In Davos, a Weak Signal Rising from the System’s Inner Workings

We never really sought to be right against everyone. We simply tried, over the years, to describe an economic and financial system that does not malfunction by accident, but by structure. For a long time, this kind of analysis was seen as excessive and pushed to the margins.

Yet a few days ago in Davos, Jamie Dimon – CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the embodiment of Wall Street – delivered a troubling message. Not the words of an activist, nor those of a critical economist: the words of a man who runs the largest American bank. He did not speak as a moralist, nor did he invoke social justice. Dimon spoke as a manager, a technician of growth, which makes his intervention all the more significant.

He stated that targeted public spending, directed straight toward those who need it – vulnerable middle‑class households, precarious workers, deindustrialized regions – would stimulate growth instead of slowing it. He dismissed the obsessions of “budget panic,” acknowledging that modest tax increases can be justified, provided that the money collected genuinely benefits citizens rather than dissolving into what he calls Washington’s “black hole.”

Dimon went further

Calling the U.S. Congress a “swamp” dominated by some 17,000 lobbying groups, Dimon admitted that banks and large corporations – his own world, in fact – are an integral part of the problem.

He cited the CHIPS Act, a $52‑billion law meant to revive the semiconductor industry, which he says has become a hypertrophied mechanism, distorted by special interests and incapable of producing a real economic strategy.

It was at that precise moment that the moderator (Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist) cut him off with a “we’re running out of time.”

Although rare, such statements from someone of Dimon’s stature draw a fault line, revealing a system beginning to doubt itself – not out of altruism, but out of pragmatism.

A Moment That Matters

That the head of America’s largest bank admits that public money should be redistributed to citizens, that lobbies suffocate democracy, that industrial policies now serve only private interests is anything but anecdotal. It is an admission that the system is reaching its limits – that its own guardians are beginning to doubt it.

No spectacular rupture, no intellectual revolution. Rather, a weak signal of a malaise now spreading to the system’s core.

For a long time, we were among the very few describing these mechanisms: the capture of politics by private interests, the extreme concentration of wealth, the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. Our analyses were systematically relegated outside the central field of debate, but they are now returning. What has changed is not their content, but their source.

A Functional Crisis, Not an Ideological One

I have never argued that capitalism should be overthrown, but that it cannot function sustainably in its current form. That a capitalism built on debt as an artificial engine of growth, on the concentration of resources, and on the subordination of politics to finance becomes progressively incompatible with democracy. That it generates instability, resentment, and a loss of legitimacy.

It is hard to misread the gravity of the malaise.

The work of Hyman Minsky, among others, has shown that instability is not an accident of financial capitalism, but one of its structural components. Crises, bubbles, violent adjustments are not external anomalies, but the secretions of a model that prioritizes short‑term profitability above all else.

What is at stake is not ideological but functional.

The Art of Diagnosis Without Remedy

Davos is a familiar place for such observations. The harshest diagnoses are often voiced there, usually without consequence. One can say almost anything there, as long as nothing changes. The art of diagnosis without remedy. Yet the speed with which Dimon’s remarks were interrupted is revealing. The limits of acceptable discourse suddenly appear with brutal clarity, even when a respected Wall Street leader says that money should go directly to people, that growth should rely on real investment rather than the endless rotation of lobbyists.

There is no coincidence here: when an economic system reserves prosperity for a minority while pushing the middle classes into precarity, it undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy. A system that can no longer direct resources toward the common good – even when it has the means to do so – gradually erodes the support of those it is meant to serve. It can endure, it is resilient, but it becomes politically fragile over time.

The Time of Legitimacy

No one should claim victory, for this is a warning signal. When even those who embody the system begin to doubt it publicly, we enter a new phase – not one of collapse, but of loss of legitimacy. The system continues to function even though no one truly believes in it anymore.

The question is no longer whether the system is in crisis, but whether its own guardians will have the courage to reform it before it is too late. A capitalism that loses the confidence of its elites is a capitalism doomed to instability.