If you’re rubbing your eyes looking at your investment portfolio these days, you’re in excellent company. Even the most seasoned veterans running America’s largest banks are struggling to explain why stocks continue to march higher despite a world that seems increasingly unstable.

Consider what markets have absorbed in just the past several years: a global pandemic, war in Europe, persistent inflation, deteriorating U.S.-China relations, and now another conflict in the Middle East that temporarily disrupted global oil supplies. By conventional thinking, investors should be demanding a much larger risk premium. Instead, the S&P 500 has gained nearly 80% over the past five years while the Nasdaq has surged more than 86%, fueled largely by extraordinary enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence and hundreds of billions of dollars in technology investment.

That disconnect is exactly what has JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon scratching his head.

Speaking recently at the Council on Foreign Relations, Dimon admitted he is surprised by the market’s apparent calm. His reasoning wasn’t that today’s economy is weak. Quite the opposite. Growth remains positive, unemployment is low, consumers continue to spend, and Corporate America is still investing aggressively. That’s precisely why markets have been able to shrug off one geopolitical shock after another.

But Dimon argues investors may be asking the wrong question.

Rather than focusing on whether Ukraine, Iran, or China will derail economic growth this quarter, he is watching what he calls the economy’s shifting “tectonic plates.” Those are the slow-moving structural forces that rarely show up immediately in earnings reports or employment data but can reshape the investment landscape over several years. Massive government deficits, changing global alliances, supply-chain realignment, rising military spending, and persistent geopolitical fragmentation all fall into that category. They aren’t necessarily today’s problem. They could easily become tomorrow’s.

That’s why Dimon says he relies on the military’s OODA framework—observe, orient, decide, and act. The lesson is that leaders who become anchored to today’s favorable conditions often fail to recognize when the environment beneath them is quietly changing.

For investors, that’s the real takeaway. The market may be correct in celebrating an economy that continues to outperform expectations. Artificial intelligence spending, resilient consumers, and steady corporate profits have created tremendous momentum that’s difficult to interrupt. But today’s strength doesn’t automatically eliminate tomorrow’s risks.

In other words, the fact that stocks continue climbing despite an extraordinary list of global challenges doesn’t necessarily prove those challenges don’t matter. It may simply mean the market believes they’ll remain someone else’s problem for another day. Dimon isn’t convinced that assumption will hold forever—and that’s what surprises him most.