With soaring inflation, record breaking gas prices and a supply chain crisis, many Americans may think that the economy has hit rock bottom. But the CEO of the country’s biggest bank just predicted that the situation will get worse as a “hurricane” is headed for the economy.
“You know, I said there’s storm clouds but I’m going to change it … It’s a hurricane,” said Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, at a financial conference Wednesday in New York, CBS News reported.
“You better brace yourself. JPMorgan is bracing ourselves and we’re going to be very conservative with our balance sheet,” he said.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says there’s a “hurricane” coming for the US economy and that “you better brace yourself” https://t.co/InCDVUx7Cz pic.twitter.com/LWFzjhxWR1
— Bloomberg (@business) June 1, 2022
This is not the first time there have been warnings about the direction of the American economy.
On May 15, Goldman Sachs’ senior chairman Lloyd Blankfein said that Americans need to prepare for a serious recession, The Hill reported.
Blankfein said that the possibility of a recession was “certainly a very, very high risk factor.”
On May 17, Wells Fargo’s CEO Charlie Scharf told The Wall Street Journal the same thing.
Do you think that a oncoming recession will permanently cripple the U.S.?
Yes: 33% (1 Votes)
No: 67% (2 Votes)
In fact, Scharf said there was “no question” that the U.S. is headed for an economic downturn.
JPMorgan Chase is the country’s largest bank as measured by assets, according to the financial services company Bankrate. Goldman Sachs is eighth. Wells Fargo is third.
Dimon’s analysis of the situation seems to indicate that things are going to be even worse than Blankfein and Scharf expected.
The Federal Reserve has been trying to fight inflation with interest rate hikes, CNBC News reported.
That alone has not done the trick, though.
As the situation has gotten worse, the Fed has also signaled that it will attempt quantitative tightening (which is reversing emergency bond-buying programs the Fed employed from 2008 to 2014 to deal with the Great Recession that followed the housing market collapse).
It’s a move that has Dimon worried.
“We’ve never had QT like this, so you’re looking at something you could be writing history books on for 50 years,” Dimon said.
This is not like the 2008 financial crisis either. The responses to that crisis won’t work this time, which has Dimon worried.
In 2008 central banks, commercial banks and foreign-exchange trading firms bought U.S. bonds.
But this time, banks and firms won’t have the capacity or desire to soak up as many U.S. bonds this time, Dimon warned.
“That’s a huge change in the flow of funds around the world,” Dimon said. “I don’t know what the effect of that is, but I’m prepared for, at a minimum, huge volatility.”
