By: Mike Campbell
In the last quarter of 2009, Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase made a profit of $3.3bn, turning in an annual profit of $11.7bn – almost $250m per week. The bank did get financial help from the US Treasury to the tune of $25bn under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), but this was repaid in June 2009. The bank reported that it lost $2.2bn through its credit card business and that its retail banking arm also posted a loss in Q4. The figures are likely to put a cat amongst the pigeons since they reveal that the bank paid its investment bankers $9.3bn and that the 200 000 strong workforce earned $27bn in salaries and bonus payments. The figures were not broken down further, but they represented a 21 and 18% increase over the previous year’s figures, respectively. The bank’s chairman and chief executive said that he was pleased with the performance but felt that it could do better. This sentiment was shared by the market where the bank’s share value lost 2% before recovering. JP Morgan Chase is the first of the US major banks to report their figures Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are expected to report their data starting from next week.
IMF Head Warns That This Recession May Be A “Double Dip”
Dominic Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the global recession may have a second downturn in store – the so-called “double-dip recession”. He cautioned that the recovery is very fragile and that countries should not exit from the financial stimuli that they have established prematurely. Strauss-Kahn said that the recovery is being led by China and the Asian economies. The current IMF growth forecasts predict that the global economy will grow by 3.1% in 2010.