Chief Executive Officer of Asset & Wealth Management and Executive Vice President, JPMorgan Chase
The Evolution of Alpha
New access to previously unavailable asset classes, innovative investment vehicles, and transformative technologies are ...
About Mary Erdoes
Mary Erdoes, CEO of JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management, said in November 2025 that artificial intelligence is not a bubble, calling that idea a "crazy concept." Speaking at CNBC's Delivering Alpha conference, she described AI as a "transformative opportunity" and a "major revolution" in how companies operate, comparing its potential impact to a process that will happen "slowly, then all at once." Erdoes stated that the market is still figuring out how to price AI's potential and that companies are only beginning to harness its power, predicting "explosive growth in both revenue and expenses." Regarding the broader economy, Erdoes said she does not foresee a recession in the near term, noting that people have been predicting one for five years without it materializing. She characterized the current environment as a "great buying opportunity" for credit investments. Erdoes also discussed the shift in investment options, noting that investors must consider whether they can sustain periods of illiquidity when accessing private markets. She has emphasized that diversification is key to preserving wealth, stating that while people often build wealth by mastering one thing, they keep and grow it through diversification.
Transcript (4 segments)
I
Interviewer0:03
Outside of AI, what do you make of the health of the rest of the economy? There's been a bit of a data void right now due to the shutdown. Can you help us fill in the pieces of what you're seeing in terms of the state of the jobs market, the state of the consumer, the stickiness of inflation? What are you seeing basically?
M
Mary Erdoes0:20
I think you have four things at play here. One, we're in a decreasing rate environment almost globally. So that is very supportive for markets. We're constantly looking for signs of inflation and you feel it in the way that you live but it doesn't show up necessarily in the way that it flows through to the numbers. I think AI will have a great impact on that in taming that. The counteracting force is that you have tariffs that are a big unknown and those will raise prices in lots of places if not done with delicately. But you also just have a world where we're facing a much greater peace environment than we have in a long period of time. And that actually changes the flow of funds in a pretty dramatic way. And it keeps things very tame, very exciting. We just came back from Saudi where by the way we celebrated our 90th anniversary of being in the country. And you look at these places that when you start to get peacetime environments, you get very exciting ways to think about making new investments, new things. And so the consumer, we keep looking for the stresses and strains and you see them pop out in pockets and we've watched some credits that have had their issues. There's nothing really synchronized about all of those situations. They're very bespoke in nature. That doesn't mean there's not going to be problems. It's just been a while since we've had the regular cycle of going through that. And when people run out of money, then they have to have a reckoning to that. But it's not anything that feels recessionary in nature. And credit in general when it has times where pricing becomes a little bit more attractive because it looks a little less good, if there's not a recession on the horizon, it's a great buying opportunity and you should be leaning in and buying. And that's exactly what they do for us. We are a very large investor in Aries and we're very proud LPs of yours and we expect you to do that when you see that stuff back up especially if you don't think there's a recession on the horizon.
I
Interviewer2:26
100%. I would remind people I think one of the challenges is we haven't had just a good old-fashioned credit cycle in a very long time and you actually have a generation of investors who have seen the GFC and COVID and have gotten into a mindset that anytime we have a correction it's catastrophic. I think when you start talking about a credit cycle, there are normal rhythms to the cycle of the business. We have been at this a long time. If you go back and look at the news cycle at the end of 2019 going into COVID, you'll see headlines talking about how late cycle we were and then we've obviously accelerated out of the pandemic and the economy as far as we can tell too is extremely strong. Corporate balance sheets delevered, consumer delevered, at least in the US economy, the structure of our mortgage market has created a fair amount of wealth and consumer liquidity. And the best we can all do is just focus on the data in our portfolios. And when you look at the earnings of folks like Aries or the earnings of JP Morgan, there's nothing that indicates that we're late cycle. Our portfolio companies on the corporate side are growing their cash flow year-over-year 10 to 12%. They're deleveraging. So, as someone who's been doing this a long time, you have to assume that we will have a cycle at some point, but there is a persistence to the growth that we're getting. It could be this productivity.
M
Mary Erdoes3:58
Yes. It is flowing through because people have been calling for a recession now for five years and it just hasn't come. The risk actually I see is not necessarily... I mean the companies have to do their own risk management, we help companies to do risk management all the time of whether they're overlevered etc. The fund managers have to do risk management, have they sized everything right in their portfolio, is any one thing going to drag them down disproportionately to others. But the group that I worry most about making sure that they do the stress testing are the retail investors who have now started buying these things and it's become so addictive because it's very nice yield that's coming out in their portfolio. And there will probably be a period of time you're not going to get that nice yield. There may not be the liquidity you want out of that side of their portfolio. And that's fine if you ride through the cycle and it's not a deep recessionary bankruptcy kind of environment. But it's not fine if you haven't risk managed the same way companies and GPs and other institutional LPs do. And so that's the part of the world we all have to make sure as advisers we are helping each individual person make sure they've done their own risk management of like did that thing get too healthy in my portfolio and outsized. And days like today are good days to think about readjusting your portfolio.