JPMorgan Chase posted record profits and an overall boost in revenue in the first quarter, in the face of recent turmoil in the banking sector last month.
The better than expected April 14 earnings report beat most analysts’ estimates for the quarter, as depositors placed their money into the larger banks in the wake of the industry’s crisis.
The bank saw “significant new account opening activity” and deposit inflows, according to CFO Jeremy Barnum. Wells Fargo and Citigroup also saw positive earnings report last week.
JP Morgan’s diversified businesses and trillions of dollars in assets also cushioned it from the crisis that slammed regional and smaller lenders.
America’s largest bank has been watched closely for signs on how the industry is faring, after a series of bank runs led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in early March.
JPMorgan played a major role in propping up First Republic, which faced a similar fate, by leading efforts to inject it with $30 billion in liquidity.
JP Morgan Surpassed Expectations During Banking Crisis
The banking giant announced a 52 percent boost in overall profits to $12.62 billion, or $4.10 per share, in the first quarter.
This included $868 million in losses on securities, but profits rose 22 cents, when earnings were not taken into account, to $4.32 per share after adjustments.
JP Morgan gained $50 billion in deposits at the end of March, while the rest of the industry saw a 3 percent decline in the first three months of 2023.
The lender’s fixed income trading business also posted $5.7 billion in profits, but equities trading revenue was at $2.7 billion, which was below earlier estimates.
The inflows of liquidity showed “an intra-quarter reversal of the recent outflow trend as a consequence of the March events,” Barnum said.
However, JPMorgan saw a 7 percent decrease in total deposits from a year ago to $2.38 trillion, but the recent inflows allowed deposits to climb by 2 percent when compared with the previous quarter.
Meanwhile, the JP Morgan CFO told shareholders that the bank had increased its forecast for net interest income to $81 billion this year, excluding profits from markets, from an earlier $74 billion.
The Federal Reserve’s hawkish interest rate policies boosted the lender’s net interest income last quarter by 49 percent to $20.8 billion, causing companywide revenue to rise 25 percent to $39.34 billion.
Barnum explained that the boost was mostly driven by expectations that the lender would have to pay less to depositors later this year if the Fed cuts rates.
Dimon Optimistic on Bank Industry Health
Although the banking sector crisis is far from over, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon expects the disruptions caused by the bank failures last month to eventually pass.
“The U.S. economy continues to be on generally healthy footings—consumers are still spending and have strong balance sheets, and businesses are in good shape,” CEO Jamie Dimon said in a release.
“However, the storm clouds that we have been monitoring for the past year remain on the horizon, and the banking industry turmoil adds to these risks,” he explained, adding that the industry could rein in lending as banks become more cautious ahead of a likely recession.
JPMorgan put aside loan loss provisions of $2.3 billion, a 56 percent increase from last year, despite Dimon’s prediction that a recession “may still be pushed off a little bit.”
“You still see sticky inflation and then in front of us issues like higher rates, the war in Ukraine—those are still substantial concerns,” he said.
Although JP Morgan saw growth in earnings, the overall investment banking sector saw revenue tumble by 24 percent to $1.6 billion, as IPO markets started to slacken.
“Our pipeline is relatively robust,” but is still “sensitive to market conditions and the economic outlook,” Barnum said.
“We expect the second quarter and the rest of the year to remain challenging,” he added.
JP Morgan’s retail customers have been slow to pull their money out until recently, unlike its commercial clients, who have been pulling deposits for the past year as interest rates rose.
Retail clients are now trying to gain higher yields, causing deposits in the bank’s retail banking division to drop 4 percent in the first quarter.
Bank Deposits And Loan Markets Still Shaky
Despite a surge of new deposits in the aftermath of the recent bank failures, Barnum warned that the bank could see outflows in the future.
“It’s a competitive market and it’s entirely possible that people temporarily come to us, and then over time, decide to go elsewhere,” Barnum explained, but that the new deposits were not a big factor in JPMorgan’s optimistic projection of a boost in revenue.
Dimon agreed, saying “there’s no pricing power that the bigger banks have.”
Analysts are still waiting to see if JPMorgan and other major U.S. banks will tighten lending standards ahead of an expected recession, which would weaken economic growth this year by making it harder for consumers and businesses to borrow money.
Dimon cautioned that although a banking crisis could cut off loans to businesses and impact consumer spending, the American economy is still robust for now.
Barnum added that while more customers are making late payments, delinquencies are not yet a problem.
The CFO also admitted that the industry could start reducing loans to the commercial real estate sector, but JPMorgan is not looking at changing its underwriting standards there any time soon.
Reuters contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.