So what exactly is JPMorgan changing when it comes to its lending practices?

So how to think about this is JPMorgan typically, when a company has just gone public, completed an IPO, they won't accept as collateral for a new loan shares that haven't been public for at least 135 days.

But what they're doing here is you have some of these huge IPOs that are coming to market, and a lot of wealth is being created from that.

And so with some of them, they are telling their bankers, "Actually, we can relax this approach a little bit as we try to bank some of this, like, emerging wealthy clientele that's being created by these mega IPOs."

What are those for JPMorgan?

Well, there's a reason why banks like JPMorgan tend to wait at least, you know, four and a half, sometimes six months of a stock trading before they'll accept it as collateral for a loan because, you know, after an IPO, share prices can be very volatile.

And, you know, what happens here at the end of the day is if the value of collateral falls by a lot, then banks will go to their clients and be like, "You need to give us more collateral, more shares, more of whatever it is for us to make us still comfortable with the loan that we've underwritten for you." So it can be more complicated from a risk perspective, but obviously JPMorgan's making the calculation right now that it's gonna be worth it for this wealth that's being created.

And I have a note here I really wanted to ask you about to walk me through your fascination with the garden and the Hebrew of Eden.

Yeah, there are certain words and certain paradigms or texts in the Bible that I think play out over and over again.

They're core texts that essentially other texts throughout the Bible are referring to.

And Eden, especially the creation narrative, is really one of those texts in which language as well as this thematics context We see over and over again.

I'll start with the idea that people had a real fascination over the last couple hundred years with finding the Garden of Eden, literally.

And even Christopher Columbus thought that he had found the Garden of Eden in Venezuela and wrote about it.

There are other people who thought that the Garden of Eden was on the North Pole.

I said, where do you go to feel this, that Heschel's radical amazement? And they'll say, I need to go to the mountains or I need to stand by the ocean and just, or look at the stars and understand how the speck of dust that I am and what does that mean? So this is this kenosis thing, right? This sort of emptying of one's self?

Or people in general don't either know or share exactly their intentions or their situation.

Right.

And I, and, and I found in law enforcement, and this, this does translate into what I'm doing now, and you hit it on the head, um, I have a, I have an ability, whether I'm conscious of it or not, to understand where the conversation needs to be, when it needs to be there, and understand what my mannerisms, what my, uh, what, how I need to be in the conversation.

And, and I think the other side of that is when you're, when you're in this job or law enforcement, the other thing that carries over is brutal truth.

And I, and when I was a police officer, and I say police officer, I was a deputy sheriff for the most part of my career, same difference, uh- Brutally truthful with people.

If they were going to jail, they were going to jail.

There was no sugarcoating it.

And how long did it take you to get comfortable in your current sale? Because it's very different than retail, where people come to you.

Or people in general don't either know or share exactly their intentions or their situation.

Right.

And I, and, and I found in law enforcement, and this, this does translate into what I'm doing now, and you hit it on the head, um, I have a, I have an ability, whether I'm conscious of it or not, to understand where the conversation needs to be when it needs to be there, and understand what my mannerisms, what my, uh, what, how I need to be in the conversation.

And, and I think the other side of that is when you're, when you're in this job or law enforcement, the other thing that carries over is brutal truth.

And I, and when I was a police officer, and I say police officer, I was a deputy sheriff for the most part of my career, same difference, uh- Brutally truthful with people.

If they were going to jail, they were going to jail.

There was no sugarcoating it.

And how long did it take you to get comfortable in your current sale? Because it's very different than retail, where people come to you.

And I have a note here I really wanted to ask you about to walk me through your fascination with the garden and the Hebrew of Eden.

Yeah, there are certain words and certain paradigms or texts in the Bible that I think play out over and over again.

They're core texts that essentially other texts throughout the Bible are referring to.

And Eden, especially the creation narrative, is really one of those texts in which language as well as this thematics context We see over and over again.

I'll start with the idea that people had a real fascination over the last couple hundred years with finding the Garden of Eden, literally.

And even Christopher Columbus thought that he had found the Garden of Eden in Venezuela and wrote about it.

There are other people who thought that the Garden of Eden was on the North Pole.

I said, where do you go to feel this, that Heschel's radical amazement? And they'll say, I need to go to the mountains or I need to stand by the ocean and just, or look at the stars and understand how the speck of dust that I am and what does that mean? So this is this kenosis thing, right? This sort of emptying of one's self?

Uh, but tell us about kind of the meaning of Harran, metaphysically what that means.

Sure.

So Harran, you could travel there today.

Book your travel agent to bring you to southeastern Turkey, and you'll find this interesting, quaint little village that exists there with very interesting architectural styles of the homes.

And you'll notice when you get there that there are a lot of places that are named after biblical figures like Adam's Garden or a well of one of the patriarchs.

And it's because our patriarchs did visit this spot, or at least several of our patriarchs.

You might remember when Abraham leaves Ur Kasdim, the first place that he goes to and he dwells in with his family is this place called Harran, but it's not where he was meant to go.

And I'm curious, um, number one, would you summarize this for our listeners? But number two, like, how do you think this is landing f- for people in light of the fact that lots of people are actually struggling with Israel right now?

What is this building?

So this building is the signature achievement, but also the first milestone in what is this JP Morgan campus that is slowly taking shape in Midtown Manhattan.

And it is this enormous steel building that really does tower over everything around it.

And you can see even there's shapes of the metal that form diamonds all across the building.

And then there, it's not a big leap to see why some people are calling this a monument to its CEO, Jamie Dimon.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, so the Pakistani government, through one of its, uh, state owned companies, controlled the Roosevelt Hotel, which is a pretty famous hotel in, in, in New York City.

The Pakistani government acquired it in the late two thousands, and really the hotel has fallen into a bit of disrepair in the last few years.

So what are some of the challenges that newer players have faced trying to break into this space?

So investment banking is risky, so especially when you're providing debt financing for deals, the debt deals can not go as expected, so you can suffer loss there.

They're also expensive in terms of hiring people.

You really have to go out and pay a lot of people millions of dollars in guaranteed salaries in the hope that they're gonna eventually more than justify that with the deals that they're gonna bring in, and that requires a strong stomach to do that.

But within that, you also get big egos that, especially when you have a kind of more retail banking culture, doesn't necessarily mesh with the bank that you have already there.

What Wells is trying to do here is basically the, the mirror image of what Goldman Sachs tried to do a few years ago when, like, the quintessential Wall Street bank tried to become a Main Street bank, and that failed pretty spectacularly, bank lost billions of dollars, and just found it very hard to dislodge the Main Street banks, one of which is Wells Fargo, um, and now has very much decided to stick to its knitting and just be a major player on Wall Street.

And so what Wells is trying to do is, is really the opposite of that, is to go from Main Street to Wall Street, and what that showed you is just how hard a pivot that is to make.

Yeah, so how is it going so far? Are they securing deals and clients? We talked about Netflix a little bit already, um, but what else have they got going on?

So tell me about this bill to expand the deposit insurance program.

So just to take a step back, right now, all deposits in the United States at a bank up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars are insured, guaranteed by the US government.

What this proposal would change is for operating accounts, so for businesses that aren't earning any interest, it would lift the, um, insurance threshold from two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to ten million dollars.

Uh, but crucially, and just to make it a little bit more [chuckles] confusing, uh, that increased insurance threshold would apply to every bank in the United States, except for the eight largest banks.

So think of the JP Morgans, the Bank of Americas, the Wells Fargos, Citigroups of the world.

What about among politicians in Washington?

In Washington, it's one of those kind of slightly funky issues where there's both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition to this bill.

Bipartisan support, you know, you're, you're never an unpopular politician in your home state if you're seen as being supportive of local banks, um, and small businesses.

So what's on tap for bank earnings?

So this quarter, a lot of it's gonna be about investment banking.

The big bankers on Wall Street looking like they had a good quarter to end a good year, probably the best year since the pandemic, and what a lot of people in the industry are hoping for right now is this is the start of what people are calling a potential investment banking super cycle for the next year or two, where just things are so teed up for huge stock market listings, mergers, corporate deal-making with a supportive regulatory environment, rising stock markets, plus this big pressure around what's gonna happen with AI.

So that's the, the optimism there, and I think we're starting to see that in the numbers.

Now it's just up to the banks to, to show that they delivered in Q4 and also that they can continue to deliver in, in twenty twenty-six.

To do that, they're gonna need a lot of cash, so are US banks lining up to provide that cash?

It's the sort of thing where the opportunity is potentially quite significant when you look at the oil reserves, the natural resources reserves in, in a country like Venezuela, but there is a lot of caution, certainly as it relates to the big banks in the US, about stepping too deep in, into a country that, you know, is still under US sanctions, has a very questionable history when it comes to rule of law, contract law, paying its debts, and these are all things that, from a financing perspective, you'd need to have in order to, to be comfortable.

So I think it's, it's a funny one because it's not just a business case.

Why have banking revenues not been so great over the last couple years, and why are things changing now?

So, I think the, the real sea change in investment banking started back in the, the first quarter of 2022 when the Federal Reserve started lifting interest rates and we kind of went into slightly more uncertain times when it came to the economy and also just borrowing costs to fund these deals went up.

And there's been optimism that, o- on Wall Street, there's been this pent-up demand for deal-making.

Uh, but it has yet to really materialize in a meaningful way, at least until we go to 2025.

There was hopes that with the arrival of the, the Trump administration that was gonna be maybe taking a more lax approach to antitrust, uh, and approving deals.

Interest rates have also come down a little bit, but it's been a slower road back this year just with the uncertainty around, uh, the trade policy in the US and as well with things like DOGE and government cuts, but now we're really starting to see deal-making pick up in a meaningful way.

That's both on the M&A side and also on the, on equity capital markets, so new companies, uh, listing on, on stock markets.

And beyond that big M&A stuff, what about the other revenues that Wall Street banks rely on?