Dimon Suggests Other States Should Be More Like Texas

(Bloomberg) — Jamie Dimon applauded Texas for its business-friendly policies and said other areas including New York City should do more to attract investment.

The chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. praised Texas’s lack of an income tax and its light regulatory touch, which have prompted companies to relocate or expand in the state. JPMorgan’s workforce in Texas has surpassed 30,000 in recent years while New York’s total has slipped to less than 29,000 from 35,000.

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“Mayors and governors call you up here and they say, ‘Jamie, what can we do to get more employees?’” he told reporters after touring a worker-training facility in Houston. “And you can look at other states, which are almost completely opposite.”

Dimon’s upbeat comments about Texas marked a shift in tone from a November visit, when he warned that the state risked undermining its business-friendly reputation with laws punishing Wall Street banks for their policies limiting work with the gun and fossil-fuel industries. In his latest comments, he instead criticized some of New York City’s elected officials, saying they were the reason Amazon.com Inc. chose not to build a second headquarters there.

“In New York City, the elected — not the mayor, not the governor, but a lot of the elected — they don’t want business,” he said. “They didn’t let Amazon come in and build a whole new thing there.”

Dimon acknowledged that he gets “a little pushback” from Texas officials over environmental initiatives that his bank has endorsed.

“I call, I explain to them what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” he said. “That’s fine.”

In recent years, Tesla Inc. and Charles Schwab Corp. have moved their headquarters to Texas from California, while Caterpillar Inc. relocated from Illinois.

In addition, Elon Musk recently expressed interest in shifting Tesla’s business incorporation to Texas from Delaware. His rocket maker, SpaceX, filed earlier this month to convert its incorporation to Texas.

(Updates with recent corporate moves to Texas in eighth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the current New York employment total in the second paragraph.)

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