Reports: Trump Considering Chase CEO He Once Dubbed “Worst Banker In U.S.” To Head Treasury

President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team are now in the process of selecting cabinet members and other top officials that will run many federal agencies under the direction of the White House. According to new reports, one of the names under consideration for Treasury Secretary is banker who Trump has slammed publicly in the past.

Both CNBC and Reuters claim that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is on the transition team’s short list to head the Treasury Department. According to Reuters, the team has actually contacted Dimon to test his interest in the position.

Having a Wall Street exec as America’s top banker is not a new idea. Current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was briefly Chief Operating Officer at Citigroup, while Hank Paulson, who held the position during the final years of the George W. Bush presidency, had been CEO of Goldman Sachs.

However, the presidents who appointed these Treasury Secretaries had not publicly called either of them a wimp.

Back in Oct. 2013, Trump told Bloomberg View columnist William Cohan that it was “horrible” that Dimon was agreeing to huge multibillion-dollar settlements over Chase’s alleged bad practices.

Trump, who has previously stated that he chooses to litigate disputes rather than settle them, told Bloomberg at the time, “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in the United States.”

(For what it’s worth, that was the same year that Consumerist readers voted Dimon as the Sexiest CEO in America.)

While Dimon and Chase have not commented on the reports about the possible Treasury Secretary gig, the CEO did send a memo to employees yesterday saying that, in spite of having just been through “one of the most contentious elections in memory,” he remains “optimistic about America’s future.”

Dimon’s name has long been dropped for possible power positions in the federal government, even as some called for him to step down.