00:00Deal making seems to be picking up. And of course, JP Morgan played a significant role in the takeover, the take private of EA, $20 billion in financing provided by JP Morgan.
00:10Is that a marker in the sand? Is that a one off as a deal of that type? Or is it a sign of more competition between, frankly, the banks and private credit?
00:19Well, we're agnostic about private credit. So there may be competition or not. We want our customers to do what's their interest.
00:25We offer both, you know, and we did that whole deal in 11 days and we didn't do it that way to make a point to private credit.
00:32You know, they said do it differently. We could have done it differently, too. And so but there's a lot of merger talk.
00:36There's a lot of firepower. There's a lot of tech. You know, we had a bunch of IPOs in the U.S.
00:41I know there's only been a handful here. The tech world is still doing quite well.
00:46You know, the 800 companies here, I think it was 400 last year.
00:50You know, we have 500 bankers coming, the innovation economy globally around the world, including vetted like 50 alone here.
00:57So, you know, look, I'm a long term optimist. I do think asset prices are high.
01:02Credit spreads are low. And, you know, you should take that in consideration how you think about the future.
01:06When we talk about credit and you talk about debt, I'm thinking of some data, in fact, that JP Morgan put out on auto loans.
01:11Biggest losses in the most recent months, I think since 2020, March of 2020.
01:15Is that idiosyncratic to auto loans in the U.S.? Or are you seeing other weak links being being stressed?
01:20I think, you know, there were one or two frauds, which I won't go through.
01:23But in general, consumer credit was so good. It's basically most of that just normalizing for both credit card.
01:31But subprime order is a little bit worse than normalizing.
01:34It doesn't look like it's getting worse from here, but it might.
01:37But a lot of that, if you look at the history of credit for consumers, it's employment.
01:41It's when employment or home prices go way down, which, you know, we don't maybe not expect, that that drives, you know, credit.
01:49The administration is talking about possibly churnaging the requirement around quarterly earnings.
01:54And you've talked about this. You've written about this with Warren Buffett around the guidance part of earnings and quarterly guidance.
02:00Would you welcome a change like that? And would it mean a change at JP Morgan in terms of how often you?
02:04Yeah, I would welcome it. We still probably update investors quarterly with much less stuff.
02:09And we just be very transparent. I think the bigger problem was just reporting quarterly.
02:13It was a forecasting where, you know, CEOs get their back up against the wall.
02:17They have to meet these things, earnings, and they start doing dumb stuff to meet earnings and that kind of public pressure.
02:22I think it's a smaller part of a much bigger problem.
02:26We've gone from 8,000 public companies in 1996 to like 4,000 today.
02:31And, you know, that I'm not sure that's good. We drive companies out of it.
02:35We have cookie-cutter governance. Some activists are good, but they're activists.
02:39There's litigation. There's cookie-cutter compensation. There's very expensive listing.
02:44There's, you know, disclosure rules, which you've heard about them here.
02:47I mean, endless rules. And that it makes it hard for a small company to go public.
02:51So I think, and they're trying to do that here, have an active small company going public.
02:55Look, that's what we all need. And it created an equity culture, which Rachel Rees was trying to do here.
03:00And I think they're doing a good job reducing regulations, you know, trying to make it easier to do business.
03:05And, you know, reducing regulation in banks, but also in business in general.
03:08You want an active market. And we've kind of crushed it.
03:11And could the research laws and MIFID and disclosure requirements.
03:16So if I was a regulator, I would take a step back and look at the whole system and say,
03:21how can we improve it and make it safer?
03:24You know, not, and look at it holistically as opposed to, you know, just everything's like a one-off conversation.
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