JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon put Mayor Zohran Mamdani on notice Monday: keep hiking taxes and watch Wall Street leave.
In his annual shareholder letter, the 70-year-old Queens native said New York City already carries the highest corporate and individual tax burden in the country. Businesses are responding in kind.
“You can already see a fairly large exodus of people and jobs out of some states with high taxes and high expenses,” Dimon wrote.
He didn’t name Mamdani. He didn’t have to. The democratic socialist mayor swept into office last year promising to “tax the rich” and has spent his first year trying to deliver. He wants to jack the corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5%, and hit individuals earning over $1 million with an extra 2% surcharge. City Comptroller Mark Levine says NYC needs to close a $12 billion budget hole within two years.
Mamdani’s answer: make it more expensive to do business here.
JPMorgan’s numbers tell the story. The bank opened a brand-new $3 billion headquarters on Park Avenue last year. Same time, it was cutting its New York headcount from 30,000 to 24,000. Texas? Up from 26,000 jobs in 2015 to 32,000 now. Dimon said that shift “will likely continue.”
Apollo Global Management is already eyeing Texas and Florida for a second U.S. base. Steve Fulop, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said it’s not just Apollo.
“Business leaders feel that some elected officials are tone deaf to the broader economic environment,” Fulop said Sunday on 77 WABC. “They have no realistic long-term plan to fix the affordability crisis beyond raising costs.”
Dimon reached back to the 1970s as a warning. That decade, nearly half of the 125 Fortune 500 companies based in New York packed up and left, crushed by taxes and ballooning operating costs. He called that kind of departure “a disaster for a city.”
Fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself under a mayor who treats “tax the rich” as both an economic policy and a moral calling.
“Higher taxes mean lower returns on capital and less competitiveness by their nature,” Dimon wrote. “Companies need to remain competitive in this very tough, fast-moving world.”
