What Jamie Dimon sees as threats to the economy in 2026

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, put out his annual letter to shareholders this week. Now, a lot of companies provide shareholder updates, but when a letter comes from the leader of the largest bank in North America and contains insights about the economy, it tends to make headlines.

Dimon’s cautionary tone struck Ari Shwayder, who teaches economics at the University of Michigan.

“He's quite worried about inflation” — so much so that Dimon called it the “skunk at the party” — “not calming back down to the 2% level that the Fed wants. And I think rightly so,” he said.

Rightly so, Shwayder argues, because of government debt, tariffs, and fiscal stimulus. Add that to the supply chain and market uncertainty with war, and “that certainly affects banks' willingness to give out loans,” he said. “And that makes it harder for folks to get a mortgage, to buy their house, or to buy their car or things like that.”

Another concern in the letter: a growing percentage of loans that come from hedge funds, private firms, and not banks.

“These types of lending institutions are not under the direct supervision often by the Fed,” said Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.

Since they’re not regulated like bank loans, “there are new loan arrangements with delayed payments, with lower credit standards, and they are not immediately obvious to the regulator,” she said.

The letter says private credit isn’t posing a huge risk yet, but Tcherneva said it could if it doesn’t get regulated.