The Bureau of Historic Losses · The Skeptics' Ledger
Entry № 003
Jamie Dimon
Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase
“It's a fraud… worse than tulip bulbs. It won't end well.”
$1,000 of Bitcoin the day they said it, at its peak
US$29,989
its high so far — 30.0×, reached October 2025
Worth today
US$15,19215.2×
live valuation · refreshed hourly · usd
As of 9 June 2026, $1,000 of Bitcoin bought when Jamie Dimon said it (US$4,159 a coin) is worth US$15,192 today, and peaked at US$29,989 — 30.0× — in October 2025.
On the record
On 12 September 2017, with Bitcoin near US$4,150, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon called it 'a fraud… worse than tulip bulbs.' He said he'd fire any trader who touched it. He never personally reversed — but his bank did, and now offers clients crypto access. The figure above tracks what $1,000 then is worth now.
On 12 September 2017, at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference in New York, the chief executive of America's largest bank was asked about Bitcoin and did not mince it. “It's a fraud… worse than tulip bulbs. It won't end well,” Jamie Dimon said. The tulip reference was deliberate — the seventeenth-century Dutch mania is the oldest bubble in the banker's vocabulary, the thing you invoke when you want to say “this is the dumbest one I've seen.” Bitcoin was around US$4,150 that day.
He went further than a verdict; he attached a consequence. Any JPMorgan trader caught dealing in the stuff, he said, would be fired in a second — “for two reasons: it's against our rules, and they're stupid.” It was vintage Dimon: blunt, certain, and delivered with the easy authority of a man who runs a balance sheet larger than most national economies. When the most powerful banker in the world calls your asset a fraud and threatens to sack anyone who touches it, that is supposed to be the end of the conversation.
It was not the end of the conversation. The number at the top of this page is what happened to the fraud in the years after he named it — a fact about the asset, recorded hourly, indifferent to the verdict.
The Bureau notes the particular shape of this case, because it is unusual. Most people in this ledger were merely individuals being wrong out loud. Dimon was an institution. And an institution is a harder thing to hold to a single sentence — because while the man kept his opinion, the firm he runs went quietly the other way. That divergence is the whole story here, and it is filed below.
Where they stand now
Dimon never personally recanted. At the 2023 DealBook Summit he said that if he were the government he'd “close it down.” But JPMorgan did not follow its chairman: by 2024–25 the bank had begun giving clients access to buy Bitcoin and was facilitating trades in spot crypto ETFs. The man held the line; the institution caved beneath him (CNBC). It is the rare case where the receipt is split — the person unmoved, the firm quietly reversed.
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