JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, analysts exchange words on 2025 NII outlook

“Can I just point out that NII, all things being equal, is a number, but all things are never equal?” JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon snapped on the bank’s Q3 earnings call on Friday. He was drilling down the point that 2025 results depend on a lot of factors that the bank has no power over.

The sharp response came when UBS analyst Erika Najarian asked about the company’s expectations for 2025 net interest income. “NII is expected to be down 6% sequentially in fourth quarter. I think year-over-year in ‘25. Consensus has it down 4% from your new level. So it sounds like consensus still has room to come down and based on the forward curve, it could be a little bit worse year-over-year than the fourth quarter sequential rate,” she said, when phrasing her question about the bank’s assumptions on the yield curve in developing 2025 NII guidance.

“I don’t want to spend all the time in these calls like going through what they’re guessing what NII is going to be next year,” Dimon said.

Still, he did answer, “so it’s going to be less than $87B next year, probably not a lot, we don’t know, and we don’t know the environment.”

Later in the call, Morgan Stanley analyst Betsy Graseck defended her question on NII, saying, “it is more than half your revenue, so I kind of care about it.”

To sum the company’s guidance on NII. At a conference in September, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) President Daniel Pinto told investors that the consensus of 2025 NII was too high. In Friday’s earnings slides, the company said Q4 2024 NII, ex-markets, was implied at ~$22.1B vs. $23.4B reported in Q3 2024.

CFO Jeremy Barnum said the current 2025 consensus for NII at $87B “looks a little toppy, but it’s definitely in the ballpark.”

Dimon, though, said it will be lower than $87B “but we don’t know” by how much.

Even with the dimmer view of NII in 2025, investors apparently liked what they saw in JPMorgan’s (JPM) better-than-expected Q3 results. JPM stock rose 4.4% in the Friday regular-hours session, its biggest one-day increase since it jumped 7.6% on April 14, 2023.