Jamie Dimon has spent four decades reading markets for a living, and even he doesn't quite believe what he's looking at.
Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations discussion on June 21, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive said he was surprised by how little the stock market seems to care about the state of the world. "I am surprised because I think that you have Ukraine, Iran, oil, Russia, and our relationship with China," he said. "That stuff is really important for the free world, but it's not necessarily the economy today."
That gap — between what dominates the headlines and what moves the S&P 500 — is not new. But hearing the head of the largest bank in the United States say it out loud, in those terms, is. Dimon went further, describing the forces reshaping the global economy as "tectonic plates" whose movement could take years to fully register. "I am quite worried about it," he added. "They may determine the economy, but it may be a year from now, a few years from now, or maybe it will all be reserved somehow. But I'm quite concerned about it, so put me in the more cautious category about how that plays out."
Markets, for now, are not in the cautious category. The question is how long that can last.
