Dimon emphasized the usefulness of LNG as a form of affordable energy for the U.S. and its allies, with the project pause increasing dependence on oil and coal and harming economic and geopolitical advantages, according to the statement. He also issued a warning for the economy that the current high rate of inflation could stick around for longer than expected, which would also mean that the Federal Reserve’s federal funds rate could remain elevated to suppress inflation amid high levels of government spending.

“Trade is realpolitik, and the recent cancellation of future liquified natural gas (LNG) projects is a good example of this fact,” Dimon said in the statement. “The projects were delayed mainly for political reasons — to pacify those who believe that gas is bad and that oil and gas projects should simply be stopped. This is not only wrong but also enormously naïve. One of the best ways to reduce CO2 for the next few decades is to use gas to replace coal. When oil and gas prices skyrocketed last winter, nations around the world — wealthy and very climate-conscious nations like France, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as lower-income nations like Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam that could not afford the higher cost — started to turn back to their coal plants.”

He also pointed out key global events that he believes threaten the U.S. economy and require Americans’ attention.

“It is important to note that the economy is being fueled by large amounts of government deficit spending and past stimulus,” Dimon said in the statement. “There is also a growing need for increased spending as we continue transitioning to a greener economy, restructuring global supply chains, boosting military expenditure and battling rising healthcare costs. This may lead to stickier inflation and higher rates than markets expect.”

The national debt is currently nearly $34.6 trillion as of April 4, according to the Treasury Department. In February, the federal government spent more than double what it took in, adding $296 billion to the national debt.

Prices have risen 18.5% since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, most recently rising 3.2% year-over-year, far higher than the Fed’s target of 2%. In response, the federal funds rate had been placed in a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest level in 23 years.

JPMorgan reported record profits in 2023 despite a crisis that rocked many medium and small banks, which was started by a bank run at Silicon Valley Bank. Following the collapse of First Republic Bank, JPMorgan purchased the bank’s assets.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon weighs in on the LNG pause in his Annual Shareholder letter

“The projects were delayed mainly for political reasons — to pacify those who believe that gas is bad and that oil and
gas projects should simply be stopped. This is not only wrong but also… pic.twitter.com/d3rLd9NbjA

— Shaylyn Hynes (@ShayHynes) April 8, 2024

“There are downside risks to watch,” Dimon said in the statement. “Quantitative tightening is draining more than $900 billion in liquidity from the system annually — and we have never truly experienced the full effect of quantitative tightening on this scale. Plus the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to have the potential to disrupt energy and food markets, migration, and military and economic relationships, in addition to their dreadful human cost. These significant and somewhat unprecedented forces cause us to remain cautious.”

JPMorgan declined to comment further to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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The response was for the Federal Reserve to surge interest rates, which cost any consumer who has a credit card or financing for a car or home even more. Even now, inflation is down from a year ago, but remains far above the government’s goal. Blame it on Joe Biden.

That’s according to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon who was interviewed by the Economist. A report at the Daily Mail confirmed that Dimon questioned the effectiveness of “Bidenomics,” previously known as “Bidenflation,” and “blamed Joe Biden’s $5 trillion economic stimulus for causing inflation.”

Biden has been scheming to raise a lot of taxes, especially on the wealthy “in order to invest in the middle class,” the report said. That’s opposite the wildly successful plan used by President Ronald Reagan to grow the economy during his White House days.

“I’d be careful about that,” Dimon said of Biden’s agenda.

He said Bidenomics is more of an industrial policy, to help particular industries. He’s opposed those in the past, but sees them now as usable within a few narrow confines like national security.

“If it relates to supersonic missiles, I think we should do it. If it relates to holding down the Chinese people, I think we shouldn’t do it,” Dimon said. “There shouldn’t be social policy around that, it shouldn’t be political it should be purely economic.”

He also was critical Biden’s massive stimulus spending. He has continued concerns with inflation, which spiked nearly to the double digits just a year ago. And while that rate has slowed somewhat, those price spikes that hit consumers so hard then now are the base level for the new price surges they are seeing now.

Biden, as the octogenarian campaigns for another four years in office, has been promoting his “Bidenomics,” which involves a lot more taxes.

However, polling shows Americans widely dissatisfied and unhappy with Biden’s work on the economy. Nearly half have confirmed they are “a lot worse off” since Biden took office and largely abandoned economic goals of President Trump.

Biden’s first term has focused largely on promoting the LGBT, specifically the transgender, ideology, as well as abortion.

Article cross-posted from WND News Center.

The system went live with its euro transactions last week, and the first payment in euros on its platform was carried out by the German company Siemens.

JPM Coin was originally launched in 2019 for dollar payments with the aim of offering clients a payment rail that uses blockchain. It allows large multinational clients to transfer money between accounts with the bank around the world and make payments to one another via blockchain technology rather than traditional payment methods.

So far, it has processed around $300 billion worth of transactions using JPM Coin. However, this is just a fraction of the firm’s daily transaction volume of almost $10 trillion via conventional banking methods.

The system allows customers to make payments around the clock and executes them faster than traditional transactions, which are only processed during business hours in most cases. It also allows customers to initiate payments that are not due yet.

The head of Coin Systems for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for JPMorgan, Basak Toprak, said: “There are cost benefits to paying at the right time. This could mean they could earn more interest income on their deposits.”

When JPMorgan introduced its system in 2019, it was the first major American bank to introduce its own digital token. Announcing the dollar-denominated coin in a blog post, they explained that the JPM coin was “not money per se.”

“It is a digital coin, representing United States dollars, held in designated accounts at J.P. Morgan Chase N.A. In short, a JPM Coin always has a value equivalent to one U.S. dollar. When one client sends money to another over the blockchain, JPM Coins are transferred and instantaneously redeemed for the equivalent amount of U.S. dollars, reducing the typical settlement time,” they clarified.

JPMorgan Chase fined $4 million by SEC for deleting subpoenaed emails

The move comes as JPMorgan Chase faces a $4 million fine by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its mismanagement of internal communications. The bank was accused in 2019 of deleting 47 million emails belonging to its retail banking group during the first four months of 2018; securities laws stipulate that financial firms are required to keep their business records for at least three years.

The emails, many of which were sought by subpoenas in a series of regulatory investigations, were permanently deleted and could not be recovered. Some of the lost emails could also be related to other impending legal matters and investigations in the future. They came from the inboxes of around 7,500 employees in JPMorgan’s retail banking sector.

The bank has stated that it is taking steps to avoid similar situations in the future. It agreed to sanctions from the SEC and instituted a new retention coding system to prevent mistakenly deleting emails. Any employees who try to delete emails must now obtain approval from superiors before proceeding.

The latest incident marks the third time the bank agreed to a punishment for its failure to comply with electronic record preservation regulations. They also agreed to pay $125 million in penalties for their failure to preserve text messages and other types of electronic communication related to banking transactions that were sent between 2018 and 2020. Back in 2005, they were hit with $700,000 in penalties for not saving electronic records from 1999 to 2002.

Sources for this article include:

• CoinTelegraph.com
• PYMNTS.com
• NATURAL NEWS

Dimon warned at a May 22 Q&A Investor Day meeting at JPMorgan Chase that interest rates were likely to go higher from here and rise to as much as 7 percent.

He noted that there was much uncertainty about the health of regional banks and that rising yields in the money market have led to a steady outflow of deposits, bringing their balance sheets to dangerous levels.

A combination of Federal Reserve rate hikes and quantitative tightening is adding more fuel to the regional bank crisis. JPMorgan controls more than 13 percent of the nation’s deposits, with a lock on 21 percent of all credit card spending.

Under Dimon, the banking giant has gobbled up more of the lending market with each small bank failure, since the financial panic in March.

JPMorgan investors were told that they should expect to benefit from rising interest rates because of its recent acquisition of First Republic Bank. Dimon told meeting attendees, that net interest income this year would be revised from $81 billion to $84 billion, after the bank bought out the profitable operations of its smaller competitor in a deal with the FDIC.

Dimon Predicts Even Higher Interest Rates

Dimon addressed the central bank’s raising of the overnight rate and said there was still too much liquidity in the system.

The JPMorgan CEO said that the credit situation will probably get worse and that higher interest rates are likely, contradicting popular opinion that the Fed has reached the upper limit of its policy hikes. However, he assured investors that the U.S. economy was fine for now and that a “mild recession” would not hit until later in the year.

“Everyone should be prepared for rates going higher from here,” Dimon said, adding that capital is already tightening up and that the Fed funds rate would surge past its current level of 5 percent, to as high as 6 or 7 percent.

“There’s a chance you could have rates ticking up and not just 3.78,” said Dimon, calling 7 percent interest rates an “outlier but possible.”

Fed’s Quantitative Tightening Policy May Cause Another Bank Liquidity Crisis

With the Fed Funds rate at 5.25 percent and with Treasuries and money market funds offering similar yields, smaller banks are now buckling under the pressure. This could spark another disastrous bank deposit run from both checking and saving accounts.

Meanwhile, the Fed’s quantitative tightening policy is causing its monetary reserves to shrink and drying up the supply of available liquidity for banks, said Dimon.

The JPMorgan chief said that higher capital charges from the Fed would hurt the smaller banks, but not their larger peers like JPMorgan. He said that smaller banks face more problems on the deposit side, as they are less likely to absorb a financial blow from a lack of liquidity.

The American banking sector had benefited from low loan defaults over the last few years, due to almost zero interest rates and the flood of government stimulus money during the pandemic.

For two decades, lenders were encouraged to buy up low-yielding securities, but the vulnerable regional banks are now being squeezed, as yields soar and fixed-income and loan prices plunge. Deposits will now have to shift into treasuries, or face liquidation in a future bank run, said Durden.

“We haven’t been through Quantitative Tightening. So we really don’t know what’s going to happen to deposits at all. And that’s why I’ve been quite concerned about that. I’m probably more concerned about quantitative tightening with anybody in this room,” warned Dimon.

“We’ve never had QT before. It just started, okay? And you see huge distortions in the marketplace already.”

“We’ve never had the Fed in the market like this … They have $2.3 trillion basically lent out to money funds. And I don’t know the full effect of that. And obviously, that’s a direct deduction from deposits are rolling out it made sense to do,” he said.

“So I think people should build into their mindset that they may have to move deposit beta more than they think and manage that. So I mean, if I was any bank or any company, I’d be saying, can you handle higher interest rates and surprise in deposits, etc?” Dimon continued.

Commercial Real Estate Sector Exposed To Credit Crunch

Before the failure of Silicon Valley Bank set off the recent bank crisis, uninsured deposits were generally not seen as a problem, said Dimon, but the regulatory moves made in response will lead to tighter credit for smaller lenders.

This will in turn lead to even tighter credit from lenders to customers.

“You’re already seeing credit tighten up because the easiest way for a bank to retain capital is not to make the next loan,” he explained.

As banks raise the bar for lending, the commercial real estate sector is expected to suffer the most from tighter credit, which may spread to the wider economy. About 80 percent of commercial real estate loans are granted by the regional banks, which have been rattled by the monetary policy of the Fed and the outflow of capital, according to Goldman Sachs.

“There will be a credit cycle. My view is it will be very normal” with the exception of real estate, Dimon said, and that “there’s always an off-sides.”

He explained that “the off-sides in this case will probably be real estate. It’ll be certain locations, certain office properties, certain construction loans. It could be very isolated; it won’t be every bank.”

Commercial properties in upscale markets, like San Francisco and New York, are already losing money, as workers increasingly prefer to work remotely.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Generally, I avoid taking financial advise from the JPMorgans of the world simply because I know that everything that they release to the public is designed to help themselves, not the public. But there are times when the advice they give is designed to help themselves BY helping their investors, and I believe the information below reported by Anna Golubova from Kitco is one of those occasions. They’re not telling people to sell equities and buy gold because they’re trying to hurt people. They’re saying it because they know if they’re correct, both they and the people who heed their advice will benefit. With that said, here’s Anna…

JPMorgan advises cutting exposure to risk-on assets and holding more cash and gold, citing the U.S. debt ceiling risk, recession outlook, and a hawkish Federal Reserve stance.

With the macro environment taking on several new risks, a team led by JPMorgan Chase chief global market strategist Marko Kolanovic is trimming its exposure to stocks, boosting its cash holdings by 2%, and moving out of energy into gold.

JPMorgan cited gold’s safe-haven effects and properties as a hedge against the debt ceiling debacle.

“Despite last week’s rebound, risk assets are failing to break out of this year’s ranges, and if anything, credit and commodities are trading at the lower end of this year’s ranges,” Bloomberg cited a note Kolanovic wrote to clients. “With equities trading close to this year’s highs, our model portfolio produced another loss last month, the third loss in four months.”

Longer-term, a Federal Reserve that keeps rates higher for longer, which is against the market’s rate cut expectations, would further weigh on equities, Kolanovic said.

“A divergence remains between rates markets that expect the Fed to cut this year, equity markets that interpret those potential cuts as positive for risk, and the Fed’s more hawkish rhetoric,” he said. “This gap is likely to close at the expense of equities, as rate cuts will likely only transpire from a risk-off event, and if rates stay higher, they should weigh on equity multiples and economic activity.”

Kolanovic favored a rebound in equities last year but eventually turned bearish, cutting JPMorgan’s model equity allocation in mid-December, January, March, and May.

After Tuesday’s meeting, there was no sign of progress from representatives of President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans. But talks are said to restart Wednesday morning.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reiterated over the weekend that June 1 remains a “hard deadline” to lift the debt ceiling. Failure to do so would lead to a default.

“I indicated in my last letter to Congress that we expect to be unable to pay all of our bills in early June and possibly as soon as June 1,” Yellen said during the NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ program. “And I will continue to update Congress, but I certainly haven’t changed my assessment. So I think that that’s a hard deadline.”

The better than expected April 14 earnings report beat most analysts’ estimates for the quarter, as depositors placed their money into the larger banks in the wake of the industry’s crisis.

The bank saw “significant new account opening activity” and deposit inflows, according to CFO Jeremy Barnum. Wells Fargo and Citigroup also saw positive earnings report last week.

JP Morgan’s diversified businesses and trillions of dollars in assets also cushioned it from the crisis that slammed regional and smaller lenders.

America’s largest bank has been watched closely for signs on how the industry is faring, after a series of bank runs led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in early March.

JPMorgan played a major role in propping up First Republic, which faced a similar fate, by leading efforts to inject it with $30 billion in liquidity.

JP Morgan Surpassed Expectations During Banking Crisis

The banking giant announced a 52 percent boost in overall profits to $12.62 billion, or $4.10 per share, in the first quarter.

This included $868 million in losses on securities, but profits rose 22 cents, when earnings were not taken into account, to $4.32 per share after adjustments.

JP Morgan gained $50 billion in deposits at the end of March, while the rest of the industry saw a 3 percent decline in the first three months of 2023.

The lender’s fixed income trading business also posted $5.7 billion in profits, but equities trading revenue was at $2.7 billion, which was below earlier estimates.

The inflows of liquidity showed “an intra-quarter reversal of the recent outflow trend as a consequence of the March events,” Barnum said.

However, JPMorgan saw a 7 percent decrease in total deposits from a year ago to $2.38 trillion, but the recent inflows allowed deposits to climb by 2 percent when compared with the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, the JP Morgan CFO told shareholders that the bank had increased its forecast for net interest income to $81 billion this year, excluding profits from markets, from an earlier $74 billion.

The Federal Reserve’s hawkish interest rate policies boosted the lender’s net interest income last quarter by 49 percent to $20.8 billion, causing companywide revenue to rise 25 percent to $39.34 billion.

Barnum explained that the boost was mostly driven by expectations that the lender would have to pay less to depositors later this year if the Fed cuts rates.

Dimon Optimistic on Bank Industry Health

Although the banking sector crisis is far from over, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon expects the disruptions caused by the bank failures last month to eventually pass.

“The U.S. economy continues to be on generally healthy footings—consumers are still spending and have strong balance sheets, and businesses are in good shape,” CEO Jamie Dimon said in a release.

“However, the storm clouds that we have been monitoring for the past year remain on the horizon, and the banking industry turmoil adds to these risks,” he explained, adding that the industry could rein in lending as banks become more cautious ahead of a likely recession.

JPMorgan put aside loan loss provisions of $2.3 billion, a 56 percent increase from last year, despite Dimon’s prediction that a recession “may still be pushed off a little bit.”

“You still see sticky inflation and then in front of us issues like higher rates, the war in Ukraine—those are still substantial concerns,” he said.

Although JP Morgan saw growth in earnings, the overall investment banking sector saw revenue tumble by 24 percent to $1.6 billion, as IPO markets started to slacken.

“Our pipeline is relatively robust,” but is still “sensitive to market conditions and the economic outlook,” Barnum said.

“We expect the second quarter and the rest of the year to remain challenging,” he added.

JP Morgan’s retail customers have been slow to pull their money out until recently, unlike its commercial clients, who have been pulling deposits for the past year as interest rates rose.

Retail clients are now trying to gain higher yields, causing deposits in the bank’s retail banking division to drop 4 percent in the first quarter.

Bank Deposits And Loan Markets Still Shaky

Despite a surge of new deposits in the aftermath of the recent bank failures, Barnum warned that the bank could see outflows in the future.

“It’s a competitive market and it’s entirely possible that people temporarily come to us, and then over time, decide to go elsewhere,” Barnum explained, but that the new deposits were not a big factor in JPMorgan’s optimistic projection of a boost in revenue.

Dimon agreed, saying “there’s no pricing power that the bigger banks have.”

Analysts are still waiting to see if JPMorgan and other major U.S. banks will tighten lending standards ahead of an expected recession, which would weaken economic growth this year by making it harder for consumers and businesses to borrow money.

Dimon cautioned that although a banking crisis could cut off loans to businesses and impact consumer spending, the American economy is still robust for now.

Barnum added that while more customers are making late payments, delinquencies are not yet a problem.

The CFO also admitted that the industry could start reducing loans to the commercial real estate sector, but JPMorgan is not looking at changing its underwriting standards there any time soon.

Reuters contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.