JPMorgan’s consumer business is doing great. Its customers are just OK

livemint.com:

The US’s biggest bank says its consumer customers are healthy and stable. But doing well from a bank’s point of view might not be the same as how a customer sees it.

In its investor day presentation on Monday, JPMorgan Chase gave many impressive metrics for its consumer and community banking business. For example, it bolstered expectations for net charge-offs—or the rate of loans going bad—for cards to roughly 3.4% this year, from a prior guide of under 3.5%.

It has recently added millions of new customers and hundreds of branches, and said it expected steady net interest income and rising noninterest income this year in this unit. “Consumer financial health has largely normalized and remains stable," the bank wrote in its presentation.

Certainly those are all good items for JPMorgan’s shareholders. But what is working for America’s biggest bank isn’t necessarily synonymous with what many people might want to see out of the economy, particularly in an election year.

Here is how JPMorgan Chase described consumers by segment during its conference on Monday: Segments of customers with lower incomes are showing stronger spending growth, but “with signs of trading down and getting a bit less for their money." High-earning segments, meanwhile, are showing lower spending growth with “slowing discretionary spend, including in travel and luxury retail." The bank’s lowest-income segment of customers have seen the largest relative gains in income: a median of 41% nominal growth since January 2020 across a stable cohort of those customers through March, versus a 21% rise in prices. But the bank’s lowest earners’ pandemic-era cash buffers have still also been shrinking, down from a peak of being able to cover an additional 15 days of