Ahead of the Fed meeting, Jamie Dimon weighs in on rate cuts

“They have to,” Dimon said on a conference call Tuesday. But “it’s a minor thing when the Fed raises and lowers interest rates because there’s a real economy underneath.”

Fed officials are expected to cut interest rates this week for the first time in more than four years. Ahead of the decision, bond traders were split on whether the Fed would cut by a quarter point or half a point, as the central bank continues to aim for a soft landing.

Dimon said last month that he doesn’t “think it matters as much as others think,” citing continued economic uncertainty and inflationary pressures. He has warned for more than a year that inflation may be tighter than investors expect and wrote in his annual letter to shareholders in April that his firm was prepared for interest rates between 2 percent and 8 percent or more.

On Tuesday, at the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy’s annual conference on the quality of financial markets, he again said that geopolitical issues — including the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as the U.S. relationship with China — are his primary concern. “Dwarfs anyone I’ve had since I’ve been working,” he said.

“People are overly focused on ‘are we going to have a soft landing, a hard landing?'” Dimon said. “Honestly, most of us have been through all this stuff, it doesn’t matter as much.”