Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase »

Duff McDonald is a New York-based journalist. A contributing editor at New York magazine, he has also written for Vanity Fair, GQ, WIRED, CondÉ Nast Portfolio, and Time, among other publications. Once a regular guest on ABC's World News Now, McDonald has also appeared on CNN, CNNfn, Fox News, CNBC, and NPR. In 2004, he was the recipient of two Canadian National Magazine Awards—Best Business Story (gold) and Best Investigative Reporting (silver)—for “The Black Watch”—in National Post Business. A Canadian, McDonald lives in Bronxville, New York, with his wife, Caroline, and daughter, Marguerite.

In the midst of the most disastrous economic climate of Wall Street’s history, one executive has weathered the storm more deftly than any other: Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. In 2008, while Dimon’s competitors watched their companies crumble, JPMorgan not only survived, it made an astonishing $5 billion profit. Dimon’s continued triumph in the face of an industry-wide meltdown has made him a paragon of finance.

In Last Man Standing, award-winning journalist Duff McDonald provides an unprecedented and deeply personal look at the extraordinary figure behind JPMorgan’s success. Using countless hours of interviews with Dimon and his full circle of friends, family, and colleagues, this definitive biography is by far the most comprehensive portrait of the man known as the Savior of Wall Street.

Now, in an updated prologue, McDonald offers insight into the future of Wall Street and how Dimon will overcome the challenge of aggressive new regulation from Washington—and how he plans to continue to thrive as the world’s preeminent banker.

Kirkus Reviews

Nicely crafted debut recounting JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's climb to the pinnacle of American finance. Now 53, Dimon became Wall Street's "banker of choice" in 2008 when he executed the historic deal that saved the investment bank Bear Stearns and helped the U.S. government prevent widespread financial calamity. In this admiring biography, New York contributing editor McDonald describes a precocious stockbroker's son who grew up on Park Avenue and vowed at age nine that he would make a fortune one day. Serious, headstrong and outspoken, Dimon earned a Harvard MBA and joined Wall Street legend Sandy Weill at American Express in 1982, becoming the older man's protege. Together they spent 15 years making a fortune. Weill hunted out financial firms worth acquiring, and Dimon closed the deals, becoming president of Primerica at age 35. Along the way Dimon developed his signature, regularly updated lists of "Things I Owe People" and "Things People Owe Me" and his credo that "it's more important to do 10 things and get eight of them right than to do five and get them all right." Their colossal egos finally clashing, Weill and Dimon fell out in the late '90s, with Dimon resigning to head Bank One and then the global megabank JPMorgan Chase, which he tranformed into a high-performing firm with his trademark cost-cutting and integration of systems. McDonald shows how Dimon came out from under Weill's shadow, exercising a penchant for openness and debate-driven decision-making and a commitment to the belief that CEOs should "drill down" (he demanded 50-page books with monthly numbers from each division head). With a new maturity that allowed him to avoid the subprime meltdown, Dimon eventuallyeclipsed his mentor/competitor Weill, winning recognition as a Wall Street hero for rescuing Bear Stearns and, writes the author, "a leader who knew how to make a company grow." McDonald produces a seamless narrative of the complex deals and power struggles that characterized Dimon's career throughout this heady period. A must-read for the business crowd. Agent: David Kuhn/Kuhn Projects

Prologue vii

1 Banking in the Blood 1

2 The Mentor 15

3 The Subprime of His Life 30

4 Building the Perfect Deal Machine 44

5 His Own Man 66

6 The Boiling Within 86

7 A Brief View From the Top 98

8 Everything But Kilimanjaro 117

9 The Outsider 143

10 The Return 171

11 Winning By Not Losing 202

12 All That He Ever Wanted 240

13 The New Power Broker 275

14 Will Giants Still Walk the Earth? 308

Epilogue 321

Bibliography 329

Acknowledgments 330

Index 332