America's biggest bank brought in nearly nine figures' worth of net income
Some companies let you know that the figures on their income statements represent thousands of dollars. Some even comport them in the millions. But for behemoths like JPMorgan $JPM Chase, it’s dollar sign-B for billions. And America’s largest bank is raking in a lot of them.
For 2023, the company pulled in $90 billion in net interest income, which is bank-speak for profit on its loans. That’s a record. Not just for JPMorgan, but, says Bloomberg, any bank ever. For context, the 31st-largest bank in the US—Salt Lake City, Utah-based Zions Bank—has about that much in total assets. And for scale, JPMorgan Chase ended the period with nearly $4 trillion in its vaults.
(After expenses, the amount amount of actual net income is a paltry $50 billion.)
These are amounts that are hard to fathom. In a New York Magazine feature about the career of CEO Jamie Dimon, writer and private equity-financier Gary Sernovitz grappled with the idea of writing about an institution where as many dollars are swirling around as at Dimon’s: “The bank is so ubiquitous that to ask a finance writer not to write about it is like asking a politics writer not to write about the government because she has a passport,” he wrote.
The bank expects to generate a lot more loans as the Federal Reserve—maybe?—cuts interest rates six times this year. That’ll make it harder to make money on those loans, but even after that JPMorgan is expecting to make $90 billion of net interest income again.
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