Jamie Dimon, chief government officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., in the course of the 2025 IIF annual membership assembly in Washington, Oct. 16, 2025.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Photographs
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon mentioned Monday that he was anxious over the U.S. economic system, citing elevated asset costs and a aggressive atmosphere in banking that reminded him of the pre-2008 disaster years.
Whilst economists tout the Trump administration’s tax and deregulatory insurance policies as boosting financial development this yr, Dimon mentioned throughout an annual investor replace that his personal tendencies have been to contemplate what may go flawed when expectations are driving excessive.
“My very own view is individuals are getting somewhat snug that that is actual, these excessive asset costs and excessive volumes, and that we cannot have any issues,” mentioned Dimon, who was wearing black and wore a brace on certainly one of his arms.
Inevitably, Dimon mentioned, the financial cycle will flip, resulting in a wave of borrower defaults that may broadly have an effect on lenders, and sometimes impacting industries few individuals anticipate, he mentioned.
“There might be a cycle sooner or later… I do not know what confluence of occasions will trigger that cycle. My anxiousness is excessive over it,” Dimon mentioned. “I am not assuaged by the truth that asset costs are excessive. In truth, I feel that provides to the danger.”
Whereas fears over how synthetic intelligence fashions from Anthropic and OpenAI may disrupt a myriad of industries — particularly software program companies — have churned markets in latest weeks, the broader S&P 500 is not far off from its all-time document degree.
On the identical time, issues over loans to software program corporations on the nexus of AI worries have walloped personal credit score lenders after Blue Owl spooked markets final week when it introduced it needed to promote property to fulfill traders clamoring to exit certainly one of its funds.
The episode, which dragged down the shares of bigger different asset managers together with Apollo, KKR and Blackstone, led some market observers to marvel if the beginning of a broader downturn in credit score had begun.
Doing ‘dumb issues’
“There’s at all times a shock in a credit score cycle,” Dimon mentioned. “The shock has usually been which trade” is impacted most, he mentioned. “You did not anticipate utilities and telephone corporations in ’08, ’09, and this time round, it may be software program, due to AI.”
Dimon additionally mentioned that he endorsed his deputies’ feedback about personal credit score from earlier within the investor occasion.
Troy Rohrbaugh, co-head of the agency’s business and funding financial institution, mentioned that he did not assume points would probably be contained to non-public credit score lenders, however as an alternative be “extra broad-based.”
“At this level, it feels a bit remoted to a handful of conditions, however that would fairly simply change, and we’re ready for that,” Rohrbaugh mentioned.
In response to a query from the veteran banking analyst Mike Mayo, Dimon mentioned the present atmosphere felt just like the three years main into the 2008 monetary disaster in that “everyone seems to be making some huge cash, individuals have been leveraging, the sky was the restrict.”
The JPMorgan chief mentioned that some monetary companies have been “doing a little dumb issues” that concerned chasing curiosity earnings, which is made by lending and investing actions, although he did not title the businesses doing so.
“You are feeling silly when everybody’s coining cash and everybody’s nice… it does really feel actually good,” Dimon mentioned.
“After which after I take into consideration all of the components happening,” Dimon added, “I take a deep breath and say `be careful’.”
Dimon additionally addressed the perennial query of CEO succession at JPMorgan, which he constructed into the world’s largest financial institution by market capitalization over his two-decade tenure.
Whereas he has usually given a particular time-frame for the variety of years he had remaining as CEO, he averted doing so on Monday.
“I used to be instructed to say this very particularly,” Dimon mentioned to scattered laughter among the many analysts in attendance. “I am right here for just a few years as CEO, and perhaps few after that as government chairman.”
