![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2286277545_2274d9.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Jamie Dimon has been warning since March \u201cthe American Dream is alive, but it\u2019s slipping out of reach for too many people\u2014and for future generations.\u201d <\/p>\n
Six months later, JPMorganChase is pointing to a specific, dollar-quantified reason why: Millions of aging small-business owners are approaching retirement with no real plan for what happens to the businesses they built\u2014and the dysfunction is only getting harder to ignore.<\/p>\n
A new report set for release Monday, \u201cPowering 10 Million Small Businesses,\u201d puts a hard number on the problem. Chase surveyed 1,000 business owners and found that while 70% are in the early stages of succession planning, just 8% say they\u2019ve reached an advanced stage. The bank frames that gap against a wave it says is already underway: Roughly 12 million businesses, representing nearly $10 trillion in assets, are expected to change hands over the next decade. That transition is even more pronounced in industries the bank considers critical to national security, where more than half of firms have an owner age 55 or older.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the latest entry in a growing body of research about the \u201cGreat Wealth Transfer\u201d or the \u201cSilver Tsunami,\u201d that is playing out rather more like a long, reluctant exit, stage left for the baby boomers who hold most of America\u2019s wealth.<\/p>\n
A retirement wave that refuses to retire<\/p>\n
The dysfunction isn\u2019t just that baby boomers own an outsized share of American small businesses. It\u2019s that they are approaching the exit with something close to paralysis. <\/p>\n
McKinsey\u2019s Institute for Economic Mobility, in a February report on what it called \u201cthe Great Ownership Transfer,\u201d estimated 6% to 13% of small-business closures over the coming decade could be avoided if owners planned better\u2014closures driven less by failing businesses than by owners who simply ran out of runway before finding a buyer or successor. A 2025 Gallup survey found 27% of employer firms with owners 55 or older are either unsure of their long-term plan or intend to close the business outright rather than sell or transfer it. U.S. Bank\u2019s 2025 small-business survey found that while most owners say they became owners to build something they could pass on, a majority told lack a formal plan for how that happens, and describe the process of figuring it out as overwhelming.<\/p>\n
The same paralysis shows up above the small-business level, too. A recent analysis of S&P 500 companies found at more than one-third of firms sampled, the CEO and CFO\u2014the top two seats\u2014were sitting in the retirement window simultaneously, with no clear succession plan disclosed. The dysfunction isn\u2019t confined to the corner hardware store; it runs from Main Street to the C-suite.<\/p>\n
Estimates of the raw scale vary by methodology. Project Equity puts the number of baby boomer-owned businesses expected to transition at 2.3 million, representing one in six U.S. jobs; other analyses run as high as 3 million businesses, or, by some counts, 6 million transitions by 2035. The boomers simply aren\u2019t preparing the business climate for the next version of the American Dream<\/p>\n
The Fillmore, twice over<\/p>\n
Nicole Williams told JPMorgan she grew up on family stories about San Francisco\u2019s Fillmore district when it was known as the \u201cHarlem of the West\u201d\u2014a corridor once dense with Black-owned businesses, music, and community before redevelopment scattered much of it, closures that swallowed a generation of ownership with no mechanism to pass it forward. <\/p>\n
That history is part of why, when her boutique Belle Noire started to grow, she didn\u2019t try to build alone. She recruited five other Black women entrepreneurs\u2014Vickie Brown of Ice Body Skincare, Layshaunese Fuqua of Beauty and Brains Tees, Rashida Taylor of Stash Candle Co., Tshara Ball of LB House of Beauty, and Melissa Robinson of MellRose\u2014to open the Cowrie Collective, a shared retail space inside San Francisco\u2019s Palace Hotel. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t open Cowrie Collective to sell more products,\u201d Williams says. \u201cWe opened it to make downtown feel connected again\u2014six businesses, one vision, and a place where every purchase carries meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams and her partners got there with help: SF New Deal\u2019s \u201cVacant to Vibrant\u201d program, a public-private partnership backed by JPMorgan and the City of San Francisco, converted an empty downtown storefront into their opening, handling permitting, accessibility compliance, and the leap from pop-up to long-term lease. Ongoing coaching through Chase\u2019s \u201cCoaching for Impact\u201d program and everyday banking support are now helping the Collective build out its financial foundation. It\u2019s a rare case of a small-business transition\u2014from six solo operators to one shared enterprise\u2014that actually got planned, funded, and executed on purpose, the same early stage where most of Chase\u2019s surveyed owners get stuck.<\/p>\n
Why JPMorgan is telling this story now<\/p>\n
JPMorganChase is showcasing Williams\u2019 story because most owners don\u2019t get her outcome. <\/p>\n
The succession gap gives Dimon\u2019s \u201cslipping away\u201d warning an actuarial edge\u2014a dated, quantifiable wave rather than an abstract complaint. It also gives the bank a policy lane to lobby in: The report backs the American Ownership and Resilience Act, the Small Business Succession Planning Act, and the Retire Through Ownership Act\u2014and pushes the SBA to build a national succession toolkit. It ties directly to money the bank already pledged in\u00a0its March launch\u00a0of the American Dream Initiative\u2014$80 billion in small-business lending over 10 years, plus transition advisory services and $11.5 million in philanthropic funding for ownership transitions announced in 2025.<\/p>\n
For every Cowrie Collective, there are far more small businesses following the pattern the surveys describe: a solo founder or a handful of partners aging toward retirement without a transition plan, for whom the default outcome is not a sale but a shutdown. <\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#Jamie #Dimon #American #Dream #Slipping #Dysfunctional #Boomer #Retirement #Wave #Major #Part #Problem<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jamie Dimon has been warning since March \u201cthe American Dream is alive, but it\u2019s slipping…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[286,14209,8451,5526,1794,21312,586,6094,2313,6052,823,208,9446,1195],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}