Cembalest said he shrunk his comments on tariffs due to concerns about the company
Dimon CEO says he supports analysts to speak freely
Trump’s order targets law firms to challenge their policies
April 11 – Some public comments on U.S. tariffs have blocked his public comments on U.S. tariffs, a senior JPMorgan Asset Management investment strategist said he was worried about the impact his entire opinion would have on his colleagues and Wall Street Bank.
Michael Cembalest, a Wall Street veteran, said in a webinar titled “Tariff Shock 2025” that he could not fully express his views on the potential impact of tariffs on the market and the economy.
In a webinar on April 7, he said tariffs were a “a sledgehammer, brute force approach.”
Cembalest did not directly mention President Donald Trump in comments on some of his comments posted at the webinar. Bloomberg News first reported the comments on Thursday.
“This is the first time I’ve called what I said, not just how they reflect our perception of markets and economics,” Cemblest said in a commentary at the end of the webinar.
“But I had to think about how they reflected on the company and some of their colleagues, when people were responsible for their views and the way they said might not be said in that way.
“So I’ve said most of what I want to say on this call, but not all.”
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a media call after a tribute Friday that he hopes the company’s analysts can speak their minds.
“We want our analysts to be free to express their ideas and free to speak out, and we support that,” he said.
“Michael covers the goals, opportunities and risks of government policies,” a JPMorgan spokesman said in a statement.
New York-based Cembalest did not respond to requests for comments sent outside normal business hours.
The comments were posted in the U.S. amid a wider atmosphere of caution in the U.S., when the Trump administration signed an executive order against law firms that restricted their contact with government officials and threatened to cancel executive orders for federal contracts held by its clients.
The orders are aimed at representing clients who challenged Trump’s policies in court, hiring lawyers who prosecuted Trump for investigations, or representing people who previously investigated him. His order also condemned the company’s workplace diversity policy.
Cembalest’s comments were published in an April 2 report titled “Readacted: Direct Talk of CEO Front Lines in Liberation Day” where most of the text on the tariffs were blacked out.
“The next phase involves either trading partners providing sufficient concessions to the White House, so tariffs are temporary, or an escalating tariff conflict could cause damage to the global economy,” he wrote in the report.
“I don’t think tariffs are the only problem that has caused a decline in business confidence in the US CEO. I believe the following issues also have negative impacts on CEO confidence and frontline capital expenditure plans, so let’s talk about them frankly.”
Then, most of the following three pages of the report were edited, and the black box covered the text. Reuters couldn’t immediately determine why the text was edited.
This article was generated from the Automation News Agency feed without the text being modified.
