Life is getting better in the US, even with stagnating wages for some workers, thanks to improvements in technology and cars, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon.
“It’s not right to say we’re worse off,” Dimon said on Thursday at an event in Detroit, Michigan, in response to a question about declining median income. “If you go back 20 years ago, cars were worse, health was worse, you didn’t live as long, the air was worse. People didn’t have iPhones.”
While income inequality is a problem, slashing CEO pay will not help, he added.
“It is true that income inequality has kind of gotten worse,” Dimon said, noting that he wants things to get better for low and middle-class households.
Still, “you can take the compensation of every CEO in America and make it zero and it wouldn’t put a dent into it. What really matters is growth,” Dimon said.
Rising income inequality has become a heated political topic in the US. Hedge fund managers are the target of US Democrats and US Republicans seeking the presidential nomination for next year’s election, and some Republicans in US Congress have expressed openness to the idea of raising the tax rate on carried interest. Regulators are seeking to make it easier for shareholders to see the gap between what companies pay their leaders and the rest of their workforce.
Dimon, 59, focused on how to grow the economy during a wide-ranging question-and-answer session conducted by Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd. The banker emphasized the need to overcome political gridlock to solve key problems, such as overhauling immigration, trade and entitlement programs and investing in “intelligent infrastructure.”
Higher growth will help build more schools and improve training, enabling people to succeed, he said.
“To me, that’s what we should do,” Dimon said. “Not just yelling at each other about who’s to blame.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained