- JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Biden's student-debt relief was "badly done."
- He told lawmakers he wished the relief had been further targeted to those who need it most.
The CEO of one of the largest banks in the US isn't pleased with President Joe Biden's recently announced student-loan forgiveness.
On Wednesday, the CEOs of the nation's major banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, testified before the House Financial Services Committee on topics ranging from the economy to combatting the climate crisis — and student-debt relief made the cut, as well. At the end of August, Biden announced up to $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness for federal borrowers making under $125,000 a year, and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon told lawmakers he thought the policy was "badly done."
"I wish they had targeted the people who actually needed help," Dimon said. "They still haven't fixed the underwriting and they haven't fixed the cost of college."
"We basically put a Band-Aid on, spent a lot of money and didn't fix the problem which will now be ongoing," he added. "So please, give it a fix."
Dimon has previously spoken on the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis, saying in 2019 that "what we've done is a disgrace and it's hurting America."
"I think they should look at all parts of student lending, fix the broken parts, and then forgive those people [who] need forgiveness, and then help people get into school, and then make sure the schools are responsible in getting the kids out," Dimon told Yahoo Finance at the time.
The idea that the relief is not going to borrowers who need it the most is a concern also expressed by Republican lawmakers, along with some vulnerable Democrats. While Biden placed an income cap on the relief likely to counter that pushback, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet — who is up for reelection — said in August that the president should "have further targeted the relief" and accompanied it with permanent solutions to address the surging cost of higher education.
Still, as Democrats and the Biden administration have noted, this one-time relief is only the first step toward addressing the problem. Chair of the House education committee Bobby Scott recently introduced a bill to make student loans easier to pay off in the future while bolstering the Pell Grant, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that financial relief for students will not stop here.
"We have a lot of problems in the whole system. The president has done what he can do with the tool in front of him. And that is he's helped relieve the debt burden for millions of Americans," Warren told CNN, adding that "we need to deal directly with the cost of college. Absolutely."