Nearly two years ago, at a conference sponsored by AllianceBernstein, Jamie Dimon delivered a weather forecast.

“Everyone thinks the Fed can handle this [but] that hurricane is right out there, down the road, coming our way,” he told the crowd. “We just don’t know if it’s a minor one or Superstorm Sandy.”

As it turns out, it wasn’t even scattered showers. There were some ominous clouds this time last year and a handful of regionals were hit by lightning, but between them, Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen and Dimon sorted things out. In 2024, there’s thunder in the US office space, but still no sign of Dimon’s hurricane.

It’s Jamie’s job to worry, though. And to prepare the world’s most important financial institution for the absolute worst. He routinely claims JPMorgan could survive even a Noah flood. I’m not sure anyone doubts that, but neither am I sure it makes any difference. You might need JPMorgan after a flood. Dimon’s services won’t be of much use after the flood.

He eventually adopted a more sunny outlook, but on Tuesday, he suggested the market’s faith in the soft landing narrative’s overdone. “The world is pricing in a soft landing at probably 70-80%. I think the chance in the next year or two is half that,” he said, during virtual remarks “at” the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney. “The worst case would be stagflation.”

Dimon described the US economy as “kinda booming.” Jamie will forgive me for being pedantic: If I go into JPMorgan and ask for a business loan using that characterization, they’re going to politely ask me to clarify. Something’s either “booming” or it isn’t.

I don’t think Dimon needs to equivocate. Considering we’re talking about the most advanced economy in the world, the figure above can fairly be described as indicative of an ongoing “boom.”

As a quick aside, I’m amused at pervasive deficit derision in the context of Bidenomics. It doesn’t occur to critics, apparently, that shouting, “The economy’s only strong because the deficit’s so large!” is a ringing endorsement of running large deficits.

Anyway, “booming.” The US economy’s booming. Whether it’s on the brink of a bust is another matter, and in that regard, Dimon wouldn’t rule out a recession. A downturn isn’t “off the table,” he said.

This is as good a time as any to highlight the figure below, which Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson this week described as a good illustration of “the increasingly ambiguous backdrop.”

“Rarely do we see such a wide spread between [GDI and GDP] which should be aligned conceptually,” Wilson said. “Historically such divergences do get reconciled.”

Without endeavoring to be derisive, the suggestion (sometimes it’s inadvertent) that dislocations and disparities are more pervasive this cycle than last is a fixture of bearish commentary. If you’re new to this, let me say, unequivocally, that although there’s merit in studying past cycles, there are always myriad dislocations and disparities, and it’s thereby always possible to suggest this cycle is somehow uniquely foreboding. Bears do it every cycle.

Of course, Wilson’s right to say the post-pandemic macro environment is in fact uniquely ambiguous. As Dimon noted Tuesday, macro indicators post-COVID should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than usual. That, in turn, means the Fed should be careful about cutting rates too soon. “They can always cut quickly and dramatically,” he said. “Their credibility is at stake here.”

As for the US election, Dimon called it “nerve-racking.” “You’ve got two men: They’re both on the older side,” he said. “Neither can get sick.”