Swift action from the Federal Reserve and U.S. government staved off a pandemic-led spike in missed loan payments. The message from the nation’s biggest banks: It’s coming.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. set aside almost $28 billion for bad loans in the second quarter, a mark only surpassed by the last three months of 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis. The total was higher than analysts had expected, with all three lenders saying their economic outlook had deteriorated as the coronavirus continues to rage through the U.S.
Even as unemployment surged, stimulus programs helped individuals stay current on debts and many have taken advantage of payment-deferral options from banks.
JPMorgan said delinquencies in its biggest consumer loan categories were down or unchanged from a year earlier, and a majority of credit-card and mortgage customers who got deferrals had still made payments.
“This is not a normal recession. The recessionary part of this you’re going to see down the road,” JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said Tuesday. “You will see the effect of this recession. You’re just not going to see it right away because of all the stimulus.”
For Wells Fargo, the biggest loan-loss provision in its history led to the bank’s first net loss since 2008 and an 80% cut to its dividend. JPMorgan and Citigroup’s trading desks seized on huge market swings to deliver record quarters, helping those firms maintain profitability.
JPMorgan traders shattered their previous revenue record by more than $2 billion, while Citigroup’s 68% jump in fixed-income revenue beat even the most optimistic analyst estimates. The biggest Wall Street firms, after years of questions about whether their trading businesses were permanently broken, have benefited from a roller-coaster 2020. After the pandemic drove stocks into the fastest bear market ever in March, the S&P 500 mounted one of the biggest rallies in nine decades, boosted by stimulus measures and optimism over a swift economic rebound.
But even buoyant markets couldn’t halt the pain from the new economic reality prompted by the U.S.’s failure to contain the spread of coronavirus in ways other nations have. JPMorgan now expects the unemployment rate to remain above 10% for all of 2020, and fall only to 7.7% by the end of next year.