Jamie Dimon lays out his plan to revive the West

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, you may have heard about him. He's laying out his vision to revive the future of the Western world. And a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal emphasized the importance of Europe rebooting its sluggish economy and strengthening its defense capabilities. In that op-ed, Dimon says, quote, a renewed commitment to American values and alliances coupled with bold reforms by Europe would be a geopolitical and economic home run, guaranteeing the Western world's strength for the next, you know, 250 years. Let's talk about this all with Michelle Caruso-Gabrera, CEO of MCC Global Enterprises, former colleague, current CNBC contributor. Michelle, what are the odds that we get bold and exciting capitalist style reforms from whoever is running Europe these days? Yeah, Europe. It's a lot of countries. It's going to be very, very difficult. I think that's why Jamie Dimon issued this call to arms. What he said actually has been said many, many times. What's really significant isn't so much what he says, but the fact that he says it. At the G20 meeting last month in Asheville, North Carolina, he was there, Brian. And there were other dignitaries there. But let me tell you, when he walked into the room, you could see the international press swarmed him because they wanted to hear from him. So he has a huge platform and he's got a lot of mind share in the world. So if anybody can dislodge the Europeans, maybe he can, because many, many people have said what he has said in this op-ed over and over again. They've got to deregulate. They've got to allow scale so they can compete. They need to do so many things so that way they can pay for help pay for their defense as well. And their energy, by the way, in this week's my primary topic in the forthcoming Power Insider is about Europe's energy crisis. And they've been kind of saved by actually mild weather three of the last four years this summer. Not the case. I only bring that up and we're doing the air quotes, Michelle, because each country has their own ruling parties. Right. They've got all their things. And then you've got this weird EU parliament in Belgium, which is kind of in charge, but kind of not. And there's like a bunch of people there, but you don't really know what they're doing. It feels like the whole leadership structure of Europe, again, air quotes is is broken. And maybe that's what needs to be fixed because there's a lot of really, really smart and hardworking people in Europe. And what they're doing is they're largely now just moving to the United States if they can. Yes, the EU, this blanket over all of these countries has clearly led to a lot of frustrations within the populations of each of the individual countries. And therefore you see voting going in different directors in different directions. There's less of people who want more Europe and there's a lot more people who want less of Europe. At the same time, some countries have really just shot themselves in the foot when it comes to energy. Germany, for example, under Angela Merkel, banning nuclear energy and as a result, building building coal plants instead and having to rely on imports either from Russia or other expensive imports, which really is leading to the deindustrialization of Europe, Germany in particular, because of rising energy costs and also because the huge competition that they're seeing from subsidized automobiles from China. So what do you think it will take, Michelle, for Europe in general to seek more coordination with the US? I'm thinking even with AI, they're pursuing their own regulatory framework versus trying to coordinate with Washington on the right guardrails for AI policy. Unfortunately, it's probably gonna take a crisis. It almost always does. If you go back to 2010 to 2015, Greece was in a major, major crisis. They had to default on their debt. And what do you see today after that crisis? Greece's debt trades better than France. France is now on the same trajectory as Greece with their social spending, their inability to pay for defense. At some point, they're gonna have an issue and that's when changes are likely to happen. That's almost always what it takes to move away from an inertia to actual action. Do you think this gives China an opportunity to step up and play nice with Europe? I mean, I know they're already trying to. They are trying to, but this is the one place where we see actually some unity coming together, it's very interesting. When you see what's happening to the German auto industry, data coming out of there, you'll hear the union say 10,000 jobs per month are being lost when it comes to industry in Germany. And that's in large part because of what's happening in the chemical industry and the automobile industry because of subsidized products from China. And we finally hear talk about some kind of either continental response or something to try to push back against that so that way they don't suffer deindustrialization the same way we did in the United States.