Legendary JP Morgan investment banker Jimmy Lee has died, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said in a statement on Wednesday.
Lee, often credited with reinventing leveraged lending in the 1980s, was 62. The cause of death was not immediately known.
“Jimmy was a great friend, leader and mentor to me and so many others,” Dimon said. “He was a master of his craft, but he was so much more – he was an incomparable force of nature.”
On the 30th anniversary of IFR, Lee was cited among the most influential bankers of the prior three decades for changing the US loan business from a buy–and–hold backwater for bilateral lending, into a broadly held, trillion-dollar asset class.
In 1982, Lee set up Chemical Bank’s New York syndications business and went on to pioneer many of the practices that have made the global loans business what it is today.
In the 1980s, he turned the leveraged financing paradigm on its head, locking up capital, then approaching KKR and other founding sponsors in order to do deals. At the time, competitors with a much stronger presence operated mainly by winning the mandate, then selling the loan.
In the 1990s, Lee threw Chase Manhattan’s balance–sheet clout behind market flex – a revolutionary concept that moved loans closer to securities-like pricing and that opened the way for institutional investors, focused on relative value, to enter the market.
Under Lee’s stewardship, Chemical and then Chase Manhattan’s loan businesses achieved perennial number one rankings in global loan syndications and leveraged finance.
Lee was vice chairman of JP Morgan Chase and chairman of the firm’s North American investment bank.
He is survived by his wife and three children.
