Bankers up All Night to Assess Impacts From Trump Trade Moves

The raft of changes implemented by new US President Donald Trump have kept bankers working around the clock, a panelist revealed at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

JPMorgan even set up a “war room” to try and assess the early impact of Trump’s policies on global trade, regulation and other matters, an executive at the bank said on Tuesday.

“The last 24 hours are showing that there’s going to be a lot of changes that we all have to digest,” JPMorgan Chase & Co head of asset and wealth management Mary Callahan Erdoes told a WEF panel in Davos, Switzerland.

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Trump said on Monday he would revoke nearly 80 executive actions of the administration of former Democratic President Joe Biden, with the Republican US president adding he will also implement an immediate freeze on new regulations and hiring.

“At JPMorgan we have a war room set up to analyse and evaluate each and every one of these, so they have been up all night and are working on it.”

“Time will tell, but a lot of this is exactly what you would do to have a very pro-business environment,” Erdoes said, reflecting on Trump’s early executive order to ban remote working for federal staff.

“Thank God the US government has done it, and hopefully that’ll keep us ahead of other governments in the world so we can continue to compete.”

China trade surplus ‘will be under attack’

Global trade flows will suffer from “interesting ructions” as the new Trump administration settles in, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters told the Davos meeting.

“We’ll see what comes through in terms of tariffs… but we know China is a big part of that in terms of having a gigantic export surplus, and that will be under attack from all parts of the world,” Winters said.

Chinese officials are hopeful the country can avoid a repeat of the bruising trade wars that drove a wedge between the world’s two economic superpowers during the last Trump administration, despite the returning President’s robust comments on potential tariffs during his campaign.

Big globally-focused banks will be able to benefit from that disruption in their roles connecting between markets, Winters said, while locally-focused banks may struggle.

Major regulatory changes

As well as disruption from the change in administration in the United States, banks face a slew of fresh regulation even as governments around the world try to prioritise growth.

“Look, regulation has been stifling,” BNY CEO Robin Vince said. “It’s really against the whole purpose that governments around the world have in trying to enable growth for their countries.”

The Bank of England said on Friday it would delay tougher bank capital rules by a year to January 2027 to get clarity on what the United States will do under Trump, prompting the European Union to say it would also weigh its options.

The standards written by the global Basel Committee are the final set of international reforms designed to make the banking system safer after the 2008 global financial crisis, and are meant to be implemented by member jurisdictions.

“This is a good time to take a step back and think about what works in regulation and what doesn’t,” Winters said, flagging his skepticism about where so-called ‘end-game’ Basel 3.1 bank capital regulation would land, given an array of delays and revisions announced in several major markets.