JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s shares headed for their biggest one-day loss since March of 2020 in Friday’s busy day of fourth-quarter bank earnings.

Wall Street investors punished shares of JPMorgan Chase with a drop of 4.8%, the stock’s heftiest one-day slide since March 2, 2020, when it lost 4.91%. Meanwhile, Citigroup dropped by 2.4% and Wells Fargo & Co. bucked the trend with a positive jump of 4.6%.

Despite its share price loss on Friday, JPMorgan stock is holding on to a 1% gain since the start of 2022, after rising 14% in the last 12 months. Wells Fargo is now up 21% since Jan. 1 including Friday’s gains, while Citigroup is still up by about 9.6% so far in 2022.

Wells Fargo’s 2022 guidance also beat expectations, while JPMorgan’s view fell short. (MarketWatch – Continue Reading)

Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination as the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision puts a final -- and decidedly progressive -- stamp on the Biden administration’s Wall Street oversight team.

A Duke University law professor and Washington insider who has previously held high-level jobs at the Treasury and the Fed, Raskin was pushed by liberal Democrats as a champion of tighter regulation for the biggest banks. She is also poised to lead efforts on developing financial regulatory policies for cryptocurrencies and fighting climate change, a top priority of the White House. 

Because the Fed is charged with monitoring Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other massive firms, the vice chair post is seen as the most powerful bank regulator in Washington. In addition to setting rules in arcane areas that go right to lenders’ bottom lines like balance-sheet liquidity and capital levels, Raskin would oversee closely-watched annual stress tests that review bank safety.

Though Raskin easily won Senate confirmation to serve as Fed governor and then deputy Treasury secretary under President Barack Obama, she’ll face a more difficult path this year. With the increasing partisan rancor on Capitol Hill and some lawmakers’ skepticism of Biden’s climate agenda, she is likely to win few, if any, Republican votes in the 50-50 split Senate. (Bloomberg – Continue Reading)

Developments in China have a considerable impact on the global outlook, with China accounting for over one-quarter of projected global GDP growth in 2021-23, and around 12.5% of world trade in goods and services. Among the factors that could significantly pull growth down in China, vulnerabilities in the property sector loom large.

The property sector has been a strong source of growth for the Chinese economy for many years, but this has been accompanied by rising leverage of developers and, more recently, households. Concerns about banks’ property lending and the balance sheets of property developers have been apparent for some time, with regulatory curbs introduced in the last two years. Despite this, significant risks remain in China’s real estate market, with the potential for large cross-sector and cross-border spillovers. The severe liquidity issues faced by some large Chinese real estate developers pose direct risks for financial intermediaries, including foreign ones. These would be amplified if the crisis in the sector were to lead to defaults, as currently appears possible, and a substantial decline in property prices. (OECD – Continue Reading)