One word tells you how seriously Jamie Dimon wants banks to change

The word Jamie Dimon reaches for is ‘excised,’ not ‘retired’ or ‘phased out.’ Excised is surgical. It suggests the phrase ‘too big to fail’ has to be removed at the root, not just pushed out of polite conversation.

‘The term “too big to fail” must be excised from our vocabulary,’ the JPMorgan Chase CEO has said, arguing that as long as the phrase exists in the vocabulary of regulators, investors and policymakers, the thinking it carries comes along with it. You cannot have an honest conversation about systemic risk, he argues, if everyone in the room is quietly assuming the biggest players will be caught before they hit the ground.

The phrase entered common use during the 2008 financial crisis, when governments decided some banks were too deeply woven into the economy to be allowed to collapse, and taxpayer money went in to save them.

The quote lands because it takes something that feels like a neutral description of financial reality and treats it as a choice. Too big to fail sounds like a fact; Dimon is saying it is closer to a habit of mind that the system has grown comfortable with because questioning it is inconvenient.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by Steve Jurvetson