The American oligarchy is petrified by Trump's economic chaos but careful not to criticize him directly

As tens of millions of Americans hustle to pay their taxes, Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, and supply chains are convulsing.

- Robert Reich

Even America's oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump's inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move — in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he's unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

"Obviously," Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, "the China stuff is significant. We don't know the full effect."

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it's a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced "considerable turbulence" from the tariffs while echoing Trump's assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. "I really almost don't care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters," Dimon said. "That isn't that important. We'll get through that. We've had recessions before and all of that."

Oops. The word "recession" coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won't be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock's chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was "very close — if not in — a recession now." Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become "the global destabilizer" and that the trade war "went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance."