The Jamie Dimon podcast interview that aired on Monday stretched to an hour, and the JPMorgan Chase chief executive used the time to range across bond markets, Iran, artificial intelligence and the future of New York City, days after his bank posted a record quarterly profit.
What the Jamie Dimon Podcast Interview Covered on Bonds and Rates
Speaking on ‘The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost’, Dimon was unequivocal on government debt: ‘Personally, no. I would not be a buyer.’ His reasoning centred on the idea that even at 2% inflation, a 10-year bond ‘should probably be at four to four and a half’, and yields are ‘almost there today’, leaving little room for price appreciation.
He went further, questioning the reliability of official inflation data. ‘You dig into these numbers, I mean, really dig into them, and I wouldn’t give them too much credence,’ he said. Inflation, he noted, has run above 3% for nearly five years. As a self-described economic historian, he said he cannot shake the memory of the 1970s, when inflation climbed from around 3.5% to 11%.
With global debt-to-GDP near 100% and the US deficit at 6%, Dimon predicted governments will wait for a crisis before acting. ‘That’ll exhibit itself with higher interest rates, the market getting rattled,’ he said. He added that he has not purchased any stocks in recent months.
The interview came shortly after JPMorgan Chase’s Q2 2026 earnings release showed the bank’s highest-ever quarterly net income of $21.2 billion, or $7.70 per share, up 41% from $15.0 billion ($5.24 per share) in the same quarter a year earlier. Excluding significant items, net income was $16.9 billion ($6.14 per share).
Those significant items included a $4.6 billion net gain related to Visa shares, plus $1.0 billion of gains on certain equity investments. Return on common equity reached 24% and return on tangible common equity hit 29% (23% excluding significant items), compared with 18% and 21% respectively in Q2 2025.
Iran, AI and the New York Headcount Question
On Iran, Dimon argued that President Donald Trump should commit to a yearlong economic strangulation of the country following the resumption of strikes and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. He envisaged the president making the case directly to the American people: ‘I could resolve it without any military deaths or put 100,000 of your kids on the field.’ Gas prices might rise for a year, but Dimon framed the trade-off bluntly: ‘Is that a better outcome than them having a nuclear weapon in 10 years? One is maybe life and death for mankind, the other one is the economy.’
On artificial intelligence, Dimon said he is a genuine believer in the technology: ‘It’s real … it will cure cancers. Your children are going to live to 100.’ The investment wave is a different matter. ‘The amount of money being spent is huge. Will it, in total, pay off? Probably, just like the internet did. Will it pay off the way you expect, on the time you expect? Definitely not.’
His reference point was the dot-com era. ‘We had Yahoo and Netscape and all these companies that went bankrupt. But Google made it, Facebook made it.’ He predicted a coming reckoning in corporate discipline, as firms begin asking: ‘I put $100 million in this, what am I getting?’
The Jamie Dimon podcast interview also touched on the bank’s shifting footprint in New York. Dimon said he had personally confronted Mayor Zohran Mamdani with the staffing numbers. According to JPMorgan Chase’s 2025 Annual Report, the firm’s New York City headcount fell from 30,000 a decade ago to 24,000, while its Texas headcount grew from 26,000 in 2015 to 32,000. Dimon cited different figures during the interview itself (35,000 to 26,000 for New York and 11,000 to 35,000 for Texas) but the Annual Report, filed in early 2026, provides the more precisely sourced breakdown.
Asked whether anything City Hall could do might push JPMorgan Chase out of New York (where it recently opened a new headquarters tower) Dimon pointedly declined to rule it out: ‘I wouldn’t make it binary like that.’ He laid out the scorecard he believes mayors are now judged on: ‘It’s not just the taxes, but it is the taxes. It’s the medical. It’s the hospitals. It’s the social life. It’s the commute. It’s the housing.’ Cities, he warned, no longer hold captive employers. ‘There weren’t as many competitive cities; now there are a lot.’
On leadership, Dimon said the best executives possess the ‘innate skills to trust people, to get the best out of people, to not get embarrassed by not knowing.’ A secure leader treats criticism as a resource: ‘You’re not going to hurt my feelings by telling me we have a crappy product.’
JPMorgan’s next earnings test arrives in October, when investors will find out whether the Federal Reserve’s rate path has started to eat into the margins Dimon described as ‘almost as good as it gets’ for banks, or whether his scepticism on bonds proves better-timed than the market currently prices.