Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said that whether the Federal Reserve cuts rates of interest by 25 or 50 basis points, the move “will not have an earth-shattering impact.”
“They have to do it,” Dimon said at a conference on Tuesday. But “it’s a side issue when the Fed raises and lowers interest rates, because underneath lies the real economy.”
Fed officials are expected to chop rates of interest this week for the primary time in greater than 4 years. Ahead of the choice, bond traders were divided on whether the Fed will cut rates by 1 / 4 of a percentage point or half a percentage point because the central bank continues to aim for a soft landing.
Dimon said last month he didn’t think it mattered as much as other people did, citing ongoing economic uncertainty and inflationary pressures. He has warned for greater than a 12 months that inflation might be more stubborn than investors expected, and wrote in his annual letter to shareholders in April that his company was prepared for rates of interest between 2% to eight% or more.
On Tuesday, speaking on the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy’s annual Financial Markets Quality conference, he again said geopolitical issues — including the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and U.S. relations with China — were his biggest concern. It “overshadows every other issue I’ve had since I started,” he said.
“People are too focused on the question, ‘Are we going to have a soft landing or a hard landing?'” Dimon said. “Honestly, most of us have already been through all of this, it’s not that important.”
