American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brian Foran: Hi, obviously, a very positive outlook. I don’t want to sound negative, but I think what we are all kind of dealing with is investors being like this is great? I will take it, but help me think about what are the risks? Where could it go wrong? So, maybe one question and one follow-up along the same theme, Jeff, when you were talking about the macro sensitivity, one question I hear sometimes is the note that the aspirational 2024 and beyond is a steady-state macro. And I get the investor question like, where is the dividing line? Like what would non-steady state macro look like where that guidance would then or aspiration within not apply? So, maybe you could touch on that, like what are the bounds in your mind for a steady-state macro?

Jeff Campbell: Well, I think Brian, I would start with two comments. First, when you think about our long-term aspirations, we don’t actually worry about recessions at all because the reality is, at some point, and I don’t know if it’s six months from now or 6 years, there will be a recession. And after that recession, there will be a recovery. And it doesn’t change our view of we should be able to steadily grow this company in excess of 10%. Now, when there is a recession where you see a very significant shrinkage in GDP. So, not like the first half of last year where maybe the U.S. GDP went down 0.5 point or something. But where you suddenly see a quarter or two quarters where you have a pandemic like or great financial crisis like large percentage declines in GDP and you see huge spikes in unemployment.

If you go back to one of the appendix slides, you will see that our CECL credit reserve accounting assumes a baseline and also builds in a downside scenario. In that downside scenario, you have 8% unemployment by the third quarter of 2023. Well, if there is 8% unemployment by the third quarter of 2023, we are going to have a few quarters where we are probably below our longer term aspirations. But is that kind of large shock that’s going to knock us off for a few quarters, but I really want to keep coming back to and I suspect, Steve, you might reinforce this, but it doesn’t change our long-term aspirations or how we are going to run the company.

Steve Squeri: No. And I think just go back to the pandemic. So, look, we pulled back on acquiring card members because I don’t think anybody had any line of sight. I mean that the pandemic was worse than the financial crisis from a credit underwriting perspective. You never say never, but that’s sort of like the 100-year flood, right. And so my perspective is we will still acquire in that kind of scenario. And remember, everything we acquired today, we acquired through the cycle, but what we would do is move the credit criteria even further up. But what we would do again is we would engage with our card members. I think one of the most successful things that we did during the pandemic was retaining card hold, retaining those cardholders, whether it was through financial relief programs that got them through the hump for a couple of months or six months, whatever it was, or engaging them to spend in other areas and to stick with us.

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