Six months ago, the most powerful banker in America walked onto a quarterly earnings call and used a word that doesn’t usually come up when bank CEOs talk to Wall Street: cockroaches.
It was Oct. 14, 2025. JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) had just taken a $170 million hit from the bankruptcy of Tricolor Holdings, a subprime auto lender that, as it later emerged, had been making car loans to borrowers without credit scores or, in many cases, driver’s licenses. A few weeks earlier, an auto-parts maker called First Brands had collapsed under what investigators believe was an opaque borrowing scheme involving as much as $2.3 billion in undisclosed loans. The Department of Justice opened a criminal probe.
Then Jamie Dimon said the line that would echo across Wall Street for the rest of the year: “My antenna goes up when things like that happen. And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more. Everyone should be forewarned on this one.”
More Credit Issues?
It was vintage Dimon — direct, memorable, and just a little bit alarming. The comment got picked up everywhere. Howard Marks, the Oaktree Capital co-founder famous for his memos on credit cycles, wrote an entire November note titled “Cockroaches in the Coal Mine” riffing on Dimon’s framing. The word stuck.
He backed it up with a real-world view of where things were headed: “We’ve had a credit bull market now for the better part of since 2010. These are early signs there might be some excess out there. If we ever have a downturn, you’re going to see quite a few more credit issues.”
For investors, it landed at exactly the wrong moment. Bank stocks had been on a tear. Private credit — the world of non-bank lenders making loans to mid-sized companies …
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