Finance

JPMorgan Chase is prepared to sue the U.S. government over Zelle scams

Published

7 months ago

September 27, 2024

JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon gestures as he speaks during the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee oversight hearing on Wall Street firms, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6, 2023.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Buried in a roughly 200-page quarterly filing from JPMorgan Chase last month were eight words that underscore how contentious the bank’s relationship with the government has become.

The lender disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could punish JPMorgan for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network. The bank is accused of failing to kick criminal accounts off its platform and failing to compensate some scam victims, according to people who declined to be identified speaking about an ongoing investigation.

In response, JPMorgan issued a thinly veiled threat: “The firm is evaluating next steps, including litigation.”

The prospect of a bank suing its regulator would’ve been unheard of in an earlier era, according to policy experts, mostly because corporations used to fear provoking their overseers. That was especially the case for the American banking industry, which needed hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to survive after irresponsible lending and trading activities caused the 2008 financial crisis, those experts say.

But a combination of factors in the intervening years has created an environment where banks and their regulators have never been farther apart.

Trade groups say that in the aftermath of the financial crisis, banks became easy targets for populist attacks from Democrat-led regulatory agencies. Those on the side of regulators point out that banks and their lobbyists increasingly lean on courts in Republican-dominated districts to fend off reform and protect billions of dollars in fees at the expense of consumers.

“If you go back 15 or 20 years, the view was it’s not particularly smart to antagonize your regulator, that litigating all this stuff is just kicking the hornet’s nest,” said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy at Wolfe Research.

“The disparity between how ambitious [President Joe] Biden’s regulators have been and how conservative the courts are, at least a subset of the courts, is historically wide,” Marcus said. “That’s created so many opportunities for successful industry litigation against regulatory proposals.”

Assault on fees

Those forces collided this year, which started out as one of the most consequential for bank regulation since the post-2008 reforms that curbed Wall Street risk-taking, introduced annual stress tests and created the industry’s lead antagonist, the CFPB.

In the final months of the Biden administration, efforts from a half-dozen government agencies were meant to slash fees on credit card late payments, debit transactions and overdrafts. The industry’s biggest threat was the Basel Endgame, a sweeping proposal to force big banks to hold tens of billions of dollars more in capital for activities like trading and lending.

“The industry is facing an onslaught of regulatory and potential legislative change,” Marianne Lake, head of JPMorgan’s consumer bank, warned investors in May.

JPMorgan’s disclosure about the CFPB probe into Zelle comes after years of grilling by Democrat lawmakers over financial crimes on the platform. Zelle was launched in 2017 by a bank-owned firm called Early Warning Services in response to the threat from peer-to-peer networks including PayPal.

The vast majority of Zelle activity is uneventful; of the $806 billion that flowed across the network last year, only $166 million in transactions was disputed as fraud by customers of JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the three biggest players on the platform.

But the three banks collectively reimbursed just 38% of those claims, according to a July Senate report that looked at disputed unauthorized transactions.

Banks are typically on the hook to reimburse fraudulent Zelle payments that the customer didn’t give permission for, but usually don’t refund losses if the customer is duped into authorizing the payment by a scammer, according to the Electronic Fund Transfer Act.

A JPMorgan payments executive told lawmakers in July that the bank actually reimburses 100% of unauthorized transactions; the discrepancy in the Senate report’s findings is because bank personnel often determine that customers have authorized the transactions.

Amid the scrutiny, the bank began warning Zelle users on the Chase app to “Stay safe from scams” and added disclosures that customers won’t likely be refunded for bogus transactions.

JPMorgan declined to comment for this article.

Dimon in front

The company, which has grown to become the largest and most profitable American bank in history under CEO Jamie Dimon, is at the fore of several other skirmishes with regulators.

Thanks to his reputation guiding JPMorgan through the 2008 crisis and last year’s regional banking upheaval, Dimon may be one of few CEOs with the standing to openly criticize regulators. That was highlighted this year when Dimon led a campaign, both public and behind closed doors, to weaken the Basel proposal.

In May, at JPMorgan’s investor day, Dimon’s deputies made the case that Basel and other regulations would end up harming consumers instead of protecting them.

The cumulative effect of pending regulation would boost the cost of mortgages by at least $500 a year and credit card rates by 2%; it would also force banks to charge two-thirds of consumers for checking accounts, according to JPMorgan.

The message: banks won’t just eat the extra costs from regulation, but instead pass them on to consumers.

While all of these battles are ongoing, the financial industry has racked up several victories so far.

Some contend the threat of litigation helped convince the Federal Reserve to offer a new Basel Endgame proposal this month that roughly cuts in half the extra capital that the largest institutions would be forced to hold, among other industry-friendly changes.

It’s not even clear if the watered-down version of the proposal, a long-in-the-making response to the 2008 crisis, will ever be implemented because it won’t be finalized until well after U.S. elections.

If Republican candidate Donald Trump wins, the rules might be further weakened or killed outright, and even under a Kamala Harris administration, the industry could fight the regulation in court.

That’s been banks’ approach to the CFPB credit card rule, which aimed to cap late fees at $8 per incident and was set to go into effect in May.

A last-ditch effort from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and bank trade groups successfully delayed its implementation when Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas sided with the industry, granting a freeze of the rule.

‘Venue shopping’

A key playbook for banks has been to file cases in conservative jurisdictions where they are likely to prevail, according to Lori Yue, a Columbia Business School associate professor who has studied the interplay between corporations and the judicial system.

The Northern District of Texas feeds into the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is “well-known for its friendliness to industry lawsuits against regulators,” Yue said.

“Venue-shopping like this has become well-established corporate strategy,” Yue said. “The financial industry has been particularly active this year in suing regulators.”

Since 2017, nearly two-thirds of the lawsuits filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce challenging federal regulations have been in courts under the 5th Circuit, according to an analysis by Accountable US.

Industries dominated by a few large players — from banks to airlines, pharmaceutical companies and energy firms — tend to have well-funded trade organizations that are more likely to resist regulators, Yue added.

The polarized environment, where weakened federal agencies are undermined by conservative courts, ultimately preserves the advantages of the largest corporations, according to Brian Graham, co-founder of bank consulting firm Klaros.

“It’s really bad in the long run, because it locks in place whatever the regulations have been, while the reality is that the world is changing,” Graham said. “It’s what happens when you can’t adopt new regulations because you’re terrified that you’ll get sued.”

— With data visualizations by CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes.

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Finance

Apple iPhone assembly in India won’t cushion China tariffs: Moffett

Published

16 hours ago

April 26, 2025

Business Finance News

Street's biggest Apple bear says a production move to India is unrealistic

Leading analyst Craig Moffett suggests any plans to move U.S. iPhone assembly to India is unrealistic.

Moffett, ranked as a top analyst multiple times by Institutional Investor, sent a memo to clients on Friday after the Financial Times reported Apple was aiming to shift production toward India from China by the end of next year.

He’s questioning how a move could bring down costs tied to tariffs because the iPhone components would still be made in China.

“You have a tremendous menu of problems created by tariffs, and moving to India doesn’t solve all the problems. Now granted, it helps to some degree,” the MoffettNathanson partner and senior managing director told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Friday. “I would question how that’s going to work.”

Moffett contends it’s not so easy to diversify to India — telling clients Apple’s supply chain would still be anchored in China and would likely face resistance.

“The bottom line is a global trade war is a two-front battle, impacting costs and sales. Moving assembly to India might (and we emphasize might) help with the former. The latter may ultimately be the bigger issue,” he wrote to clients.

Moffett cut his Apple price target on Monday to $141 from $184 a share. It implies a 33% drop from Friday’s close. The price target is also the Street low, according to FactSet.

“I don’t think of myself as the biggest Apple bear,” he said. “I think quite highly of Apple. My concern about Apple has been the valuation more than the company.”

Moffett has had a “sell” rating on Apple since Jan. 7. Since then, the company’s shares are down about 14%.

“None of this is because Apple is a bad company. They still have a great balance sheet [and] a great consumer franchise,” he said. “It’s just the reality of there are no good answers when you are a product company, and your products are going to be significantly tariffed, and you’re heading into a market that is likely to have at least some deceleration in consumer demand because of the macro economy.”

Moffett notes Apple also isn’t getting help from its carriers to cushion the blow of tariffs.

“You also have the demand destruction that’s created by potentially higher prices. Remember, you had AT&T, Verizon and T. Mobile all this week come out and say we’re not going to underwrite the additional cost of tariff [on] handsets,” he added. “The consumer is going to have to pay for that. So, you’re going to have some demand destruction that’s going to show up in even longer holding periods and slower upgrade rates — all of which probably trims estimates next year’s consensus.”

According to Moffett, the backlash against Apple in China over U.S. tariffs will also hurt iPhone sales.

“It’s a very real problem,” Moffett said. “Volumes are really going to the Huaweis and the Vivos and the local competitors in China rather than to Apple.”

Apple stock is coming off a winning week — up more than 6%. It comes ahead of the iPhone maker’s quarterly earnings report due next Thursday after the market close.

To get more personalized investment strategies, join us for our next “Fast Money” Live event on Thursday, June 5, at the Nasdaq in Times Square.

Finance

Warren Buffett’s top stock picks come with 15% income bonus in new ETF

Published

16 hours ago

April 26, 2025

Business Finance News

Invest like Buffett: VistaShares CEO on new ETF that follows the investor

In a year that hasn’t been kind to many big-name stocks, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is standing near the top. Berkshire shares have posted a 17% return year-to-date, while the S&P 500 index is down 6%.

That performance places Berkshire among the top 10% of the U.S. market’s large-cap leaders, and the run has been getting Buffett more attention ahead of next weekend’s annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. It’s also good timing for the recently launched VistaShares Target 15 Berkshire Select Income ETF (OMAH), which holds the top 20 most heavily weighted stocks in Berkshire Hathaway, as well as shares of Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire is currently the biggest holding in the ETF, at 10.6% of the fund. Other top holdings in the ETF from among the ranks of Berkshire’s biggest bets include Apple, American Express, Kroger, VeriSign, Bank of America, Citigroup, Visa and of course Coca-Cola, a long time favorite of the man known as the Oracle of Omaha.

“It’s a really well-balanced portfolio chosen by the most successful investor the world has ever seen,” Adam Patti, CEO of VistaShares, said in an appearance this week on CNBC’s “ETF Edge.”

Berkshire’s outperformance of the S&P 500 isn’t limited to 2025. Buffett’s stock has tripled the performance of the market over the past year, and its 185% return over the past five years is more than double the performance of the S&P 500.

Berkshire Hathaway is one of 2025’s top performing stocks.

In addition to this long-term track record of success in the market, Berkshire Hathaway is getting a lot of attention right now for the record amount of cash Buffett is holding as he trimmed stakes in big stocks including Apple, which has proven to be a great strategy. The S&P 500 has experienced extreme short-term volatility since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Even after a recent recovery, the S&P is still down 8% since the start of Trump’s second term.

“The market has been momentum driven for many years, the switch has flipped and we’re looking at quality in terms of exposure, and Berkshire Hathaway has performed incredibly well this year, handily outperforming the S&P 500,” said Patti.

Berkshire Hathaway famously doesn’t pay a dividend, with Buffett holding firm over many decades in the belief that he can re-invest cash to create more value for shareholders. In a letter to shareholders in February, Buffett wrote that Berkshire shareholders “can rest assured that we will forever deploy a substantial majority of their money in equities — mostly American equities.”

The lack of a dividend payment has been an issue over the years for some shareholders at Berkshire who do want income from the market, according to Patti, who added that his firm conducted research among investors in designing the ETF. “Who doesn’t want to invest like Buffett, but with income?” he said.

So, in addition to being tied to the performance of Berkshire and the stock picks of Buffett, the VistaShares Target 15 Berkshire Select Income ETF is designed to produce income of 15% annually through a strategy of selling call options and distributing monthly payments of 1.25% to shareholders. This income strategy has become more popular in the ETF space, with more asset managers launching funds to capture income opportunities and more investors adopting the approach amid market volatility.

Finance

More Americans buy groceries with buy now, pay later loans

Published

20 hours ago

April 26, 2025

Business Finance News

People shop for produce at a Walmart in Rosemead, California, on April 11, 2025.

Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images

A growing number of Americans are using buy now, pay later loans to buy groceries, and more people are paying those bills late, according to new Lending Tree data released Friday.

The figures are the latest indicator that some consumers are cracking under the pressure of an uncertain economy and are having trouble affording essentials such as groceries as they contend with persistent inflation, high interest rates and concerns around tariffs.

In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.

Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.

Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so.

“A lot of people are struggling and looking for ways to extend their budget,” Schulz said. “Inflation is still a problem. Interest rates are still really high. There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and other economic issues, and it’s all going to add up to a lot of people looking for ways to extend their budget however they can.”

“For an awful lot of people, that’s going to mean leaning on buy now, pay later loans, for better or for worse,” he said.

He stopped short of calling the results a recession indicator but said conditions are expected to decline further before they get better.

“I do think it’s going to get worse, at least in the short term,” said Schulz. “I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of reason to expect these numbers to get better in the near term.”

The loans, which allow consumers to split up purchases into several smaller payments, are a popular alternative to credit cards because they often don’t charge interest. But consumers can see high fees if they pay late, and they can run into problems if they stack up multiple loans. In Lending Tree’s survey, 60% of BNPL users said they’ve had multiple loans at once, with nearly a fourth saying they have held three or more at once.

“It’s just really important for people to be cautious when they use these things, because even though they can be a really good interest-free tool to help you kind of make it from one paycheck to the next, there’s also a lot of risk in mismanaging it,” said Schulz. “So people should tread lightly.”

Lending Tree’s findings come after Billboard revealed that about 60% of general admission Coachella attendees funded their concert tickets with buy now, pay later loans, sparking a debate on the state of the economy and how consumers are using debt to keep up their lifestyles. A recent announcement from DoorDash that it would begin accepting BNPL financing from Klarna for food deliveries led to widespread mockery and jokes that Americans were struggling so much that they were now being forced to finance cheeseburgers and burritos.

Over the last few years, consumers have held up relatively well, even in the face of persistent inflation and high interest rates, because the job market was strong and wage growth had kept up with inflation — at least for some workers.

Earlier this year, however, large companies including Walmart and Delta Airlines began warning that the dynamic had begun to shift and they were seeing cracks in demand, which was leading to worse-than-expected sales forecasts.