"Banks Are Under Assault" & Other Headlines for Thursday

1) JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon lashed out against regulators in the bank's quarterly earnings call, saying upcoming US capital requirements may force the bank to break up.

Banks are under assault. In the old days, you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about how American that is, how fair that is.”

If that's what the federal government wants, he added, JPMorgan Chase will have no choice but to break up. But there is no such thing as "too big too fail" for Dimon, who refutes the idea that separating the bank into smaller parts would make it less risky – or more valuable for investors, as Goldman Sachs has argued. "The model works from a business standpoint," he said. The bank reported a 6.6 percent drop in quarterly profit after setting aside $1 billion to cover penalties for its misconduct on the foreign exchange market. The bank still established a record for profit and earnings per share in 2014.

2) It's Bank of America and Citigroup's turn to report earnings today. The banks are likely to face the same questions.

3) Samsung and BlackBerry are not in talks, they swear. The two companies denied reports that South Korea's recently ailing smartphone maker Samsung was looking to acquire Canada's long-suffering smartphone maker BlackBerry. Samsung called the Reuters report "groundless." BlackBerry stock fell as much as 17 percent before recovering and is, as of this writing, up nearly 30 percent in afterhours trading.

4) Xiaomi unveiled its latest model, a super thin, high end smartphone designed to take on the iPhone 6 Plus. The Chinese maker is already fast coming up on Samsung in emerging markets with its cheaper models, but it's on Apple that founder Lei Jun has copied his communication style with big stage events, well crafted teasers and hyperbolic product descriptions. Now the world's third smartphone brand, Xiaomi is looking to enter Western markets.

5) Chinese Uber competitor Kuaidi Dache raised $600 million from Softbank, Alibaba and others. That's half of Uber's latest financing round. Like other startup markets, the taxi hailing scene serves as a proxy fight between China's internet giants, with Alibaba behind Kuaidi, Tencent behind Didi Dache and Baidu behind Uber. Japan's Softbank has also invested in GrabTaxi in Southeast Asia and Olacabs in India.

6) India's central bank made a surprise interest rate cut to boost growth. Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said inflation should be below the bank's target of 6 percent by 2016

7) Speaking of, an average American will spend $280,000 in interests over their lifetime. Here's the state-by-state breakdown.

8) Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is now the largest shareholder of The New York Times. The world's second richest man exercised options today to increase his ownership stake to 16.8 percent of the newspaper company.

9) RadioShack could be filing for bankruptcy as early as February, reports the Wall Street Journal. Sad but not surprising for the ailing electronics retailer: even their Superbowl ad was about how great they used to be.

Every morning, we share the top headlines professionals need to know about right now. Share with your network, read and discuss — and let us know what we missed in the comments below.