JPMORGAN CHASE chief executive Jamie Dimon said he regrets using the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp’s (FDIC) guarantee programme to issue $40 billion in unsecured debt during the height of the financial crisis. “We didn’t need it,” Mr Dimon (54) said in his annual letter to shareholders yesterday. “And it just added to the argument that all banks had been bailed out and fuelled the anger directed toward banks.”

Mr Dimon said the New York-based company was “highly criticised” for issuing debt backed by the FDIC and for accepting $25 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The company repaid all Tarp funds in June, stopped using the FDIC’s programme last April and shunned participation in other federal programs “to avoid the stigma”, he said.

JPMorgan, which ranks second behind Bank of America in deposits and assets among US lenders, remained profitable through the crisis with combined net income of $17.3 billion in the last two years. The company issued $20.8 billion in FDIC-guaranteed long-term debt in 2008, and $19.7 billion in 2009.

“It was not a question of access or need,” Mr Dimon said of the FDIC programme, whose government backing helped keep interest rates low. “The markets always were open to us, but the programme did save us money.”

Mr Dimon apologised for what he said were the bank’s mistakes. He said the two biggest were lowering mortgage underwriting standards and making too many leveraged loans that “may have contributed to the financial crisis”.

At the same time, he claimed some credit for helping to stabilise markets through JPMorgan’s purchases of Bear Stearns Cos and Washington Mutual. He also sought to deflect some of the public anger toward financial companies and to correct the perception that all banks would have failed if the federal government hadn’t intervened.

“We should acknowledge that the worst offenders among financial companies no longer are in existence,” Mr Dimon said. “And while it is true that some of the surviving banks would not, or might not, have survived, not all banks would have failed.”

Mr Dimon, who took over as chief executive in 2005, said his “Number one priority” this year is to find his successor. – (Bloomberg)