Jamie Dimon, chief government officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., throughout the 2025 IIF annual membership assembly in Washington, Oct. 16, 2025.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Photos
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stated Monday that he was anxious over the U.S. economic system, citing elevated asset costs and a aggressive setting in banking that reminded him of the pre-2008 disaster years.
At the same time as economists tout the Trump administration’s tax and deregulatory insurance policies as boosting financial development this yr, Dimon stated throughout an annual investor replace that his personal tendencies have been to think about what might go incorrect when expectations are driving excessive.
“My very own view is persons are getting slightly snug that that is actual, these excessive asset costs and excessive volumes, and that we cannot have any issues,” stated Dimon, who was wearing black and wore a brace on one in every of his arms.
Inevitably, Dimon stated, 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 count on, he stated.
“There shall be a cycle in the future… I do not know what confluence of occasions will trigger that cycle. My nervousness is excessive over it,” Dimon stated. “I am not assuaged by the truth that asset costs are excessive. The truth is, I feel that provides to the chance.”
Whereas fears over how synthetic intelligence fashions from Anthropic and OpenAI might disrupt a myriad of industries — particularly software program corporations — have churned markets in current weeks, the broader S&P 500 is not far off from its all-time file 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 buyers clamoring to exit one in every 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 all the time a shock in a credit score cycle,” Dimon stated. “The shock has typically been which business” is impacted most, he stated. “You did not count on utilities and cellphone corporations in ’08, ’09, and this time round, it is likely to be software program, due to AI.”
Dimon additionally stated that he endorsed his deputies’ feedback about personal credit score from earlier within the investor occasion.
Troy Rohrbaugh, co-head of the agency’s industrial and funding financial institution, stated that he did not suppose points would possible be contained to personal 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 might fairly simply change, and we’re ready for that,” Rohrbaugh stated.
In response to a query from the veteran banking analyst Mike Mayo, Dimon stated the present setting felt much 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 stated that some monetary corporations have been “performing some dumb issues” that concerned chasing curiosity earnings, which is made via lending and investing actions, although he did not identify the businesses doing so.
“You’re feeling silly when everybody’s coining cash and everybody’s nice… it does really feel actually good,” Dimon stated.
“After which once I take into consideration all of the elements going down,” 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 typically given a particular timeframe for the variety of years he had remaining as CEO, he prevented doing so on Monday.
“I used to be advised to say this very particularly,” Dimon stated 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.”
