Then there’s the more intangible cockroach index. Speaking in mid-October about signs of instability in private credit and private equity, a sector that goes largely unregulated, JPMorganChase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said: “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more.” Five months later, private credit’s exposure to software companies vulnerable to AI advances is prompting what Bloomberg calls “a sudden investor exodus.” It’s cockroaches all the way down.
Some Wall Street commentators, including everybody in the Trump administration, are saying that the surge in oil prices and consequent financial disruption are only temporary. “The backdrop is very strong fundamentals,” said David Dietze, chief investment strategist of Dietze Wealth Management Group, last week, citing corporate earnings up 16 percent last year. But that was a.) last year and b.) driven by an AI bubble. Last year’s more relevant fundamental, as I’ve noted previously, is that growth in gross domestic product slowed to 0.7 percent during the last quarter of 2026. This year’s most attention-getting fundamental is that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February.
As for the war in Iran, I don’t disagree that Trump tends to lose his nerve when anything he does spooks the stock market. But as Yale’s CEO whisperer Jeffrey Sonenfeld noted last week, Trump’s TACO reversals to calm markets are only temporary; once the markets calm down, “Trump is prone to nudging back toward his original inflammatory position until he hits the breaking point.” He goes on the wagon, then he falls off the wagon. Thus, for instance, “with financial markets soothed from Trump putting out smoke about a potential peace deal, counterintuitively, that has the opposite effect of buying Trump much more time on the clock and much more room to escalate militarily.”