JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said he remains skeptical about a soft landing in the US following the Federal Reserve’s first rate cut in more than four years — and said he wouldn’t “count my eggs” on that outcome.
“I am a little more skeptical than other people. I give it lower odds,” he said at The Atlantic Festival event in Washington on Friday. “I hope it’s true, but I’m also more skeptical that inflation is going to go away so easily, not because it hasn’t come down — it has — and it can come down more.”
The rate cut will have almost no effect on the presidential election, the CEO of the biggest US bank added, when asked if there would be an impact.
The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point Wednesday in a policy shift aimed at engineering a so-called soft landing. Ahead of the decision, Dimon said that whether they lowered them by 25 or 50 basis points, it wouldn’t be “earth-shattering.”
The longtime CEO has been warning for over a year that inflation could be stickier than investors expect, citing drivers including deficit spending and the “remilitarization of the world.” He wrote in his annual shareholder letter in April that JPMorgan is prepared for interest rates ranging from 2% to 8% or more.
“I wouldn’t count my eggs,” on the soft-landing outcome, Dimon said. “We may have gone from a lower rate, lower inflation, to a slightly higher rate, higher inflation. Down the road, whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. Economists are used to dealing with that. It’s not a disaster.”
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