People are doing “dumb” things in today’s economy reminiscent of the years before the 2008 financial crash, according to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
“Unfortunately, we did see this in ‘05, ‘06 and ‘07, almost the same thing — the rising tide was lifting all boats, everyone was making a lot of money,” Dimon told investors on Monday.
“I see a couple people doing some dumb things,” he added, speaking of unnamed institutions making risky bets to earn extra income in this economic climate, which has seen a high, if volatile, stock market responding to ever-changing developments in tariffs and artificial intelligence.
The Wall Street exec added that despite encouraging signs, such as the Dow hitting an all-time high earlier this month, there are always economic surprises in store and industries that could suddenly falter.
“This time around it might be software because of AI,” he said.
“My anxiety is high over it,” he said elsewhere of the overall downturn risk. “I’m not assuaged by the fact that asset prices are high. In fact, I think that adds to the risk.”
As if to prove his point, shares in IBM fell 13 percent Monday, their worst single-day drop in a quarter-century, following news that AI tools from Anthropic could compete with one of IBM’s signature programming languages.
Dimon has previously warned of other economic risks, including the president’s unpredictable tariff policies, which were recently struck down at the Supreme Court, and friction between the U.S. and its traditional allies.
“The other tectonic shift is … the global economy. So the global military umbrella of America, and then the global economy, of which trade is a part,” Dimon said last year. “The other parts are, do people want to partner with you? Do you have your alliances? You have investment agreements and all those various things. And they're changing.”
In a survey released this week, credit investors at Bank of America said their biggest concern was an AI bubble, as firms like Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon pour hundreds of billions of dollars into building artificial intelligence data centers and power sources.
“Few worry about geopolitics or a central bank policy error,” BofA strategists wrote in a note on Tuesday, Bloomberg reports.
The so-called Magnificent 7 — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — tech companies that make up a disproportionate share of the stock market’s overall value — are all heavily invested in AI.
If the economy is in an investment bubble, and if that bubble pops, the resulting downturn could hurt numerous Main Street investors, too, as their retirement savings and pensions are bound up in the stock market.
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