Wall Street’s biggest firms on Friday attempted the tricky two-step of revealing the toll of President Donald Trump’s whiplash tariff policy without outright criticizing a man who has repeatedly tangled with the financial industry for slights both real and imagined.

Earlier Friday, China ratcheted up global trade tensions by raising its own tariffs on U.S. imports, adding an extra dose of difficulty.

“Obviously,” said Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

The careful choreography came at the start of earnings season, a quarterly ritual in which publicly traded firms disclose their financial results and, in many cases, give projections. It’s not typically of interest for many people other than professional investors, but it took on new importance and anticipation this week with the market turmoil that has accompanied the escalating trade war between the United States and its major trading partners.

The spotlight was in particular on JPMorgan, the largest bank in the country, and Dimon, who has styled himself as a frank speaker and publicly said he puts his country above his job. In his annual shareholder letter, released Monday, he warned that Trump’s saber-rattling could damage America’s standing in the world. Two days later, he talked up the benefits of some tariffs on Fox Business in a rare interview that Trump later said he watched shortly before announcing a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries except China.

On Friday morning, Dimon was back to being bearish on tariffs, saying in a statement accompanying his bank’s earnings that there were “potential negatives of tariffs and ‘trade wars’” and that the economy faces “considerable turbulence.” The bank’s chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum, summed it up as an “unusually uncertain” era.

JPMorgan otherwise performed ably in the quarter that ended March 31, posting a better-than-expected profit of nearly $15 billion. But in one indication of how the bank is steeling itself for the future, JPMorgan said it had added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion for losses from customers who can’t pay credit card debts and loans.“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, CEO of BNY Mellon, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.” His bank also beat market expectations for revenue and profit.

Leaders at Wells Fargo, which also reported its earnings Friday, “expect continued volatility and uncertainty and are prepared for a slower economic environment,” Charlie Scharf, the bank’s CEO, said in a statement. “We support the administration’s willingness to look at barriers to fair trade for the United States, though there are certainly risks associated with such significant actions,” he added.

Asked if corporate customers were reacting to the market volatility over the last week by stockpiling cash or drawing down their credit lines, Michael Santomassimo, Wells Fargo’s chief financial officer, said, “It’s just too early to see big changes in behavior as a result of what’s happening.”

Wells Fargo’s revenue in the first quarter fell slightly short of expectations, dipping to $20.1 billion, compared with $20.9 billion a year ago. It earned a profit of $4.9 billion, up a bit from the year before.

Although financial titans have flashed some anger over the uncertainty created by tariff policy, they are wary of a threat in the air that has nothing to do with the economy. Trump has lashed out at Wall Street for the purported practice of “debanking,” or the closing of customer accounts. The first lady, Melania Trump, has claimed without evidence that their son Barron was denied an account.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued Capital One for shutting its accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The bank didn’t give a reason for closing the accounts, other than saying that as a rule it doesn’t consider politics in its operating decisions.