JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon said Monday he expects the coronavirus crisis to include a "bad recession" and elements of financial strain similar to the 2008 downturn.

The chairman and CEO of the biggest U.S. bank said that while JPMorgan entered the crisis from a position of strength and that lenders have prepared for this, the pandemic is playing out in ways that are "dramatically different" from the industry's Federal Reserve stress tests.

"We don't know exactly what the future will hold — but at a minimum, we assume that it will include a bad recession combined with some kind of financial stress similar to the global financial crisis of 2008," Dimon said in his annual shareholders letter. "Our bank cannot be immune to the effects of this kind of stress."

Dimon, 64, has returned to JPMorgan after a heart procedure last month to find an industry at a critical juncture. After being responsible for the excesses that led to the last crisis in 2008, banks are now being called upon to help support millions of people and businesses.

While the lender is fresh off a record year for revenue and profit, Dimon said that the bank's earnings "will be down meaningfully in 2020" because of the coronavirus. He also warned that in an "extremely adverse" downturn in the U.S. economy, JPMorgan would probably consider suspending its dividend to preserve capital.

That message is likely to reverberate among bank investors and analysts. Executives have said that while the biggest U.S. banks voluntarily pulled back on share repurchases at the onset of the crisis, their dividends were safe. Now, with the leader of the world's most valuable bank by market capitalization broaching the topic of a dividend cut, it would seem that most banks could also be vulnerable if the economy doesn't recover later this year.

JPMorgan has steadily raised its dividend in recent years, reaching a quarterly payout of 90 cents a share.