JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, known for his frankness, is tiptoeing around tariffs as he and other leaders of big banks reveal their latest earnings.
Wall Street’s biggest firms on Friday attempted the tricky two-step of revealing the toll of President Trump’s whiplash tariff policy without outright criticizing a man who has repeatedly tangled with the financial industry for slights both real and imagined.
Earlier on Friday, China ratcheted up global trade tensions by raising its own tariffs on U.S. imports, adding an extra dose of difficulty.
“Obviously,” said Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”
The careful choreography came at the start of earnings season, a quarterly ritual in which publicly traded firms disclose their financial results and, in many cases, give projections. It’s not typically of interest for many people other than professional investors, but it took on new importance and anticipation this week with the market turmoil that has accompanied the escalating trade war between the United States and its major trading partners.
The spotlight was in particular on JPMorgan, the largest bank in the country, and Mr. Dimon, who has styled himself as a frank speaker and publicly said he puts his country above his job. In his annual shareholder letter, released on Monday, he warned that Mr. Trump’s saber rattling could damage America’s standing in the world. Two days later, he talked up the benefits of some tariffs on Fox Business in a rare interview that Mr. Trump later said he watched shortly before announcing a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries except China.
On Friday morning, Mr. Dimon was back to being bearish on tariffs, saying in a statement accompanying his bank’s earnings that there were “potential negatives of tariffs and ‘trade wars’” and that the economy faces “considerable turbulence.” The bank’s chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum, summed it up as an “unusually uncertain” era.
