Attention Economy


Monday, April 8, 2024

Jamie Dimon's Musings

JP Morgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, notes:
Many key economic indicators today continue to be good and possibly improving, including inflation. But when looking ahead to tomorrow, conditions that will affect the future should be considered. For example, there seems to be a large number of persistent inflationary pressures, which may likely continue. All of the following factors appear to be inflationary: ongoing fiscal spending, remilitarization of the world, restructuring of global trade, capital needs of the new green economy, and possibly higher energy costs in the future (even though there currently is an oversupply of gas and plentiful spare capacity in oil) due to a lack of needed investment in the energy infrastructure. In the past, fiscal deficits did not seem to be closely related to inflation. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a general understanding that inflation was driven by “guns and butter”; i.e., fiscal deficits and the increase to the money supply, both partially driven by the Vietnam War, led to increased inflation, which went over 10%. The deficits today are even larger and occurring in boom times — not as the result of a recession — and they have been supported by quantitative easing, which was never done before the great financial crisis. Quantitative easing is a form of increasing the money supply (though it has many offsets). I remain more concerned about quantitative easing than most, and its reversal, which has never been done before at this scale.
 
Dimon Likens AI’s Transformational Potential to the Steam Engine