JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon: Tight credit market not a concern
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told FOX Business that he’s not worried about the tight credit market right now.
“Credit spreads were abnormally low for a long time,” he said during an exclusive interview with Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday. “This is more – maybe a little bit of a normalization, and… you and I both know that… the tip of the spear is IPOs and high yield… when sentiment changes dramatically, those are usually the first two areas where people cut back. And then they kind of open up over time.”
Although Dimon isn’t concerned, legendary investor Carl Icahn said there’s too much debt in the world.
“The debt is amazingly 250 trillion dollars across the globe and you just can’t continue to live with that,” he told FOX Business’ Neil Cavuto on Monday. “And there's certainly too much debt in our country … you don't have productivity in this country.”
However, Dimon said that although the U.S. economy may be in a “slowdown” period, it is still growing at a rate of 2 percent to 2.5 percent and the December jobs report is a positive sign of things to come.
And despite uncertainty from the Federal Reserve on rate hikes and geopolitical risks, such as the U.S. trade war with China creating a volatile market environment, there is no recession on the horizon in the near term, in his opinion.
“A lot of concerns out there … Sentiment went from kind of global synchronized growth to maybe it’ll be bad, maybe we’ll go into recession,” he said. “It doesn’t look to me like that’s taking place. I think it is just a slowdown.”
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He also said that the U.S. consumer is in “good shape” and continues to improve.
“If you look at actual data, people getting jobs, more people working, wages going up … Household balance sheet in very good shape, credit card credit – extraordinarily good,” he said. “I think it’s better than we deserve at this point in the cycle. And if you look at actual spend, if you look at retail spend, the home improvement spend … it’s pretty good.”