Jamie Dimon says the American Dream is slipping away. The dysfunctional baby boomer retirement wave is a major part of the problem

Jamie Dimon has been warning since March that "the American Dream is alive, but it's slipping out of reach for too many people—and for future generations."

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—and the dysfunction is only getting harder to ignore.

A new report set for release Monday, Powering 10 Million Small Businesses, 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've 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.

It's the latest entry in a growing body of research about the Great Wealth Transfer or the Silver Tsunami , which is playing out rather more like a long, reluctant exit, stage left for the baby boomers who hold most of America's wealth.

A retirement wave that refuses to retire

The dysfunction isn't just that baby boomers own an outsize share of American small businesses. It's that they are approaching the exit with something close to paralysis.

The McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility , in a February report on what it called "the Great Ownership Transfer," estimated 6% to 13% of small-business closures over the coming decade could be avoided if owners planned better—closures 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's 2025 small-business survey found that while most owners say they became owners to build something they could pass on, a majority lack a formal plan for how that happens, and describe the process of figuring it out as overwhelming.

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—the top two seats—were sitting in the retirement window simultaneously, with no clear succession plan disclosed. The dysfunction isn't confined to the corner hardware store; it runs from Main Street to the C-suite.