JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jamie Dimon: Yes. So, remember, the securities book is an outcome of investing, but basically excess deposits. And you have like $2.4 trillion deposits and $1 trillion of loans and things like that. So €“ and we manage it to manage interest rate exposure, all these various things. And so €“ and then when you say the size of it, we forecast, which I am not going to give you the numbers, we forecast every quarter what we are going to buy, what we are going to sell, how much is coming in, how much we need for liquidity, and we adjust it all the time based upon deposits coming down and loans and stuff like that. Obviously, what you get to invest in is at much higher rates today. And you see JPMorgan’s lost an ACM loan book as the percentage is much lower than most other people. We are kind of conservative there too.

Matthew O’Connor: I guess a bigger picture question. We have seen such a drop in really 5-year to 10-year part of the curve and even further out. And banks aren’t really buying, as said, you are selling. And I guess I was wondering if you had thoughts on who is buying and what’s driving the rates so much lower than most people thought they should be at?

Jamie Dimon: Yes, we do. But we should get the answer, of course, to get that. We look at it, what everybody is doing, pension plans, governments. We look at every part of the curve. We look at what other banks are doing. I think I have mentioned earlier in this call, banks are in different positions. Some may have to sell securities to finance their loan books. We obviously don’t. So, people are in a different position. And as Jeremy pointed out, it’s very important. That yield curve will not be the same six months from now that is today. While we use that to kind of look forward, it’s not actually our forecast. We know it will be wrong. And with the investment portfolio, we would be invested when there are opportunities. We bought a lot of Ginnie Maes when there is a 60 OAS spread. We have sold €“ one of the reasons we take securities losses, because that gives you $10-plus billion you can reinvest it when you think of more attractive securities.

Matthew O’Connor: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: The final question is coming from the line of Andrew Lim from Société Générale. You may proceed.

Andrew Lim: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. So, the first one on credit quality. Thanks for giving us a commentary on the shape of NCOs, I guess, specifically for credit cards topping out at the end of this year. Could you give us a bit more color on how reserve builds should shape out this year, I guess with respect to CECL? I am guessing that it should top out quite soon. That’s my first question. Just assuming all your macro assumptions are unchanged and all the assumptions are unchanged in the property are unchanged and so forth.

Jeremy Barnum: Yes. Andrew, well, I think we have talked about CECL like quite a bit, and I think there is some decent color there in terms of Jamie’s $6 billion over a few quarters in a world where the economic outlook is worse than it is today. We are definitely not going to get into the business of giving you an outlook for sequential evolution of the loan loss allowance. But it’s appropriate today and it will evolve as a function of the environment

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