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The Wall Street Iran Bounce

The economy is slowing and the Middle East is on fire, but the Big Five banks are printing record profits and stock markets keep hitting new highs. Is this the last song before the music stops, or were the bears wrong all along?

Jamie Dimon
“You make a little bit each time you buy and sell,” Jamie Dimon said—you’ve got to love the interstitial men. And occasionally, he implied, the bank is on the wrong side of a trade and there’s a loss. “But, to me,” Jamie continued, “that’s kind of the cost of doing business. Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
April 19, 2026

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Here’s a real head-scratcher: We now find ourselves in the middle of Donald Trump’s stupid, no-way-out war in Iran, with rising oil and commodity prices, increasing inflation and interest rates, and a president who picks fights with the pope and the chairman of the Federal Reserve. (No surprise there, I guess.) My friend Peter Baker has written a Times piece about whether Trump has lost, or is losing, his mind. And yet… the broader stock market indices are at, or near, all-time highs. The S&P 500 is now at 7,126—up nearly 4 percent for the year and some 12 percent since the index hit a recent low on March 30. The Nasdaq is also at, or near, its all-time high—and, incredibly, up more than 17 percent since the same date.