DealBook: Justice Dept. Again Signals Interest to Pursue Financial Crisis Cases

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DealBook: JPMorgan and Wells Fargo Feel First Chill of Rising Interest Rates

Leslye Davis/The New York TimesJPMorgan’s profit on mortgages fell 14 percent in the last quarter.

Even as two of the nation’s largest banks reported record profits on Friday, beneath the rosy earnings were signs that a sharp uptick in interest rates could spell trouble ahead for Wall Street and the broader housing market.

Kicking off bank earnings season, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo handily beat analysts’ expectations. Profit at JPMorgan surged 31 percent, bolstered by gains in the bank’s trading and investment banking business. Wells Fargo, the biggest home lender in the country, posted a 19 percent increase in its second-quarter profit.

The gains were spread across the banks except for one important source: mortgage banking. The results showed that refinancing activity slowed, as did demand for mortgage loans.

The results could worsen. If rates continue to rise, fewer borrowers are likely to refinance or buy a house. And if the mortgage bond market weakens, banks will take a smaller gain when selling the mortgages.

While these concerns have loomed for months, the earnings on Friday offered the clearest picture yet of how the interest rate turmoil could affect the banks, whose fortunes hinge in part on their lending businesses.

“We’re trying to be clear with you that this would be a significant event,” Marianne Lake, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, said on Friday, referring to the potential effect of rising rates on the industry. She cautioned analysts that the volumes of mortgage refinancing could plunge by an “estimated 30 percent to 40 percent” in the second half of this year.

The results from JPMorgan and Wells are a barometer for the housing market because the two banks together account for the majority of all mortgages in the United States. In recent years, the recovery in the market has fueled the earnings of both companies and has also played a significant role in the broader economic rebound.

Mark Lennihan/Associated PressJohn Stumpf, chief of Wells Fargo, noted that higher rates reflected a mending economy. “I’ll take that trade all day,” he said.

Until now, the banks have benefited from government policies intended to stimulate the economy in the wake of the financial crisis. As the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in recent years, for example, it spurred millions of borrowers to refinance their home loans to take advantage of the lower costs.

But the Fed has signaled in recent weeks that it could ease its stimulus as the economy continues to recover. The warning has prompted investors to drive up interest rates around the globe. Since Fed officials first hinted that they might retreat, the rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage has risen to 4.78 percent from a low of 3.54 percent.

The banks’ second-quarter results show the early results of the sudden surge. In the second quarter, Wells Fargo received $146 billion worth of quarterly home loan applications, down from $208 billion in the period a year earlier. Its mortgage originations totaled $112 billion, down from $131 billion.

At JPMorgan, mortgage originations rose 12 percent in the quarter, to $49 billion, but overall profit in mortgage banking fell by 14 percent, to $1.1 billion.

On Friday, JPMorgan executives said the slowdown could be even more extreme than previous forecasts have suggested. While both banks might be able to seize on the uptick in interest rates to create a bigger spread between the income they derive from lending and the ultimate cost of borrowing, those benefits proved elusive.

Net interest margin, a critical measure that reveals how much profit banks earn on their loans, fell at JPMorgan, settling in at 2.60 percent for the quarter, from 2.83 percent in the previous quarter. At Wells Fargo, it was 3.46 percent, down from 3.48 percent in the first quarter.

The results suggested that the surge in interest rates came too late in the second quarter to significantly affect the banks, but that the increase could cause deeper problems in the second half of the year.

Christopher Whalen, an investor and housing market analyst at Carrington Investment Services, said that the numbers that Wells and JPMorgan presented were a “very big deal.”

“Everybody in the mortgage industry is going to have to reassess their view of this year and next,” Mr. Whalen said.

Rising rates, though, might help other parts of the banks’ business. Within its fixed-income trading operations, for example, JPMorgan reported an 18 percent increase in revenue. Fees in JPMorgan’s investment banking unit surged 38 percent, to $1.7 billion.

Wells Fargo executives played down the significance of the rate change, noting that mortgage rates were still extremely low by historical standards. John Stumpf, the bank’s chief executive, pointed to the interest he paid for his own mortgages.

“If you were in the mortgage market before 2000, you know that these are unbelievably good rates,” Mr. Stumpf said. “My first mortgage was at 8.5 percent. My second one was at 11.5 percent, and I thought those were great rates at those times.”

Mr. Stumpf noted that the uptick in rates stemmed from the Fed’s indication that the economy was improving. Housing prices are rising and demand for homes has soared.

As the improvements continue, he said, a growth in loans for new home purchases will more than make up for any losses in refinancing.

“I’ll take that trade all day,” Mr. Stumpf said. “It’s good for America, it’s good for the economy and in the long term, it’s good for our business.”

Wells’s overall loan portfolio, which includes commercial and consumer lending, actually rose 3 percent to $802 billion in the second quarter. A bump in credit cards and commercial lending — and record origination of auto loans — further offset the home loan slowdown. The bank’s total average deposits reached $1 trillion, up 9 percent from a year ago.

But important drivers of the returns at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan did not stem from substantial growth in the underlying businesses. Instead, they came from reduced expenses.

Wells Fargo, for example, reduced a crucial expense — building a reserve for bad loans. This move reflected improvements in the quality of loans.

In the second quarter, JPMorgan also lifted its profits by reducing loan-loss reserves by $1.5 billion. The bank defended the practice, saying it pointed to the improving condition of its loans.

Yet Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, conceded that fresh loan growth was still “soft.”

Nathaniel Popper contributed reporting.

China’s Credit Squeeze Relaxes as Interest Rates Drop

China’s central government made no official announcement on the situation, and it remained unclear whether policy makers had intervened, but short-term interest rates fell sharply Friday from the day before, when they had reached some of the highest levels in a decade.

Still, rates for Chinese institutions seeking interbank financing on Friday were substantially higher than they had been a few weeks ago.

Financial experts said they expected the higher interest rates to persist for some time because the Chinese government appeared to have abandoned its longstanding policy of responding to any hint of an economic slowdown by expanding credit. Analysts say the government is holding back because it is determined to rein in excess credit expansion and avert a financial crisis that could result from years of poor lending practices and overinvestment. There are also hints that a huge shadow banking operation in China could be masking more serious financial risk-taking.

“The government at the moment wants to signal, we’re working on reform; we’re not interested in short-term stimulus, like China did in the past,” said Louis Kuijs, the chief China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The government’s reluctance to increase bank liquidity is troubling investors because of concerns that China’s economy is weakening much faster than expected.

Economists in China cut their growth forecasts sharply in the last week, though projections remain robust at 7 percent. Prices of Chinese shares plunged on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets, ending one of the worst weeks in four years.

Joe Zhang, a longtime banker and the author of “Inside China’s Shadow Banking: The Next Subprime Crisis?,” said the apparent decision by the central bank to discipline banks by allowing rates to rise this past week was necessary.

“Effectively, they’re telling commercial banks to go and sort out their problems,” Mr. Zhang said by telephone on Friday. “The banks have lent out too much money. And what happens over time? You go from prime to subprime to silly loans. This is what happened with the U.S. subprime crisis. Banks start lending to bad projects. We’ve been too reckless.”

Determined to shore up defenses in a financial system that now underlies the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, China’s top leaders are slowing the flow of the fuel that has helped foster many of the risks: credit from state-run banks.

For much of the last decade, when the economy has slowed, Beijing has pressed state-owned banks to lend more aggressively.

But when interbank lending tightened this month — after aggressive lending early in the year — the central bank refrained from adding liquidity to the market, which would have kept short-term interest rates low.

As credit markets began to freeze up and mistrust among banks spread, rumors circulated of defaults. Late Thursday, the Bank of China, one of the country’s biggest lenders, was forced to issue a statement on its Web site denying local news reports that it had defaulted on interbank payments.

By late Friday, the markets had settled somewhat. The overnight lending rate between banks had dropped to 8.49 percent, down from a record-high fixing of 13.44 percent on Thursday, but still much higher than last month’s levels of less than 4 percent.

The situation remains volatile. Another benchmark rate for bank-to-bank borrowing costs, the seven-day repurchase rate, opened Friday at 8.1 percent, briefly soared as high as 25 percent and closed at 5.5 percent.

“Persistent tight liquidity conditions in China’s financial sector could constrain the ability of some banks to meet upcoming obligations on maturing wealth management products on a timely basis,” the credit ratings agency Fitch Ratings said in a report. Wealth management products are instruments sold to investors through banks and trust funds but do not appear on the financial companies’ balance sheets.

Referring to wealth management products, Fitch went on: “Issuance of new products, and borrowing from the interbank market, are among the most common sources of repayment for maturing W.M.P.’s, and the recent interbank liquidity shortage complicates both.”

Neil Gough contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

Public Interest Lawyers Question FJD's Debt Collection

For the past three years, the First Judicial District has stepped up its effort to collect on forfeited bails and other outstanding debts with the "view," as Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge John W. Herron put it in 2012, "that it's necessary to do so in order to underscore the ramifications of failing to appear for court hearings."

Fundamentally: When Interest Rates Rise, Stocks Needn’t Fall

Here’s the reality: In May, rates actually rose quite sharply, as 10-year Treasury yields jumped to 2.16 percent from 1.63 percent. Yet the Dow Jones industrial average still soared more than 400 points, to end the month at 15,115.57.

The stock market’s road did become choppy as rates rose. The Dow lost more than 200 points on Friday, for example, but the overall trend remained upward. It just goes to show that while there is a connection between interest rates and the stock market, it isn’t a simple one. When rates rise, said Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial, “it is not the size of the move itself, but the absolute level of yields reached that matters to the stock market.”

Even with the recent uptick, the 10-year yields are only about half of what they were five years ago, during the global recession. And a climb in rates from such a low level may be a tail wind — not a headwind — for stocks, Mr. Kleintop said.

For starters, he said, “it reflects an improving outlook for economic growth and less risk of deflation.” Both are welcome developments to equity investors. Moreover, “it results in losses for bonds,” he said, which may prompt investors to sell those bonds and move money into stocks.

Indeed, over the past month, the average bond fund that invests in long-term government debt has lost more than 6.5 percent of its value, according to Morningstar, the investment research firm. The typical blue-chip stock fund, meanwhile, has gained about 4 percent.

But this is not to say that rising interest rates wouldn’t hurt the stock market at all.

For instance, if rates were to climb enough to threaten the rebound in housing, stocks might start to sing a different tune, market strategists say. But the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is still at a historically low 3.81 percent, even though that rate is up since the end of April.

Similarly, climbing rates would threaten stocks if they signaled rising inflation, so that the Federal Reserve might have to curtail its efforts to stimulate the economy. But the most recent reading of the Consumer Price Index showed that prices were up only around 1.1 percent over the past 12 months. That’s down from the 1.6 percent pace of inflation at the start of the year.

So how much would rates have to climb before investors became seriously worried about stocks?

If history is any guide, the threshold is around 6 percent.

Doug Ramsey, chief investment officer at the Leuthold Group, has looked at stock valuations and bond yields going back to 1878. He has found that while there is a relationship between the two, big trouble for the stock market appears to kick in only when 10-year Treasuries are yielding 6 percent or higher.

Theories abound as to why 6 percent seems the magic number. James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, argues that 6 percent is important because it reflects the overall economy’s nominal long-term growth rate. “I can see why you’d get a negative reaction if the cost of capital for the market was above the inherent, sustainable growth rate of the economy,” he said.

Mr. Ramsey offers a slightly different explanation. He said that for rising bond yields to hurt the stock market, they would have to be viewed by investors as real competition to stocks. Perhaps at 6 percent, he said, bond yields are high enough that “they are truly thought of as potential replacements or substitutes for long-term stock returns.”

TO be sure, some market watchers say what really matters isn’t the current move in long-term market rates, but what happens with the short-term rate that the Fed controls.

Recently, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, hinted that the central bank might soon begin to taper its purchases of Treasury bonds as part of its efforts to stimulate the economy. He did not offer any clues, however, as to when the federal funds rate, now 0.25 percent, might be lifted.

John Stoltzfus, chief market strategist at Oppenheimer & Company, noted that whenever the Fed does raise short-term rates, “it could create a jostle in the stock market.” But Mr. Stoltzfus warned investors not to assume that Fed increases would immediately pull the plug on the bull market.

He notes that the last time the Fed started raising rates was in June 2004, when the funds rate was at 1 percent. The central bank proceeded to lift rates 17 times through the end of June 2006. During that stretch, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 11.3 percent, while the Russell 2000 index of small-company stocks gained 22.5 percent. In the 12 months that followed — while the Fed held rates steady — stocks continued to post double-digit gains.

“What really counts here for investors is, are rising rates crimping the affordability of credit?” Mr. Stoltzfus said. With two-year Treasury notes yielding just 0.29 percent, he said, “I’d argue that we’re far from that point.”

Paul J. Lim is a senior editor at Money magazine. E-mail: fund@nytimes.com.

DealBook: Why Carried Interest Is a Capital Gain

Kevinallenphotography.comSteve Judge, chief of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council.

Steve Judge is the president and chief executive of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council.

The current debates on tax reform and government spending levels have often focused on raising taxes on carried interest. While many, including a recent opinion piece in The New York Times by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, have homed in on carried interest to raise revenue, little discussion has focused on how carried interest actually functions and why it was treated as a long-term capital gain in the first place.

Furthermore, changing the tax treatment of carried interest would not generate the significant revenue needed to close our huge budget shortfall. Some of the latest proposals on carried interest would deprive private equity, venture capital and real estate partnerships of the same long-term capital gains treatment available to other kinds of businesses – and would only pay for merely 3.1 hours a year in federal government operations.

In order to understand why carried interest is a capital gain, we should first examine what private equity does. Private equity is an industry of investors with management expertise and vision who form partnerships with pension funds, university endowments and charitable foundations to buy companies. It is the epitome of patient capital, investing in promising companies poised for growth and those in need of a turnaround.

The average private equity investment spans three to seven years. Companies owned by private equity are located throughout the country, touching nearly every community. More than eight million people work at private equity-owned businesses based in the United States.

Private equity funds are a partnership between the firm, or general partner, and the investors, also known as limited partners. Partnerships are the oldest form of business.

In the case of private equity, the managers contribute their understanding of the companies to buy, operational expertise and, often, capital to the partnership. The limited partners – pensions, endowments and foundations – contribute just capital to the endeavor.

The partnership structure results in an alignment of interest between the private equity general partner and their investors to expand companies over the long term. Private equity firms are true owners in the companies they buy. Because they develop strategic business plans, sit on boards and work to strengthen the companies they own over many years, the income they receive is a capital gain.

The private equity firm is compensated with this alignment of interest in mind. Typically private equity investors are paid a 2 percent management fee, on which they pay ordinary income tax rates, and a 20 percent carried interest of the partnership’s profits that is only paid after limited partners receive a preferred return of 8 percent.

Carried interest, therefore, is the profits share on the sale of a capital asset and not “ordinary income” as some would have it treated. In other words, it is a capital gain within a partnership and is rightfully taxed at the long-term capital gains rate — provided that the asset, or company, is held for more than one year.

The aristocratic argument presented by Ms. de Rothschild and others that capital gains treatment should only be available to those with money to invest would advance a policy that puts a higher value on financial contributions than vision, hard work and other forms of “sweat equity.”

The underlying principle is no different than two friends who partner together to purchase a restaurant. One might bring capital and the other brings expertise. The restaurant could be in disrepair or a great concept that needs additional capital to expand. The chef identifies the restaurant to buy and possesses the skills to manage the restaurant and add value to the enterprise over time. The friend has the capital to invest, but doesn’t possess the operational or investment skills to generate a return.

When they sell the restaurant years later, both partners receive capital gains treatment on their long-term investment. A private equity partnership works in the same way. This is Partnership Law 101.

The capital gains rate exists to provide incentive for investment partnerships to take risks, invest hundreds of billions of dollars of capital into new and existing businesses and contribute operational expertise to improve these businesses over time.

The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee of Congress, has pegged the additional revenue from carried interest at just $16.85 billion over 10 years. The joint committee estimate even includes the controversial enterprise value provision, which experts believe constitutes two-thirds of the total revenue assumption.

Permanent tax increases on private equity, venture capital and real estate in exchange for a short-term spending patch does not come close to solving our country’s fiscal situation. Policy makers should reject calls to eliminate this incentive for long-term economic growth in exchange for 3.1 hours of federal government operations.

Public Interest Lawyers Question FJD's Debt Collection

For the past three years, the First Judicial District has stepped up its effort to collect on forfeited bails and other outstanding debts with the "view," as Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge John W. Herron put it in 2012, "that it's necessary to do so in order to underscore the ramifications of failing to appear for court hearings."

Public Interest: The Public Interest Calendar of Events

On Wednesday, the Mazzoni Center is set to present its fourth annual Open Bar event to raise funds for and awareness about the agency's Legal Services, which is a program offering free legal services tailored toward low-income LGBT individuals in Pennsylvania.