Walmart CEO tapped as chairman of Business Roundtable

Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon will be the next chairman of the Business Roundtable (BRT), the business advocacy group announced on Thursday. 

His chairmanship will go into effect on Jan. 1 and he replaces JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. He will serve a two-year term.

McMillion, 52, became Walmart’s fifth CEO in 2014. 

{mosads}“In the coming months, there will be extensive conversations about America’s future and the role business plays in shaping it. As Chairman, I commit to keeping Business Roundtable CEOs at the forefront of constructive public policy debates as we pursue an agenda of greater growth and opportunity for all Americans,” McMillion said in a press release. 

BRT is made up of 192 CEOs from leading US companies. McMillon has been a member since 2014 and is on the Board of Directors.

BRT in August announced a new set of principals for corporations that said that shareholder value should no longer be the main goal of a corporation.

On Wednesday, BRT and Dimon expressed opposition to creating legal standards to enforce that set of principals.

BRT has also recently been pushing for Congress to approve President Trump’s revised North American trade deal and has joined the chorus of other business groups urging for an end to Trump’s trade war with China. 

And Dimon criticized socialism at a BRT discussion with reporters in June and heard from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who fired back that Dimon wasn’t “criticizing socialism when Wall Street begged for the largest federal bailout in American history—some $700 billion from the Treasury and even more from the Fed.”