levy a windfall tax on the sector’s outsized earnings. The conversation, confirmed by someone familiar with its contents, marked Dimon’s position as the first of several bank chief executives scheduled to hold introductory calls with Healey in the coming weeks.

Speculation about a one-off surcharge on UK lenders has intensified as Andy Burnham’s cost-of-living programme searches for funding. Campaigners have pegged the potential yield of such a measure at roughly £19 billion, a figure that would meaningfully offset household energy costs. Dimon’s intervention, however, signals that the industry’s lobbying machinery is already engaged before a single line item appears in the autumn statement.

A Warning Framed in New York

In the call, Dimon did not limit his tax commentary to British policy. He pointed to a contraction in finance-sector employment in New York, attributing the decline to the city’s tax environment. The person familiar with the exchange stressed that Dimon’s remarks were not narrowly targeted at the UK, though the timing made the subtext unmistakable. JP Morgan itself declined to comment on the conversation.

The CEO’s posture is consistent with a long-running campaign against Britain’s post-crisis bank taxation. After the 2008 financial crisis, when the state stepped in to rescue major UK lenders, Parliament imposed a higher corporation tax rate on the sector. UK banks now pay 28 per cent on profits, three points above the standard 25 per cent rate applicable to most companies, alongside a separate surcharge levied on their UK balance sheets. Dimon has repeatedly argued that these additional charges chill investment and employment.

In July, speaking on the Master Investor Podcast, he warned that pushing the rates higher still could carry

“adverse consequences… It would be one more negative on that bucket of things you got to think about.”

That month he also joined other bank chiefs in lobbying successfully against proposed increases in Rachel Reeves’s budget. The very next day, he announced plans for a three-million-square-foot tower in London’s Canary Wharf financial district, expected to function as the firm’s UK headquarters and accommodate more than half of its 23,000-strong British workforce. The announcement carried an explicit caveat: the project depended on a “continuing positive business environment in the UK.” By May, Dimon went further, suggesting the £3 billion tower could be scrapped entirely if Keir Starmer were succeeded by a Labour prime minister hostile to banking interests.

Union and Campaigner Pushback

The remarks landed with force in the labour movement. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, dismissed the intervention as out of touch with ordinary economic reality.

“People are sick and tired of being told they have to tighten their belts while profits, dividends and bankers’ bonuses hit record highs. The new chancellor has a clear opportunity to show working people he’s on their side by asking banks to pay fair taxes to cut energy bills.”

The TUC is pressing the government to raise the existing bank surcharge. Its modelling suggests a 16 per cent rate would generate £24 billion over four years, while a 35 per cent rate would yield £60 billion in the same window. Positive Money, a campaign group focused on financial-sector accountability, has argued that the industry’s windfall profits make a £19 billion levy entirely affordable.

Simon Youel, the group’s head of advocacy, drew a historical parallel to sharpen the point:

“Even Margaret Thatcher introduced a windfall tax on banks, recognising that their profits were simply the result of higher interest rates rather than increased efficiency or better service to customers. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had a chance to recoup banks’ huge windfalls at the last budget, but instead they chose to raise taxes on ordinary people. Hopefully Andy Burnham and John Healey won’t be fooled by the industry’s lobbyists into making the same mistake.”

The Numbers Behind the Debate

The fiscal arithmetic is difficult to ignore. The four largest UK lenders — HSBC, NatWest, Barclays, and Lloyds — collectively reported £29.2 billion in profits across the first half of the year. Of that sum, nearly half, £13.7 billion, was earmarked for return to shareholders through dividends and share buy-backs. Against this, UK banks as a sector paid an estimated £43.3 billion in total tax for the financial year ending March 2025, per a report commissioned by the industry body UK Finance.

Whether that total represents adequate contribution or excessive burden depends on which lens one applies. For households still absorbing elevated energy costs and stagnant real wages, the optics of record bank dividends alongside public-sector austerity create political pressure that no amount of lobbying can fully neutralise. For the banks themselves, the marginal cost of a windfall levy — layered on top of an already-elevated tax rate and balance-sheet surcharge — is framed as a threat to headcount, investment, and the sector’s willingness to keep operating from London.

Neither Burnham nor Healey has yet issued a specific statement on bank taxation. But the sequence of events — Dimon’s call, the union’s public rebuttal, the campaign groups’ modelling, and the looming October budget — suggests the question will dominate the fiscal debate well before the chancellor takes the floor. The industry’s message is clear: tax increases will be met with investment withdrawal. The public’s message, articulated through its unions and advocacy groups, is equally clear: record profits deserve record contributions. Healey’s first budget will be the first test of which argument carries more weight in the new government.