JPMorgan Chase’s Heidi Miller has made it clear that, when it comes to bankers’ pay, she won’t accept Congress’ populist pandering anymore. Miller, who is the chief executive of JPMorgan’s Treasury and securities services division, told attendees of U.S. Banker’s 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking dinner last night of an encounter she had with an unnamed member of Congress that left her “shocked” and “deeply depressed.”
As the House of Representatives was getting ready to vote on a proposal last fall for a 90% tax on bankers’ pay, Miller said, the congressman, who she described only as a “new congressman” who “came out of our industry” and who was “in my district,” told her he wasn’t interested in her views on the subject. Instead, she said, he wanted money for a fundraiser. “His comment to me was that that was not important,” she said of the 90% tax vote. “That the anger for bankers was quite deep and therefore he had to vote the populist way because the Senate would ultimately correct it.”
Miller lives in Greenwich, Conn., which is in Connecticut’s fourth congressional district. In 2008, Republican Christopher Shays, who had served on the House Financial Services Committee, was unseated by a new face: Democrat and Goldman Sachs alum Jim Himes. Himes is on the Financial Services Committee too.
Himes may have run with the populist pack at the time of the 90% tax vote, but he seems to have sobered up a little since then. In March he co-sponsored a bill with Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., that would tie executive compensation to performance for companies in which the government had taken stakes. Himes' office did not respond to a request for comment in time for this post.
In an interview after her speech, Miller told an American Banker reporter that despite her dismay she could understand the congressman’s position.
“In the onslaught of bad publicity and popular sentiment it’s very hard to do anything but just wait for it to roll past,” she said. “I think that trying to get facts and real discussion there was not very well-received. And I think that congressman was probably actually right, if he wanted to preserve his seat and get re-elected in two years he was going to just roll over for the public, he wasn’t going to speak truth.”
