As global stock markets plunged on Monday amid President Donald Trump’s unrelenting tariff campaign, the country’s most prominent banking CEO called for a more moderate approach. In his annual shareholder letter published on Monday, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, wrote that the economy is facing “considerable turbulence,” citing the potential fallout of an escalating trade war.
Dimon and Trump have long had a complicated relationship, with Dimon never endorsing the president, though he has publicly supported some of his policies, including tariffs. In a January interview on CNBC, soon after Trump took office, Dimon described tariffs as an “economic weapon,” telling critics to “get over it.”
But with Trump’s Rose Garden announcement last week spurring an unprecedented selloff, Dimon is now joining a chorus of voices sounding the alarm on what many view as a disastrous economic plan. “The quicker this issue is resolved, the better,” Dimon wrote in his letter.
While Dimon argued that the economy remains resilient, with consumer spending still high and businesses relatively healthy, he cautioned that tariffs will slow down growth, if not cause a full-blown recession. “In the short run, I see this as one large additional straw on the camel’s back,” he wrote.
Tariff pain
Investors have reacted with panic to the sweeping tariff plan, but the recent measures are not a total surprise. Trump, a longtime tariff champion, signaled the strategy during his campaign for a second term in office, promising to impose duties as high as 20% on U.S. trading partners, and much steeper on countries like China, without the authorization of Congress.
He began to carry out the plan quickly after taking office, pledging to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens” during his inaugural address and quickly announcing duties on countries including Canada, Mexico, and Colombia, though the countries hammered out deals.
The looming threat of further tariffs caused markets to lose much of their initial “Trump bump” by early March, though the worst was yet to come. Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement last Wednesday triggered the worst stock wipeout since 2020, with this week set to continue the slide.
Business leaders have largely supported Trump or stayed neutral during his first few months in office, with many CEOs of the largest tech companies donating to his inauguration, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who have had a strained relationship with the President.
But last week’s announcement has seen cracks begin to form. Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who backed Trump during his 2024 campaign, took to X over the weekend to criticize the tariff plan.
Dimon, long one of the most influential figures on Wall Street, has never explicitly backed Trump, though the then candidate falsely claimed that Dimon endorsed him last October. Still, Dimon voiced tacit support for the tariff strategy after Trump took office, arguing that it could be used to get other countries “to the table.”
Though Dimon stopped short of denouncing Trump in his shareholder letter on Monday, he laid out the risks, including inflation and the heightened possibility of a recession. “These significant and somewhat unprecedented forces cause us to remain very cautious,” he wrote.
