JPMorgan Chase reported better-than-expected financial results on Thursday and gave credit to improvement in the American economy.
The bank, the nation's largest by assets, said it was seeing broad demand for loans from consumers and businesses in the United States. JPMorgan's loan portfolio in the second quarter grew 16 percent from a year earlier and 3 percent from the previous quarter.
"That speaks well for the U.S. economy and the consumer in particular," said JPMorgan's chief financial officer, Marianne Lake. "We're expecting continuing moderate growth and demand in the U.S."
JPMorgan is the first of the big banks to announce its quarterly financial results, and its signs of growth appeared to please investors. Shares of JPMorgan rose 96 cents, or 1.5 percent, to close Thursday at $64.12.
For the second quarter, earnings at JPMorgan slipped to $6.20 billion, or $1.55 a share, from $6.29 billion, or $1.54 a share. Wall Street had been expecting earnings of $1.43 a share, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters.
Improving results from its Main Street and Wall Street divisions helped push up the firm's overall revenue 3 percent, to $25.2 billion, from a year earlier.
Earlier this week, the bank's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, wrote an op-ed article in The New York Times announcing that the company would be giving raises to its lowest paid salaried employees.
Dimon wrote that the move was driven in part by his optimistic outlook and would allow his employees to share in the economic growth.
And the bank on Thursday sounded a relatively optimistic note about the potential impact of Britain's recent vote to leave the European Union.
"We see this as a political and economic challenge, but not a financial crisis," Lake said.
While JPMorgan executives have said trading rebounded in April and May, that was before the U.K. referendum roiled markets and pushed out expectations for additional U.S. interest-rate increases from the Federal Reserve to at least next year. The delay would extend a post-financial-crisis era of low rates that have forced banks to rely on expense cuts to cope with stagnant revenue.
"The success can last for a quarter or a two, but I think it's still going to be a very difficult year," Charles Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television when asked about JPMorgan's results. "I'm still expecting earnings to be down year over year."
Before the vote, Dimon had warned that JPMorgan might have to move thousands of employees out of the country if Britain voted to leave the EU.
Lake said Thursday that the company would make decisions on any moves only after the exact terms of Britain's exit had been negotiated.
"It's very early days -- things will unfold very slowly," she said. "We would like to believe that we can continue to have our European franchise headquarters based in London."
The trading activity around the British exit vote appears to have helped the results from JPMorgan's trading divisions, and particularly its bond and fixed-income units. Those units have been struggling in recent years. In the second quarter, revenue from fixed-income markets rose 35 percent from a year earlier.
Banks have been hit hard in the market turmoil during the first half of the year, and there has been concern about the potential impact of Britain's exit.
Information for this article was contributed by Hugh Son of Bloomberg News.
Business on 07/15/2016