Editorial: Sure, Jamie Dimon trashed central banks. But that was not his main point in Riyadh.

The Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is known as the Davos of the Desert. But whether the view is dunes or Alps, this is not exactly an ideal moment for schmoozing or noodling esoteric big ideas.

Not with the world in crisis and widespread fears of an escalating crisis on multiple fronts in the Middle East.

Nonetheless, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase jetted into Riyadh this week to yak with other forecasters and top executives, including Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and keep cozy with that nation’s huge sovereign wealth fund, holding assets estimated at more than $700 billion.

Dimon, for a few years a prominent Chicagoan, is outspoken, would make a decent candidate for high political office and is always good for a headline.

In this case, what appeared in bold Wednesday was Dimon criticizing central banks: “Jamie Dimon says central banks got forecasts ‘100% dead wrong,’” blared the New York Post, “and it doesn’t matter if Fed hikes rates again.”

We all know by now that the Fed and others (including plenty of columnists) blew their inflation forecasts as we came out of the pandemic. Dimon, too, is probably right that another quarter point on the benchmark federal funds rate won’t fundamentally change consumer behavior or have a big impact on the root causes of inflation. With loans for used cars at 10% and mortgages grazing 8% now, we’re already feeling plenty of interest-rate pain.

Of course, bank executives are known to mock the government stooges, whom they often see as much less nimble than themselves. If you work for the Fed, that goes with the territory and Dimon’s remarks Tuesday will not have come as a surprise.

But mocking the Fed and its peers is not really where Dimon put his focus; the rest of what he had to say Tuesday was far more interesting. And far more important.

In essence, Dimon pointed out that the world has been plunged into a whole new level of uncertainty with the outcome of the Israel-Hamas war, a conflict that may well have profound economic consequences, not yet known and certainly not yet understood.

These times, he said, call for leaders who can think on their feet and comprehend how fast and how dramatically things are changing. Plodding along with a predetermined strategy is no good anymore. Skilled improvisers are required.

Take the sudden increased threat of nuclear war, obvious to any thinking and worrying person, given the armaments of many of those either in, or adjacent to, the crisis in the Middle East. Still raging is the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which might have slipped out of the headlines but remains deadly serious and dangerous.

“I hear people talking about ESG all the time,” Dimon said Tuesday, referencing corporate environmental, social and governance strategies. “I just would put on your table the most serious thing facing mankind is nuclear proliferation. If we’re not sitting here 100 years from now, it will be nuclear proliferation. It’s not our climate.”

Precisely. We might have said nuclear use rather than proliferation, but Dimon’s point was well made. Nukes are the bigger emergency right now: far more important than inflation. Climate change, too, is an existential threat, but it’s not as immediate. When you have the level of hate we saw manifest on Oct. 7 in Israel, such fears fully are justified.

Another point — obvious but still rarely stated — is that the situation in the Middle East likely will require more government spending. As Dimon noted, the U.S. government already has been spending in profligate fashion during peacetime, partly as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. Already, the U.S. has dispatched additional aircraft carrier groups to the Mediterranean Sea. War can be very expensive, and the current generation of Americans hardly is used to accepting sacrifices at home.

Dimon was looking ahead, as his shareholders expect him to do, seeing massive amounts of future human migration (you can already see the costly impact of that in Chicago as the arrival of tent cities roils Chicago neighborhoods and threatens both city budgets and social cohesion), rising food and oil prices (preventing interest rates from falling) and, in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of humans who clearly already are in danger of not having enough food or fuel in order to live. Some might well starve to death if things carry on as they are, and as that reality becomes clear, the worries of an increase in terrorism and further devastating consequences become yet more intense.

We do not see a pretty picture coming out of the Middle East, to say the least.

It begs the question: How to respond?

Dimon’s best answer there was effective national leadership.

A no-brainer? Sure. But look at the attempts to elect a speaker in the Republican-controlled House this week and you’ll see the utter antithesis of effective leadership. Instead, we have seen a feast of personal animosity, destructive rigidity, an astonishing lack of compromise, ideological or otherwise, and such an inability to see beyond members’ own noses that you’d think the world outside was a garden of roses, willing and able to wait forever for these feuding House Republicans.

Dimon, and many of his colleagues in the financial sector, know that could not be further from the truth.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. He wasn’t speaking about the speaker. He was talking about the world.

None of us know. The issue we all must confront is whether we have the right people at the tiller when, once again, the hitherto unknown blows up in our faces.

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