Finance

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.
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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.
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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

“If you assess individual banks in Italy, it’s difficult not to believe that something will happen, I would say, over the next 12 months or so,” Antonio Reale, co-head of European banks at Bank of America, told CNBC.
Speaking in March, Italy’s Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said “there is a specific commitment” with the European Commission on the divestment of the government stake on BMPS.
Paola Sabbione, an analyst at Barclays, believes there would be a high bar for Italian banking M&A if it does occur.

Banking analysts assess the possibility of a banking merger in Italy.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

MILAN, Italy — European policymakers have longed for bigger banks across the continent.
And Italy might be about to give them their wish with a bumper round of M&A, according to analysts.

Years after a sovereign debt crisis in the region and a government rescue for Banca Monte dei Paschi (BMPS) that saved it from collapse, many are looking at Italy’s banking sector with fresh eyes.
“If you assess individual banks in Italy, it’s difficult not to believe that something will happen, I would say, over the next 12 months or so,” Antonio Reale, co-head of European banks at Bank of America, told CNBC.
Reale highlighted that BMPS had been rehabilitated and needed re-privatization, he also said UniCredit is now sitting on a “relatively large stack of excess of capital,” and more broadly that the Italian government has a new industrial agenda.
UniCredit, in particular, continues to surprise markets with some stellar quarterly profit beats. It earned 8.6 billion euros last year (up 54% year-on-year), pleasing investors via share buybacks and dividends.
Meanwhile, BMPS — which was saved in 2017 — has to eventually be put back into private hands under an agreement with European regulators and the Italian government. Speaking in March, Italy’s Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said “there is a specific commitment” with the European Commission on the divestment of the government stake on BMPS.

“In general, we see room for consolidation in markets such as Italy, Spain and Germany,” Nicola De Caro, senior vice president at Morningstar, told CNBC via email, adding that “domestic consolidation is more likely than European cross-border mergers due to some structural impediments.”
He added that despite recent consolidation in Italian banking, involving Intesa-Ubi, BPER-Carige and Banco-Bpm, “there is still a significant number of banks and fragmentation at the medium-sized level.”
“UniCredit, BMPS and some medium sized banks are likely to play a role in the potential future consolidation of the banking sector in Italy,” De Caro added.
Speaking to CNBC in July, UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel indicated that at current prices, he did not see any potential for deals in Italy, but said he is open to that possibility if market conditions were to change.
“In spite our performance, we still trade at a discount to the sector … so if I were to do those acquisitions, I would need to go to my shareholders and say this is strategic, but actually I am going to dilute your returns and I am not going to do that,” he said.

“But if it changes, we are here,” he added.
Paola Sabbione, an analyst at Barclays, believes there would be a high bar for Italian banking M&A if it does occur.
“Monte dei Paschi is looking for a partner, UniCredit is looking for possible targets. Hence from these banks, in theory several combinations could arise. However, no bank is in urgent need,” she told CNBC via email.
European officials have been making more and more comments about the need for bigger banks. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, said in May in an interview with Bloomberg that Europe’s banking sector needs greater consolidation. However, there’s still some skepticism about supposed mega deals. In Spain, for instance, the government opposed BBVA’s bid for Sabadell in May.
“Europe needs bigger, stronger and more profitable banks. That’s undeniable,” Reale from Bank of America said, adding that there are differences between Spain and Italy.
“Spain has come a long way. We’ve seen a big wave of consolidation happen[ing] right after the Global Financial Crisis and continued in recent years, with a number of excess capacity that’s exited the market one way or the other. Italy is a lot more fragmented in terms of banking markets,” he added. More

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