In the week since Dimon uttered his remarks, the $956 billion-valued Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, and Goldman Sachs equity analysts projected a record $225 billion in IPOs this year. (SpaceX<\/a> has officially filed to go public, leaving OpenAI as the other major listing yet to drop).<\/p>\n Fortune has heard this word before<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear if Dimon\u2019s historical callback was intentional. He reached for one very particular word:\u00a0exuberance, the same word Alan Greenspan used in December 1996 when he remarked on \u201cirrational exuberance\u201d in equity markets.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s something worth noting before we go further: Fortune has a direct, if largely forgotten, connection to the vocabulary Dimon just deployed. In March 1959, a young economist named Alan Greenspan (the very same) was quoted in a\u00a0Fortune\u00a0article<\/a> using the phrase \u201cover-exuberance\u201d to describe financial market sentiment. Nearly four decades later, as Federal Reserve Chairman, Greenspan reached back for that same word\u2014sharpened into \u201cirrational exuberance\u201d\u2014to some, an infamous example<\/a> of a central banker who refused to call a bubble before it burst. But that market partied for three more years before the dot-com collapse.<\/p>\n The word has been in circulation ever since, a kind of financial Cassandra\u2019s curse: always right, always early, always ignored. And now Jamie Dimon, not a regulator but the man running the largest bank in America, has picked it up again.<\/p>\n Dimon said he knows that this feels good, even if it may not be healthy under the surface. \u201cOf course, it feels good,\u201d he said. \u201cIt feels good for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Why those four years?<\/p>\n Dimon\u2019s choice of historical benchmarks wasn\u2019t random. Each year on his list represents a moment when confidence was high, activity was robust, and the music was playing, right before it stopped.<\/p>\n 1972\u00a0preceded the 1973 oil shock and one of the worst bear markets of the 20th century, which wiped out the Nifty Fifty darlings of that era.<\/p>\n 1986\u00a0came just before Black Monday<\/a> in October 1987, when the Dow<\/a> fell 22% in a single day, with the savings & loan crisis metastasizing.<\/p>\n 2000\u00a0was the peak of dot-com euphoria. The Nasdaq lost over 75%<\/a> of its value over the next two-and-a-half years.<\/p>\n 2007\u00a0needs the least explanation: the last year before the global financial crisis, when leveraged buyouts were booming, credit spreads were at historic lows, and Bear Stearns was still standing.<\/p>\n The common thread isn\u2019t just that bad things followed. It\u2019s that in each of those years, the prevailing sentiment was that\u00a0this time the fundamentals supported the optimism. As former Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince said in 2007<\/a>, \u201cWhen the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you\u2019ve got to get up and dance. We\u2019re still dancing.\u201d<\/p>\n The stimulus hangover nobody is pricing in<\/p>\n What worries Dimon most isn\u2019t irrational behavior on its own terms\u2014it\u2019s that much of what looks like organic economic health is actually the tail end of an extraordinary fiscal sugar rush. He estimates that $10 trillion to $12 trillion in deficit spending over the last six to seven years has mechanically inflated corporate profits. \u201cThe government borrows money and gives it to people and that money gets spent,\u201d he said. \u201cIt also fuels corporate profits. Corporations, it\u2019s just not all automatically, they\u2019re all geniuses all of a sudden.\u201d<\/p>\n Add to that the current round of stimulus\u2014the One Big Beautiful Bill ($300 billion), deregulation, and AI capital expenditure running at $300 billion year-over-year\u2014and the picture is one of an economy that looks healthy in no small part because it has been, and continues to be, flooded with money. That\u2019s fine until it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Dimon also flagged the specific vulnerabilities he sees building in the credit cycle: weakening covenants, stretched EBITDAs, growing refinancing risk, and private credit marks that haven\u2019t yet reflected the volatility of early 2026. \u201cWhen it happens,\u201d he said of the inevitable credit cycle, \u201cit will be worse than people expect.\u201d<\/p>\n A lonely club with a terrible track record of being ignored<\/p>\n Dimon is not alone in sounding the alarm. He is, however, in distinguished and historically frustrated company.<\/p>\n Warren Buffett laid out his own warning framework in a landmark 2001\u00a0Fortune\u00a0article<\/a>\u2014published, notably, only after the dot-com bubble had already begun deflating \u2014 explaining what became known as the Buffett Indicator: the ratio of total U.S. stock market capitalization to GDP. \u201cIf the relationship approaches 200% as it did in 1999 and 2000, you are playing with fire,\u201d Buffett wrote. That indicator recently hit\u00a0230%, well past Buffett\u2019s own fire threshold.<\/p>\n Michael Burry<\/a>, the investor immortalized in\u00a0The Big Short\u00a0for calling the 2008 housing collapse, has been warning since early 2026 that current market conditions feel like \u201cthe last months of the 1999\u20132000 bubble.\u201d He points to the same AI-concentration dynamic that defined the dot-com era\u2019s final act \u2014 87% of venture capital now flowing into AI firms, AI-related borrowers making up nearly half of investment-grade bond issuance\u2014and draws an explicit parallel<\/a> to the over-issuance of tech debt in 1999 and 2000 that was subsequently downgraded to junk.<\/p>\n So what does Dimon actually think will happen?<\/p>\n That\u2019s the honest answer he gave: he doesn\u2019t know, and he\u2019s suspicious of anyone who claims to. His explicit view is that treating any scenario as a \u201cbase case\u201d is a \u201cfalse sense of security\u201d in an environment this complex\u2014with unresolved war in Ukraine, instability in the Middle East, massive global deficits, and trade relationships in flux.<\/p>\n What he is certain of is that JPMorgan is positioned for the range, not the point estimate. The firm expects $40 to $50 billion of excess capital to accumulate. Dimon is in no hurry to deploy it. \u201cIt\u2019s not burning a hole in our pocket at all,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it sits there for a while. No problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The deals are flowing, bankers are busy, sponsors are spending. The clients aren\u2019t hesitating. \u201cIt\u2019s gung-ho, folks,\u201d Jamie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[70488,28,101,1921,8624],"class_list":["post-687374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-bubbles","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-jamie-dimon","tag-jpmorgan-chase"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/goldman_5fd4e3.png\"\/)
<\/p>\n