Central banks failed to foresee inflation coming at them 18 months ago and got their financial forecasting “100% dead wrong,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said at the economic conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Bloomberg reports.

The outspoken CEO said the U.S. Federal Reserve and other banks should remain humble about their proficiency to handle the economic fallout from inflation and slowing global growth.

Dimon recalled how the Fed called inflation transitory when it began to rear its ugly head, and in June 2022, when it peaked at 9.1%, the Fed incorrectly predicted that inflation would tamp back down between 2.5% to 3% by year end.

“Fiscal spending is more than it’s ever been in peacetime and there’s this omnipotent feeling that central banks and governments can manage through all this stuff,” he said in a panel discussion on future investments. “I am cautious about what will happen next year.”

The U.S. needs “real leadership” to navigate the current economic and geopolitical environment, Dimon said.

The economic environment today is much like the 1970s, when the government spent excess amounts of money, there was waste, and some wondered about the efficiency of interest rate hikes by the Fed.

“I don’t think it makes a piece of difference whether rates go up 25 basis points or more,” he said. “Whether the whole curve goes up 100 basis points, be prepared for it. I don’t know if it’s going to happen.”

On the same panel, Bridgewater Associates CEO Ray Dalio was equally cynical, saying his 2024 outlook for world growth is “pessimistic,” due to record high public debt, wars in the Mideast and Ukraine, and disorder.

Dimon was equally critical of the lack of a cohesive policy to tackle climate change, likening policymakers’ and lawmakers’ current “incompetent” efforts to a game of “whack-a-mole.”

Goldman Sachs strategists say that if the Fed funds rate remains at its current 5.25%-5.5% level or higher, the U.S. economy could shrink by 0.5%, the New York Post reports.

The U.S. has continued to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and consumers have kept spending, which means that the neutral rate, or the rate at which interest rates weigh on the economy, is higher than it was the last cycle, Goldman strategists believe.

This is causing the U.S. central bank to think the current Fed funds rate is not high enough to cause a recession and put off thoughts on future rate cuts, according to the Goldman Sachs note published earlier this month.

Nonetheless, consumers are feeling the pinch of inflation. Fitch Ratings data this week shows that Americans are defaulting on their auto loans at rates not seen in three decades.