Wall Street Journal (September 26)
“Walmart executives aren’t sugarcoating the message: Artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs and reshape its workforce.” They are not alone. “Companies including Ford, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon have bluntly predicted job losses associated with AI.” For the next three years at Walmart, head count is “expected to stay flat… despite growth plans, as AI eliminates or transforms roles.” Beyond that time frame, the outlook “remains murky” for the specifics of its labor force composition, but it will definitely be leaner.
Tags: AI, Amazon, Companies, Eliminates, Executives, Ford, Growth, Head count, Job losses, JPMorgan Chase, Murky, Reshape, Sugarcoating, Transforms, Walmart, Workforce
Barron’s (April 13)
“Wall Street chief executives’ cautious-to-downbeat remarks about the economy on Friday stood in contrast with their firms’ first-quarter showings and their outlooks for the rest of the year. JPMorgan Chase +4.00%, Wells Fargo -0.95%, and Morgan Stanley +1.44% reported solid earnings results, while BlackRock +2.33% posted another quarter of record assets.” Investors who were “expecting market-sensitive firms to dial down their earnings forecasts” instead found the firms “left their outlooks largely unchanged.” This could, however, just ”mean revisions are in store for later in 2025.”
Tags: Assets, BlackRock, Cautious, Chief executives, Downbeat, Earnings results, Economy, Forecasts, Investors, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Outlooks, Q1, Remarks, Wall Street, Wells Fargo
American Banker (January 7)
“JPMorgan Chase bid farewell to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance on Tuesday, making it the last big U.S. bank to leave the climate-banking group ahead of the second Trump administration.” The latest defection “comes on the heels of similar departures last week by three of its peers — Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. In early December, Goldman Sachs became the first large U.S. bank to leave the alliance. Wells Fargo’s exit was reported about two weeks later.”
Tags: Bank, BoA, Citigroup, Climate, Defection, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Net-Zero Banking Alliance, Trump, U.S., Wells Fargo
New York Times (December 4)
“On Wednesday, the price of a single Bitcoin rose to more than $100,000, a remarkable milestone for an experimental financial asset that had once been mocked as a sideshow…. Bitcoin now stands as arguably the most successful investment product of the last 20 years. The value of all the coins in circulation is $2 trillion, more than the combined worth of Mastercard, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase.”
Tags: $100K, $2 trillion, Asset, Bitcoin, Circulation, Experimental, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Milestone, Mocked, Remarkable, Sideshow, Value, Walmart
New York Times (February 16)
“BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and State Street are quitting or scaling back their ties to an influential global investment coalition.” The former reduced its ties with “Climate Action 100+, a global investment coalition that has been pushing companies to decarbonize” while the latter two outright quit the coalition. “All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda.”
Tags: $14 trillion, BlackRock, Climate Action 100+, Climate agenda, Coalition, Decarbonize, Global, Investment, JPMorgan Chase, Quitting, Scaling back, State Street, Wall Street
Bloomberg (January 21)
“In a week marked by fresh recession angst from Wall Street to Davos, JPMorgan Chase & Co. finds the odds of an economic downturn priced into financial markets have actually fallen sharply from their 2022 highs.” In October, “a contraction was effectively seen as a done deal across markets.” Now, “according to the firm’s trading model, seven of nine asset classes from high-grade bonds to European stocks now show less than a 50% chance of a recession. That’s a big reversal.”
Tags: Angst, Asset classes, Bonds, Contraction, Davos, Economic downturn, Financial markets, JPMorgan Chase, Recession, Stocks, Trading model, Wall Street
Financial Times (June 2)
“Cloudy with chance of hurricanes for Wall Street.” Jamie Dimon the head of JPMorgan Chase, started the rush to use “meteorological metaphors to make sense of the economic turbulence.” After speaking of big storm clouds and a hurricane striking the economy, other bankers followed suit. Only a few, like Goldman Sachs chief John Waldron, refused to play along. He rejected the use of “any weather analogies,” but largely agreed the outlook is complex and dynamic, “The confluence of the number of shocks to the system, to me, is unprecedented.”
Tags: Bankers, Cloudy, Complex, Dimon, Dynamic, Economic turbulence, Economy, Goldman Sachs, Hurricane, Hurricanes, JPMorgan Chase, Metaphors, Meteorological, Shocks, Storm clouds, Unprecedented, Waldron, Wall Street
MarketWatch (October 11)
“For those of you expecting the world to return to some sense of normalcy by the time 2021 rolls around, JPMorgan Chase JPM CEO Jamie Dimon has a message: ‘We’re going to have to live with this.’” Dimon does not “expect normality to return until the summer of 2021.”
Barron’s (March 7)
“Today, in response to a campaign by sustainable investors Arjuna Capital and Walden Asset Management, American Express (AXP) became the seventh financial-services company since Jan. 15 to agree to take steps to publish and close the pay gap between male and female employees. The others are Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of New York Mellon (BK), Mastercard (MA), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM).”
Tags: American Express, Arjuna Capital, Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Campaign, Citigroup, Financial services, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Pay gap, Sustainable investors, Walden Asset Management, Wells Fargo
Institutional Investor (April 24)
To strengthen their balance sheets, large banks (including Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Barclays) have been reducing their commodities businesses, mainly through sales to independent trading companies. With these sales “to smaller players, conflicts of interest remain a potential problem” and nobody’s sure whether new problems will accompany this major shift. Given the skinnier balance sheets of the new players, market liquidity could conceivably suffer. In addition, “concerns abound that the underlying problems that have traditionally beset the commodities markets are simply being pushed onto a new and less tightly regulated set of actors.”
Tags: Balance sheets, Banks, Barclays, Commodities, Conflicts of interest, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Liquidity, Morgan Stanley, Regulated, Royal Bank of Scotland, Shift, Trading, UBS
