Obama blamed lenders in his January State of the Union address for the 2008 credit freeze, saying their wrong-way bets "left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag." Lobby groups representing financial firms including JPMorgan and Bank of America Corp. fought against the creation of Obama's new watchdog, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection bureau, as an independent agency, saying it would create needless bureaucracy.
Dimon, who was once dubbed Obama's "favorite banker" by the New York Times, publicly questioned Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke in June on financial regulatory costs. Net income at JPMorgan rose 9.2 percent to $19 billion last year.
"Jamie's irritated understandably by some of this stuff," said James Armstrong, president of Berkshire investor Henry H. Armstrong Associates. "But I don't think Berkshire is saying one thing and doing another" with compensation, he said.