Finance

UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti said Wednesday that market volatility could intensify in the second half of the year, but he does not believe the U.S. is heading into a recession.
Global equities saw sharp sell-offs last week as investors digested weak economic data out of the U.S. which raised fears about an economic downturn in the world’s largest economy.
UBS expects that the Federal Reserve will cut rates by at least 50 basis points this year.

Sergio Ermotti, chief executive officer of UBS Group
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images

ZURICH, Switzerland ꟷ UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti said Wednesday that market volatility could intensify in the second half of the year, but he does not believe the U.S. is heading into a recession.
Global equities saw sharp sell-offs last week as investors digested weak economic data out of the U.S. which raised fears about an economic downturn in the world’s largest economy. It also raised questions about whether the Federal Reserve needed to be less hawkish with its monetary policy stance. The central bank kept rates on hold in late July at a 23-year high.

When asked about the outlook for the U.S. economy, Ermotti said: “Not necessarily a recession, but definitely a slowdown is possible.”
“The macroeconomic indicators are not clear enough to talk about recessions, and actually, it’s probably premature. What we know is that the Fed has enough capacity to step in and support that, although it’s going to take time, whatever they do to be then transmitted into the economy,” the CEO told CNBC on Wednesday after the bank reported its second-quarter results.

UBS expects that the Federal Reserve will cut rates by at least 50 basis points this year. At the moment, traders are split between a 50 and a 25 basis point cut at the Fed’s next meeting in September, according to LSEG data.
Speaking to CNBC, Ermotti said that we are likely to see higher market volatility in the second half of the year, partially because of the U.S. election in November.
“That’s one factor, but also, if I look at the overall geopolitical picture, if I look at the macroeconomic picture, what we saw in the last couple of weeks in terms of volatility, which, in my point of view, is a clear sign of the fragility of some elements of the system, … one should expect definitely a higher degree of volatility,” he said.

Another uncertainty going forward is monetary policy and whether central banks will have to cut rates more aggressively to combat a slowdown in the economy. In Switzerland, where UBS is headquartered, the central bank has cut rates twice this year. The European Central Bank and the Bank of England have both announced one cut so far.
“Knowing the events which are the unknowns on the horizon like the U.S. presidential election, we became complacent with a very low volatility, now we are shifting to a more normal regime,” Bruno Verstraete, founder of Lakefield Wealth Management told CNBC Wednesday.
“In the context of UBS, [more volatility is] not necessarily a bad thing, because more volatility means more trading income,” he added. More

Just ignore it. That, in short, is the advice given to retail investors when stockmarkets convulse, as plenty have over the past few weeks. Watching hard-earned savings disappear in a flash tends not to promote a cool head. So do not check your portfolio, do not tot up your losses and, above all, do not decide that now is the time to overhaul your entire investment strategy. Simply wait for the storm to pass and for share prices to resume their long march upwards. More

In just 10.5 minutes, Zeekr’s new batteries can go from a 10% to an 80% charge, using the automaker’s ultra-fast charging stations, the U.S.-listed electric car company said Tuesday.
Tesla’s Model 3 can recharge up to 175 miles in 15 minutes, or about 48% of the stated 363 mile-range, according to the company’s website.
Zeekr said its 2025 007 sedan, which is set to begin deliveries next week, will be the firm’s first model to use the new batteries.

The New York Stock Exchange welcomes Zeekr Intelligent Technology Holding Limited in celebration of its initial public offering on May 10, 2024.

BEIJING — Chinese electric car brand Zeekr announced new batteries on Tuesday, which it says boast the fastest charge in the world.
The offering aims to address consumers’ long-standing worries about battery driving range and ease of charging.

In just 10.5 minutes, Zeekr’s new batteries can go from a 10% to an 80% charge, using the automaker’s ultra-fast charging stations, the U.S.-listed company said. Zeekr said that the new battery could achieve the same charge performance even in negative 10 degree Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) weather in about 30 minutes.
Comparatively, Elon Musk’s Tesla says its supercharger allow the company’s vehicles to charge up to 200 miles in 15 minutes.
The company’s website says the Model 3 can recharge up to 175 miles in 15 minutes, or about 48% of the car’s stated 363 mile-range.
Chinese automaker Nio has also offered the alternative of a three-minute battery swap. The subscription service automatically changes out the battery of designated car models with a charged one at specific swap stations.

Zeekr said that its 2025 007 sedan, which is set to begin deliveries next week, will be the first model to use the new batteries.

The company noted it has opened more than 500 ultra-fast charging stations in China and plans to double that tally by then end of this year. Zeekr aims to operate more than 10,000 ultra-fast charging stations in 2026.
The Geely-owned electric car company delivered a record number of vehicles in June, making its deliveries for the first half of the year the largest among U.S.-listed Chinese companies that only sell pure electric cars. Deliveries fell slightly in July. More

Across the world worries are mounting about the economy. In America and Canada unemployment is rising, while consumer sentiment remains depressed. Europe continues to flirt with recession. Don’t even mention China. Yet there is one place where the mood is quite different. Despite fierce sanctions and pariah status, Russia’s economy is growing strongly. It turns out that bacchanalian spending, at a time of war, really juices an economy. More

The Olympic Games, as well as other mega events like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, produce sudden demand shocks in local economies that can appear to boost inflation, UBS says.
However, these mega events may not actually increase the cost of living for the local population.
The Paris Olympics has boosted demand — and prices — in various industries, including hotels and airlines.

A general view of the Eiffel Tower with the Olympics rings pictured with national flags of competing countries from the Place du Trocadero ahead of Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 21, 2024 in Paris, France.
Kevin Voigt | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images

The Olympic Games are causing a surge in prices, but French consumers aren’t likely to feel its pinch.
Mega events like the Olympics, or even big concerts like Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, lead to a rise in demand for hotel — rooms and airline tickets, as well as other goods and services needed by the influx of visitors. Even so, most consumers may not feel the impact, according to UBS. 

Still, the data might suggest otherwise. That’s because the method for calculating consumer price changes might pick up the spiking costs in industries associated with tourism — like hotels — and provide a distorted impression.
“The Olympic Games or a Taylor Swift concert create a sudden demand shock,” wrote Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, in a recent analyst note. “The measurement method for these prices is more likely to capture the unusual and transitory pattern of demand, and it is here that the increase in consumer price inflation takes place.”

Taylor Swift performs onstage during The Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium on June 21, 2024, in London.
Kevin Mazur | Getty Images

This was already seen with the Eras Tour, as it boosted hotel revenue in cities across the U.S. where Swift was performing.
This year, U.K. hotel prices increased in June, but Donovan said the higher costs “may have been borne by a select group of aficionados of Swift’s music” given that the Eras Tour came to Wembley Stadium that month.
Meanwhile, the Summer Games are causing a similar phenomenon in Paris. “The tourists flocking to Paris for the Olympics, and paying the price, are not representative of French consumers,” he wrote.

A Parisian hotel boom?

Though hotels in the City of Light struggled in the beginning of July, with an estimated 60% drop in occupancy rates that prompted hotels to discount rates, the trend during the Games has reversed. Paris hotel occupancy levels during the Olympics, which started on July 26 and run until Sunday, are up versus last year, according to global real estate data company CoStar. But in the days after the closing ceremony, Paris hotel bookings are projected to drop from a year ago.

The city’s hotel industry has also seen massive year-over-year price increases. For each day during the first full week of this year’s Games from July 28 until Aug. 3, CoStar found a 206% year-over-year growth in weekly revenue per available room. That was fueled by a 17.4 percentage point rise in occupancy to 85.4% as well as a gain in the average daily rate (ADR) of 143%.
The Paris tourist office expects an occupancy rate of 86% from Aug. 5 through Sunday.
A notable price surge has also been seen in other parts of France. In the surrounding Île-de-France region, CoStar found that ADR grew 83.4% in the week ended July 27 from a year ago. At the same time, Paris occupancy fell 5.7 percentage points year over year, while ADR jumped by 90.8%.
“Is your average French person looking to stay in Paris at the moment? No, they are absolutely not, not unless they’re insane or going to the Olympics,” he told CNBC in an interview. “Most of them are unaffected by the surge in prices.”

Olympic gains

That said, the Games are drawing huge numbers of tourists. During the first week alone, the Paris tourist office reported 1.73 million visitors in Greater Paris, an 18.9% increase from 2023.
Of these, 924,000 were international tourists — about a 14% uptick from last year — with the largest number of foreign visitors coming from the U.S. French tourists coming to the city rose 25.1% to 803,000 from last year.
In all, the tourist office has estimated a total of 15.3 million visitors for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, with 11.3 million for the former and 4 million for the latter.

Tourists take selfies in front of the Arc de Triomphe on July 07, 2023 in Paris, France. Paris will host the Summer Olympics from July 26 till August 11, 2024. 
Matthias Hangst | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images

This comes as the Games tally record ticket sales. The Paris 2024 Organizing Committee recorded that a combined 10.6 million tickets have been sold or allocated for the Olympic and Paralympic Games so far, with at least 9.4 million for the Olympics and at least 1.2 million for the Paralympics. The previous record was held by the 1996 Atlanta Games at 8.3 million sold or allocated.
“What you find quite often is that tourism unrelated to the Olympiad falls off the edge of a cliff,” Donovan told CNBC, adding that this is what differentiates it from the Eras Tour and other mega events. “It’s a demand shock, but it’s a narrowly focused demand shock, which is sort of the problem on the inflation side, because you’re creating a concentrated period of absolutely supernormal demand. The pricing mechanism goes bananas basically.”
Demand fluctuations have also been seen in other related areas of the Parisian economy, such as the airline industry. Despite some airlines forecasting declines in third-quarter revenue as a result of less traffic to Paris this summer, recent Visa data shows flight bookings to the city have increased 39% in the period leading up to the Olympics over the year-ago period.

Tourists pass near a banner with the Paris 2024 logo before the start of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games on June 17, 2024 in Paris, France. 
Chesnot | 

Small businesses across the city have also seen gains. Visa found that those businesses received a year-ove-year sales boost of 26% from cardholders in the Games’ first weekend.
While the long-term economic impact of the Paris Olympics is still uncertain, Donovan expects that “on balance it will probably be a positive,” citing past Games that have seen tourism booms like Barcelona in 1992. “If you get it right, it can be a boost,” he said, noting that Summer Olympics tend to garner more attraction than the Winter Olympics in general.
Paris 2024 may generate as much as $12 billion, or 11.1 billion euros, in long-term economic impact, a recent study from the Centre for Law and Economics of Sport estimated. The International Olympic Committee said the next two Summer Olympics could see even more value being created.

“What we see is that the economic impact of the Games is very substantial,” said Christophe Dubi, the Olympic Games executive director. “This is an injection of resources in the local economy that leaves a profound impact now and in the future.”
The IOC’s Agenda 2020 reforms have helped the events become more sustainable economically, according to Victor Matheson, an economist and professor at the College of the Holy Cross.
This will be the first Summer Games projected to cost under $10 billion since Sydney 2000. Money was saved by having 95% of the venues be preexisting or temporary and the strategy could mark a “turning point” for the the Olympic movement, Matheson said.
“The IOC has allowed Paris to come through with an Olympics that doesn’t build these billion-dollar monuments at the Olympics and doesn’t gold-plate everything there,” he said. “Those sorts of things that can drive up costs pretty quickly, they don’t appear to be pushing that.”
Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal owns NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics is the U.S. broadcast rights holder to all Summer and Winter Games through 2032.

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The U.S. unemployment rate has drifted upward over the past year, fueling recession concerns.
The unemployment insurance program buckled during the Covid-19 pandemic under a deluge of claims.
Experts say the system for unemployment benefits is ill equipped to handle the next economic downturn.

Job seekers attends the JobNewsUSA.com South Florida Job Fair on June 26, 2024 in Sunrise, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Renewed fears of a U.S. recession have put a spotlight on unemployment.
However, the system that workers rely on to collect unemployment benefits is at risk of buckling — as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic — if there’s another economic downturn, experts say.

“It absolutely isn’t” ready for the next recession, said Michele Evermore, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and a former deputy director for policy in the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization.
“If anything, we’re kind of in worse shape right now,” she said.

Unemployment insurance provides temporary income support to laid-off workers, thereby helping prop up consumer spending and the broader U.S. economy during downturns.
The pandemic exposed “major cracks” in the system, including “massive technology failures” and an administrative structure “ill equipped” to pay benefits quickly and accurately, according to a recent report issued by the National Academy of Social Insurance.
There’s also wide variation among states — which administer the programs — relative to factors like benefit amount, duration and eligibility, according to the report, authored by more than two dozen unemployment insurance experts.

“The pandemic exposed longstanding challenges to the UI program,” Andrew Stettner, the director of the Labor Department’s Office of UI Modernization, said during a recent webinar about the NASI report.
The U.S. unemployment rate, at 4.3% in July, remains a far cry from its pandemic-era peak and is low by historical standards. But it has gradually drifted upward over the past year, fueling rumblings about a potential recession on the horizon.
Policymakers should address the system’s shortcomings when times are good “so it can deliver when times are bad,” Stettner said.

Why the unemployment insurance program buckled

Joblessness ballooned in the pandemic’s early days.
The national unemployment rate neared 15% in April 2020, the highest since the Great Depression, which was the worst downturn in the history of the industrialized world.
Claims for unemployment benefits peaked at more than 6 million in early April 2020, up from roughly 200,000 a week before the pandemic.
States were ill prepared to handle the deluge, experts said.
Meanwhile, state unemployment offices were tasked with implementing a variety of new federal programs enacted by the CARES Act to enhance the system. Those programs raised weekly benefits, extended their duration and offered aid to a larger pool of workers, like those in the gig economy, for example.

Later, states had to adopt stricter fraud prevention measures when it became clear that criminals, attracted by richer benefits, were pilfering funds.
The result of all this: benefits were extremely delayed for thousands of people, putting severe financial stress on many households. Others found it nearly impossible to reach customer service agents for help.
Years later, states haven’t fully recovered.
For example, the Labor Department generally considers benefit payments to be timely if issued within 21 days of an unemployment application. This year, about 80% of payments have been timely, compared with roughly 90% in 2019, according to agency data.
It’s imperative to build a system you need “for the worst part of the business cycle,” Indivar Dutta-Gupta, a labor expert and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, said during the recent webinar.

Potential areas to fix

Experts who drafted the National Academy of Social Insurance report outlined many areas for policymakers to fix.
Administration and technology were among them. States entered the pandemic at a 50-year low in funding, leading to “cascading failures,” the report said.
Today’s system is largely financed by a federal tax on employers, equivalent to $42 a year per employee. The federal government might opt to raise that tax rate, for example, the report said.
Raising such funding could help states modernize outdated technology, by optimizing mobile access for workers and allowing them to access portals 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for example. It would also make it easier to pivot in times of crisis, experts said.
Financing is the “biggest pitfall” that has allowed state systems to “really deteriorate,” Dutta-Gupta said.
More from Personal Finance:This labor data trend is a ‘warning sign’A ‘soft landing’ is still on the tableAverage consumer now carries $6,329 in credit card debt
Additionally, policymakers might consider more uniform rules around the duration and amount of benefits, and who can collect them, said Evermore, a NASI report author.
States use different formulas to determine factors like aid eligibility and weekly benefit payments.
The average American received $447 a week in benefits in the first quarter of 2024, replacing about 36% of their weekly wage, according to U.S. Labor Department data.
But benefits vary widely from state to state. Those differences are largely attributable to benefit formulas instead of wage disparities between states, experts said.
For example, the average Mississippi recipient got $221 a week in June 2024, while those in Washington state and Massachusetts received about $720 a week, Labor Department data shows.
Further, 13 states currently provide less than a maximum 26 weeks — or, six months — of benefits, the report said. Many have called for a 26-week standard in all states.
Various proposals have also called for raising weekly benefit amounts, to the tune of perhaps 50% or 75% of lost weekly wages, for example, and giving some additional funds per dependent.
There are reasons for optimism, Evermore said.
U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., ranking committee member Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and 10 co-sponsors proposed bipartisan legislation in July to reform aspects of the unemployment insurance program.
“I’m pretty encouraged right now” by the bipartisan will, Evermore said. “We need something, we need another grand bargain, before another downturn.”
Correction: Andrew Stettner is the director of the Labor Department’s Office of UI Modernization. An earlier version misstated his title.

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JPMorgan Chase has rolled out a generative AI assistant to tens of thousands of its employees, the initial phase of a broader plan to inject the technology throughout the bank.
The program, called LLM Suite, is already helping more than 60,000 employees with tasks like writing emails and reports.
The software is expected to eventually be as ubiquitous within the bank as the videoconferencing program Zoom, people with knowledge of the plans told CNBC.
JPMorgan designed LLM Suite to be a portal that allows users to tap external large language models and launched it with ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s LLM, said the people.

JPMorgan Chase has rolled out a generative artificial intelligence assistant to tens of thousands of its employees in recent weeks, the initial phase of a broader plan to inject the technology throughout the sprawling financial giant.
The program, called LLM Suite, is already available to more than 60,000 employees, helping them with tasks like writing emails and reports. The software is expected to eventually be as ubiquitous within the bank as the videoconferencing program Zoom, people with knowledge of the plans told CNBC.

Rather than developing its own AI models, JPMorgan designed LLM Suite to be a portal that allows users to tap external large language models — the complex programs underpinning generative AI tools — and launched it with ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s LLM, said the people.
“Ultimately, we’d like to be able to move pretty fluidly across models depending on the use cases,” Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan’s chief data and analytics officer, said in an interview. “The plan is not to be beholden to any one model provider.”
The move by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, shows how quickly generative AI has swept through American corporations since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Rival bank Morgan Stanley has already released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. And consumer tech giant Apple said in June that it was integrating OpenAI models into the operating system of hundreds of millions of its consumer devices, vastly expanding its reach.
The technology — hailed by some as the “Cognitive Revolution” in which tasks formerly done by knowledge workers will be automated — could be as important as the advent of electricity, the printing press and the internet, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in April.
It will likely “augment virtually every job” at the bank, Dimon said. JPMorgan had about 313,000 employees as of June.

ChatGPT ban

The bank is giving employees what is essentially OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a JPMorgan-approved wrapper more than a year after it restricted employees from using ChatGPT. That’s because JPMorgan didn’t want to expose its data to external providers, Heitsenrether said.
“Since our data is a key differentiator, we don’t want it being used to train the model,” she said. “We’ve implemented it in a way that we can leverage the model while still keeping our data protected.”
The bank has introduced LLM Suite broadly across the company, with groups using it in JPMorgan’s consumer division, investment bank, and asset and wealth management business, the people said. It can help employees with writing, summarizing lengthy documents, problem solving using Excel, and generating ideas.
But getting it on employees’ desktops is just the first step, according to Heitsenrether, who was promoted in 2023 to lead the bank’s adoption of the red-hot technology.
“You have to teach people how to do prompt engineering that is relevant for their domain to show them what it can actually do,” Heitsenrether said. “The more people get deep into it and unlock what it’s good at and what it’s not, the more we’re starting to see the ideas really flourishing.”
The bank’s engineers can also use LLM Suite to incorporate functions from external AI models directly into their programs, she said.

‘Exponentially bigger’

JPMorgan has been working on traditional AI and machine learning for more than a decade, but the arrival of ChatGPT forced it to pivot.
Traditional, or narrow, AI performs specific tasks involving pattern recognition, like making predictions based on historical data. Generative AI is more advanced, however, and trains models on vast data sets with the goal of pattern creation, which is how human-sounding text or realistic images are formed.
The number of uses for generative AI are “exponentially bigger” than previous technology because of how flexible LLMs are, Heitsenrether said.
The bank is testing many cases for both forms of AI and has already put a few into production.
JPMorgan is using generative AI to create marketing content for social media channels, map out itineraries for clients of the travel agency it acquired in 2022 and summarize meetings for financial advisors, she said.
The consumer bank uses AI to determine where to place new branches and ATMs by ingesting satellite images and in call centers to help service personnel quickly find answers, Heitsenrether said.
In the firm’s global-payments business, which moves more than $8 trillion around the world daily, AI helps prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, she said.
But the bank is being more cautious with generative AI that directly touches upon the individual customer because of the risk that a chatbot gives bad information, Heitsenrether said.
Ultimately, the generative AI field may develop into “five or six big foundational models” that dominate the market, she said.
The bank is testing LLMs from U.S. tech giants as well as open source models to onboard to its portal next, said the people, who declined to be identified speaking about the bank’s AI strategy.

Friend or foe?

Heitsenrether charted out three stages for the evolution of generative AI at JPMorgan.
The first is simply making the models available to workers; the second involves adding proprietary JPMorgan data to help boost employee productivity, which is the stage that has just begun at the company.
The third is a larger leap that would unlock far greater productivity gains, which is when generative AI is powerful enough to operate as autonomous agents that perform complex multistep tasks. That would make rank-and-file employees more like managers with AI assistants at their command.
The technology will likely empower some workers while displacing others, changing the composition of the industry in ways that are hard to predict.
Banking jobs are the most prone to automation of all industries, including technology, health care and retail, according to consulting firm Accenture. AI could boost the sector’s profits by $170 billion in just four years, Citigroup analysts said.  
People should consider generative AI “like an assistant that takes away the more mundane things that we would all like to not do, where it can just give you the answer without grinding through the spreadsheets,” Heitsenrether said.
“You can focus on the higher-value work,” she said.
— CNBC’s Leslie Picker contributed to this report.

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A hazardous goods container exploded Friday on a ship operating in China’s Ningbo port, vessel owner Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp. told CNBC in a statement, citing a preliminary investigation.
No casualties or injuries were announced to date.
The Liberia-flagged ship had arrived in Ningbo after last calling at Shanghai, according to MarineTraffic tracking data.

An aerial photo is showing containers at Beilun Port in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China, on April 11, 2024.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

BEIJING — A hazardous goods container exploded Friday on a cargo ship in China’s high-traffic Ningbo port, Taiwanese vessel owner Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp. told CNBC in a statement.
No casualties or injuries were announced to date. The incident took place on the YM Mobility ship and led to a fire, which has been brought under control, the owner said. All people on board were safely evacuated.

The Liberia-flagged ship had arrived in Ningbo after last calling at Shanghai, according to MarineTraffic tracking data. State-owned port operator Ningbo-Zhoushan said the ship was docked at the Beilun 2 container terminal, according to a post on Chinese social media.
The port operator and Yang Ming both said the cause of the incident was not yet clear.
Yang Ming added that the owner of the goods had declared it under dry, cold storage, without need for plugged-in electricity, according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese-language statement.
The incident did not immediately appear to significantly disrupt major shipping lines.
Ningbo-Zhoushan is China’s second-highest traffic port, located in eastern China’s Zhejiang province. Shanghai is the busiest port in the world, followed by Singapore and then Ningbo-Zhoushan, according to Lloyd’s List.
— CNBC’s Ruxandra Iordache contributed to this report. More