JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday that he was anxious over the U.S. economy, citing elevated asset prices and a competitive environment in banking that reminded him of the pre-2008 crisis years.
Even as economists tout the Trump administration’s tax and deregulatory policies as boosting economic growth this year, Dimon said that his own tendencies were to consider what could go wrong when expectations are riding high.
“My own view is people are getting a little comfortable that this is real, these high asset prices and high volumes, and that we won’t have any problems,” said Dimon, who was dressed in black and wore a brace on one of his hands.
Inevitably, Dimon said, the economic cycle will turn, leading to a wave of borrower defaults that would broadly affect lenders, and often impacting industries few people expect, he said.
“There will be a cycle one day… I don’t know what confluence of events will cause that cycle. My anxiety is high over it,” Dimon said. “I’m not assuaged by the fact that asset prices are high. In fact, I think that adds to the risk.”
While fears over how artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI could disrupt a myriad of industries — especially software firms — have churned markets in recent weeks, the broader S&P 500 isn’t far off from its all-time record level.
At the same time, concerns over loans to software companies at the nexus of AI worries have walloped private credit lenders after Blue Owl spooked markets last week when it announced it had to sell assets to satisfy investors clamoring to exit one of its funds.
The episode, which dragged down the shares of larger alternative asset managers including Apollo, KKR and Blackstone, led some market observers to wonder if the start of a broader downturn in credit had begun.
Doing ‘dumb things’
“There’s always a surprise in a credit cycle,” Dimon said. “The surprise has often been which industry” is impacted most, he said. “You didn’t expect utilities and phone companies in ’08, ’09, and this time around, it might be software, because of AI.”
Dimon also said that he had endorsed his deputies’ comments about private credit from earlier in the investor event.
Troy Rohrbaugh, co-head of the firm’s commercial and investment bank, said that he didn’t think credit issues would likely be contained to private credit lenders, but instead be “more broad-based.”
“I think at this point, it feels a bit isolated to a handful of situations, but that could quite easily change, and we’re prepared for that,” Rohrbaugh said.
In response to a question from the veteran banking analyst Mike Mayo, Dimon said the current environment felt similar to the three years leading into the 2008 financial crisis in that “everyone is making a lot of money, people were leveraging, the sky was the limit.”
The JPMorgan chief said that some financial firms were “doing some dumb things” now that involved chasing interest income, which is made through lending and investing activities, though he didn’t name the companies doing so.
“You feel stupid when everyone’s coining money and everyone’s great… it does feel really good,” Dimon said.
“And then when I think about all the factors taking place,” Dimon added, “I take a deep breath and say `watch out’.”
Dimon also addressed the perennial question of CEO succession at JPMorgan, which he built into the world’s largest bank by market capitalization over his two decade tenure. While he has often given a specific time frame for the number of years he had remaining as CEO, he avoided doing so on Monday.
“I was told to say this very specifically,” Dimon said, to scattered laughter among the analysts in attendance. “I’m here for a few years as CEO, and maybe few after that as executive chairman.”
