- Daniel Pinto discussed everything from SPACs to the European Super League in a recent interview.
- The JP Morgan co-president said his firm has been firing on all cylinders, but he expects things to normalize in the second quarter.
- Pinto also said bitcoin has "no intrinsic value" and isn't a payment method worth using.
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JP Morgan's Co-President Daniel Pinto discussed everything from his company's performance to crypto mania to the European Super League to SPACs in a recent interview with Bloomberg.
Pinto said that SPACs may have trouble finding target companies due to the rapid increase in funds raised from IPOs of blank check firms.
The co-president also touched on the growing risk appetite for investors across the markets and how his firm has been forced to turn away some clients who expect a more speculative approach.
When asked about the rise of retail investors, Pinto urged caution when it comes to investing based on information from social media.
The JP Morgan executive also said bitcoin has no intrinsic value and that the only thing that keeps the price up is investor confidence.
Finally, Pinto discussed JP Morgan's backing of the stalled European Super League and said although his company provided the funding for the project that it wasn't its place to decide what's right for the sport.
Here are the 10 best quote from Pintos' 10 interview with Bloomberg, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:
- "The first quarter was very strong, last year was very strong, almost all across the business but mainly driven by the investment bank…so what I see for the rest of the year is probably going back to the more normalized levels of 2019 with some degree of growth…client activity is still very high."
- "I think that what may happen is that some of these SPACs, they will not find a target and they will have to be redeemed…the way to manage the risk is to find a good sponsor that knows a sector, has a track record of managing companies or investing in companies to make sure that the SPACs will invest prudently."
- "SPACs are regulated. You have to file with the SEC…as you analyze the comments from the SEC they are more and more in line with requiring SPACs to have similar standards to IPOs."
- "It's football, it's very emotional. I don't think there's reputational damage here…we arrange a loan for a client it's not our place to decide what is the optimal way for football to operate in Europe and the UK. So, we hope that the Super League, UEFA, FIFA, the national leagues get together and decide what is the way…and then from there hopefully it will better for the game altogether."
- "In a prime business, essentially when you onboard a client, what you try to understand is, what is the portfolio that they want to have with us, what is the correlation of that portfolio, what is the risk of that portfolio, what is expected leverage and that will define what is our risk appetite. So, if that client wants a risk parameter that is beyond what our risk appetite is, we will just not onboard that client."
- "The price of bitcoin, high or low, is impossible to define because it is an asset class based on the confidence that you buy it, you will be able to sell it at a better price in the future…there is no intrinsic value, there is no value as a payment method…so it's essentially a place to store value and that value is driven by confidence. So, the risk to bitcoin is relatively simple, it's the risk that something happens to that confidence."
- "There is not a single meeting that you go to…that [ESG] doesn't come up and the difference from the past to now is that everyone is taking action."
- "The risk here, and I hope this doesn't happen, is that you end up, the SPACs are two years, you have two years to find a target. So, you get toward the end of the two years and you are more desperate to find a target and you end up paying an amount that is not in line with the value of what you are buying.
- "Social media could be a very good, positive force and in some cases could be a negative force that induces people to lose something that they may regret."
- "Going back 100% to work from the office every day of the week is a very low probability. Having everyone work from home all the time is a bad idea. I think that over time we will lose creativity, innovation, that comes from the personal interaction on a day-to-day basis. And you will destroy the culture of the company."