This is what you need to know:.
All the major banks in the country have released their financial results for the past year, and this data reflects the strange economic situation facing the Biden administration. Some parts of the economy are booming, others are stagnant and the outlook remains uncertain.
On the one hand, Wall Street’s core business is booming:
- Goldman Sachs’ business operations posted the largest annual gain in a decade and helped the bank more than double its fourth-quarter profit.
- JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley also reported strong growth in their investment banking and trading divisions after a year marked by bond issues, IPOs and mergers and acquisitions.
But other banks with large consumer loans were not spared, and Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo lagged in earnings growth. Low interest rates, which have encouraged businesses to borrow, have affected banks’ net interest rates on consumer loans, which have fallen year on year for most lenders in recent years.
Few bank heads seem to think Wall Street-centric activity will work this year, but concerns about Main Street companies seem less acute than last year.
JPMorgan Chase spent nearly $3 billion on reserves it set aside to protect against loan defaults in the fourth quarter, while Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo together spent $2 billion in the same period.
Throughout the year, these four banks added about $50 billion to their loan loss reserves, suggesting that they remain prepared for a possible wave of defaults. At the same time, demand for credit is low and deposits are piling up.
What are the banks planning to do with all that money? We have so much capital that we can’t use, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon told investors. Cash resources doubled last year to more than $500 billion.
It’s the same in other banks, and now that regulators have given the go-ahead to buy back shares, we will aggressively buy back shares in a consistent way, said James Gorman, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive officer.
Analysts surveyed by FactSet expect the six largest banks to buy back nearly $70 billion in shares this year, up from $18 billion last year.
Credit…Mladen Antonov/ Agence France-Presse – Getty Images
It’s bad enough when James Bond still can’t leave the house.
No Time to Die, the 25th. in the Bond franchise, was postponed for a third time last Thursday, the surest sign yet that Hollywood doesn’t think the masses will return to theaters anytime soon. According to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the $250 million film will be released on the 8th. October in the cinema.
It was supposed to start last April. As the coronavirus continued to grow, this plan for a November launch was abandoned. Finally, the expected blockbuster should be released in the second quarter. April is expected.
Already, studios worried about immunization in the United States are delaying the release of major films (again). Universal and Amblin Entertainment have therefore released the film Bios, starring Tom Hanks, set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, from the age of 16. From April to April 13th. August postponed.
But the withdrawal of No Time to Die could bring down more dominoes. It’s the first megafilm to come out after the inoculation. That honor now goes to Marvel’s prequel, Black Widow (May 7), followed by Universal’s latest, Fast & Furious (May 28). Problem: Nobody really wants to test the market by making the first move – especially after what happened with Christopher Nolan’s Shadowman.
In September, Warner Bros. attempted to kick-start film production with the release of Tenet, although many theaters were closed and others were operating at limited capacity. The film grossed $363 million worldwide, which is a very decent amount under the circumstances, but still disappointing for Hollywood. (Mr. Nolan’s films usually get more than double that.)
More recently, Wonder Woman brought in $143 million worldwide in 1984. Immediate online availability in the United States has undermined ticket sales and fueled fears of a resurgence of the virus.
Shortly after MGM announced a new No Time to Die date, Sony Pictures reworked their schedule and came out with Ghostbusters : Postmortem is on the 11th. November, as of November 11. June, and Morbius, with Jared Leto in the role of Marvel’s pseudo-vampire, through June 21. January 2022, beginning January 8. October, where he will face a certain British super spy.
Britain’s services sector, including tourism, contracted sharply in January, according to the latest report from IHS Markit’s purchasing managers.Credit…Will Oliver/EPA, via Shutterstock
- Wall Street is expected to stumble at the opening of the market on Friday after global stock prices fell, as data showed the economy in Europe weakened due to pandemic-related restrictions.
- Futures contracts tracking the S&P 500 index are expected to fall 0.8%. In Europe, the Stoxx Europe 600 benchmark index fell 1%, marking the second consecutive weekly decline. The FTSE 100 in the UK fell 0.6% and the DAX in Germany fell 0.9%. Most indexes in Asia also fell, with South Korea’s Kospi closing down 1.3%.
- New data point to a continued slowdown in the European economy. According to the IHS Markit Purchasing Managers’ Indices, the UK’s services sector contracted sharply in January, while manufacturing in Germany and services in France also contracted more than economists had expected.
- Shares in Cineworld, the parent company of Regal Cinemas, the second largest cinema chain in the United States, fell 4.9% in London on Friday after the release date of No Time to Die, the 25th film of the year. in the James Bond series, was postponed for the third time last Thursday. Shares of AMC Entertainment, the largest US film chain, fell 2% in pre-market trading.
- Intel shares fell nearly 4% in the pre-market after new CEO Patrick Gelsinger said Thursday that the company will continue to produce its chips internally. He also stated that he wanted the company to regain its position as the undisputed technology leader. Some analysts suggest that Intel is expanding its manufacturing operations in an increasingly competitive environment. Shares of rival AMD rose 1.3%.
- IBM shares fell 7.5% in the pre-market after the company reported a drop in revenue across all its businesses, including cloud software.
- Shares in Siemens, Germany’s largest manufacturing and engineering group, rose more than 5% after the company announced higher-than-expected profits thanks to the economic recovery in China.
Moon globe over New Zealand in 2013. The goal of the project was to provide mobile wireless services to underserved areas of the world.Credit…John Schenk, via European Press Photo Agency
Loon, a major subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet that sought to use hot air balloons to provide cellular connectivity in remote areas of the world, is closing.
Nearly a decade after the project began, Alphabet said Thursday it stopped Project Wage because it didn’t see how to cut the cost of building a sustainable business, Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times reported. Moon was one of the most high-profile lunar technology projects in Alphabet’s X research lab.
Loon’s idea was to bring cellular communications to remote parts of the world, where building a traditional cellular network would be too difficult and costly. Alphabet has been promoting this technology as a potentially promising way to connect not only the next billion consumers, but also the last billion.
Google started using Loon in 2011 and began public testing in 2013. Loon became an independent subsidiary in 2018, a few years after Google became a holding company called Alphabet. In April 2019, it agreed to a $125 million investment by a division of SoftBank called HAPSMobile to expand the use of high-rise vehicles to provide internet connectivity.
Last year, the company announced the first commercial deployment of this technology with Telkom Kenya, which will bring 4G LTE connectivity to nearly 31,000 square miles in central and western Kenya, including the capital Nairobi. So far, balloons have only been used in emergency situations, such as after Hurricane Maria crippled the cellular network in Puerto Rico.
However, Lon ran out of money and turned to Alphabet to maintain his company’s solvency while seeking another investor for the project, according to a report published in The Information in November.
