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JPMorgan’s 2025 ended with somewhat less than a bang. The world’s most valuable bank reported a 7 per cent year-on-year fall in earnings in the fourth quarter and expects costs to rise dramatically this year. But everything is relative. Short-term performance matters much less than the long-term potential damage from reckless political meddling.

Despite the underwhelming headlines, JPMorgan is still growing in most of the places shareholders would like. Net interest income — the difference between what it earns in interest and pays to its own funders — increased 7 per cent year on year, and forecasts for interest in 2026 beat expectations. Trading revenues hit $8.2bn, rounding out a record year.

Slip-ups, such as they were, barely blotted the copybook of a bank whose share price has doubled in two years. Dealmaking fees may have fallen 5 per cent, for example, but capital markets are still booming overall. Investment banking revenue for the whole of 2025 was almost one-third bigger than 2019, before the gyrations of Covid.

Dimon deserves credit for this, but running JPMorgan is a team effort — and one that takes place in no small way in Washington. President Donald Trump has helped by cutting taxes, stimulating the economy and giving the White House a more capitalist-friendly face. But so too has the Federal Reserve, which has brought down inflation without crashing the economy. Dimon says JPMorgan wins when America does. Arguably, America wins when the Fed does.

That makes Trump’s assault on Fed chair Jay Powell particularly troubling. Dimon said on Tuesday that anything that “chips away” at the central bank’s independence could increase inflationary expectations. And inflation, if the central bank fails to curb it effectively, threatens the prosperity of JPMorgan’s customers, not to mention their creditworthiness.

Nor is it just monetary policy that’s at stake. As well as setting rates, the Fed sits at the centre of a regulatory framework that has, since the financial crisis of 2008, made big banks a safe haven. While banks rail at enforced conservatism, there are perks to having regulators breathing down your neck: JPMorgan detailed its exposure to so-called shadow lenders on Tuesday, and it amounted to just 3 per cent of its total assets.

Dimon and his peers have locked horns with the Fed more than once, accusing it of “capricious and arbitrary” rulemaking. Industry groups have literally sued the central bank for landing them with onerous “stress tests” they criticised as too opaque. And they fall too easily into the claim that curbing their instincts will harm the economy by depriving “working families” of credit and banking services.

But they have been consistent in arguing that a politicised Fed is bad news. In so far as JPMorgan owes its size and stability to a growing, well- stewarded economy — and decades of the idea that central bank independence is a big part of that — it is hard to disagree.

john.foley@ft.com