JPMC CEO: PPP Saved Roughly 35M Jobs

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon estimated the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has saved as many as 35 million jobs by delivering the Small Business Administration‘s emergency forgivable loans to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) impacted by the pandemic, according to NBC News.

“I’m going to give credit to [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Steven Mnuchin, [Federal Reserve Chair] Jerome Powell, the administration, and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress,” Dimon told the outlet. “Who would have thought they could move that quick? And you can argue with PPP, and it’s been redesigned a couple times, but they moved very quickly.”

Last month, a report co-written by economists at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ADP Research Institute, put the number of saved jobs by the PPP at around 2.3 million jobs through early June. The initiative boosted employment at companies that received the loans by 2 percent to 4.5 percent, the researchers found.

Dimon, who served on President Donald Trump’s now-defunct Strategic and Policy forum, tempered his praise with a request that Congress and the White House do more for SMBs and the jobless to get the country through the next three to six months.

“There’s going to be some scar tissue from this one, but we have a chance to recover,” he told NBC.

Democrats and Republicans are stalled over the next version of the stimulus. The House has approved a more than $3 trillion proposal while the GOP is $1 trillion.

Dimon told NBC the PPP should be extended for businesses that need the restart money or the ones that didn’t get it in the first go-round, including business owners of color.

“A lot of news outlets are saying that, you know, minority businesses got much less than they actually needed,” he told the network.

Dimon is one of nearly 30 high-profile CEOs, including Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who have pledged to hire 100,000 people from New York’s minority communities by 2030.

The leaders from many of New York’s dominant sectors have formed the New York Jobs CEO Council. Its mission is to up the recruitment from low-income Black, Latinx and Asian communities.