Jamie Dimon forks out a year's pay on JPMorgan shares

The chairman and chief executive of one of New York's largest banks spent an entire year's worth of pay buying back shares of his own company on Thursday.

Jamie Dimon made the move after shares in JPMorgan Chase & Co. tumbled to their lowest level in more than two years.

The 59-year-old spent $26.6m (£18.3m) on 500,000 shares, which brought his total holding to 6.75m, according to the regulatory announcement related to the purchase.

A person close to Dimon told Bloomberg he made the purchase because he believed the stock was cheapened by the global equities rout. The bank had already fallen 20% this year by the closing bell on Thursday.

But JPMorgan hadn't been hurt as badly as other banks in 2016, with Citigroup, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank all losing more than 32%.

Citigroup's CEO Michael Corbat and chairman Michael O'Neill made similar, albeit smaller, moves on 22 January, purchasing around $1m of their bank's shares each after they fell to their lowest in more than three years. The stock has plunged 15% since then.

Citigroup's chief financial officer John Gerspach bought 13,000 shares in a $489,000 transaction on Thursday this week, filings showed.

Dimon's total compensation for 2015 was $27m, which was mostly in stock linked to JPMorgan's performance. According to Bloomberg, that was a 35% raise from a year earlier, as profit reached a mammoth record of $24.4bn.

Shares in the bank closed at $53.52 on Thursday.