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JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon warned European leaders they have a competitiveness problem and that they are currently “losing” the battle to rival the US and China.
“Europe has gone from 90 per cent US GDP to 65 per cent over 10 or 15 years. That’s not good,” Dimon said at an event in Dublin organised by the Irish foreign ministry. “You’re losing.”
The comments from Dimon, one of the most influential voices in global finance, underscores the challenges facing the EU as it battles to invigorate its economy.
Mario Draghi, the continent’s former top central banker, last year demanded a new industrial strategy for Europe with annual investment of €800bn to maintain competitiveness with the US and China.
“We’ve got this huge strong market and our companies are big and successful, have huge kinds of scale that are global. You have that, but less and less,” Dimon said.
It is an even blunter message from Dimon than he made in his most recent annual shareholder meeting in April, where he said “Europe has some serious issues to fix”, and urged European nations to “significantly reform their economies so they can grow”.
Dimon, who has run JPMorgan since 2006, also warned that financial markets had become too relaxed about Donald Trump’s repeated threat of tariffs.
Investors on Thursday brushed off the US president’s latest threat of a 50 per cent tariff on copper, 200 per cent tariffs on the pharmaceutical sector and levies on countries including Japan and South Korea.
“Unfortunately, I think there is complacency in the market,” Dimon said.
He said Trump had so far been correct in backing down from his biggest threats on tariffs, invoking the so-called Taco trade based on the premise that “Trump always chickens out”.
“I hate to use the word ‘Taco trade” because I think he did the right thing to chicken out,” Dimon said.
Dimon saw trouble ahead for Trump if the economy struggled. “I think if the [US] economy weakens at all, he’s going to have a tough time.”
But he also blasted the opposition Democrats, saying: “What were they thinking in their wokeness?” He also called Zohran Mamdani — who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, where JPMorgan has its headquarters — a “Marxist”.
Dimon said worrying about whether Trump would seek a third term would be “premature”. US presidents are limited to two terms.
However, the JPMorgan boss said he thought the vice-president, JD Vance, would not agree to any deal in which he headlined the ticket alongside Trump: “He’ll say, ‘Hey buddy, get in the basement. You’ve had your day in the sun!’”
But Dimon said Trump may eventually prefer his son Eric as a candidate. Despite saying he harboured no political aspirations, Dimon said: “If he did [that], I might consider it too.”
