Look, in any system, you want highly ethical people who really understand issues to form policies and make tough decisions. You need all the right people in the room. But there's a general view in Washington now by many politicians that if you ever were on this side, you're conflicted for being on that side.

When the government gets involved in pricing, I don't think it's the right way to look at a business.

Banks don't want certain asset classes, and that's created opportunities for private equity, hedge funds, Silicon Valley. In this case I think he was referring to some of the European banks shedding assets, and the big buyers are probably not going to be big American banks. Someone like Blackstone may have a very good chance to buy those assets, leverage them, borrow up a little bit, and do something good there.

Part of the concept of the euro zone was to establish a common market. The banks were going to bank across all their countries like we bank across states. But that concept got killed for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't get into. That was a good concept, by the way. It may yet return, because there are huge economies of scale in banking. That's another thing people don't quite get.

If you look at Detroit, that mayor, it's been a train wreck for 40 years, the population has gone from 2 million to 700,000. This Mayor comes in, and he talked about streetlights, sanitation, jobs, policing, schools, affordable housing. He's doing it all, and it's growing for the first time in 30 years. Literally, one man. But that one man couldn't do it without business. And business couldn't have done it without a political environment where they wanted to improve things. If you had an antibusiness environment there, it would still be down there.

JPMorgan is a very good franchise. And the way you should look at a franchise, a business, is from the standpoint of the customers.

We got a lot of excellent people and businesses from Bear and WaMu. But Bear definitely was more painful. WaMu got us into Florida, California, and other states, which was a huge benefit - to expand and grow and add middle-market, private banking, investment banking, and other products, too.