JPMorgan Chase says banks could fight

JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum hinted Tuesday the industry could fight President Donald Trump’s demand for credit card price controls, saying “everything’s on the table.”

“If you wind up with weakly supported directives to radically change our business that aren’t justified, you have to assume that everything’s on the table,” Barnum said on a call with reporters following JPMorgan’s fourth-quarter earnings report. “We owe that to shareholders.”

Barnum was responding to a question about whether banks would choose to litigate to block Trump’s demand, made late Friday, that card companies cap interest rates at 10% for a year. Last year, the industry successfully fought efforts by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to cap card late fees.

Banks and industry insiders say that an interest rate limit would result in fewer credit card accounts for Americans and a dip in spending for the U.S. economy, as companies would simply pull accounts rather than offer them at an unprofitable level.

The average credit card rate nationally is 19.7% as of this month, according to a weekly survey from Bankrate.com, while rates for subprime borrowers and store-specific cards are typically higher.

“Our belief is that actions like this will have the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants for consumers,” Barnum said. “Instead of lowering the price of credit, we’ll simply reduce the supply of credit, and that will be bad for everyone: consumers, the wider economy, and yes, at the margin, for us.”

The CFO declined to directly answer a question on whether JPMorgan would comply with Trump’s demand, which has a proposed Jan. 20 start date. Banks that don’t follow the directive are “in violation of the law,” Trump told reporters Sunday.

Still, it’s unclear how Trump’s mandate would be enforced. There is no U.S. law capping card rates, though a bill was introduced last year from Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont that would limit card APRs at 10% for five years. That bill is stalled in Congress.

Other voices in the corporate and political realms began addressing the possible impact of Trump’s rate cap on Tuesday.

Beyond banks, airlines and retailers rely on revenue from card partnerships to bolster profit. For instance, Delta Air Lines said Tuesday that its American Express partnership produced $8.2 billion in revenue last year.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said on an earnings call that the cap would “upend the whole credit card industry … I don’t see any way we could even begin to contemplate how that would be implemented.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson struck a note of caution when asked about the issue at a news conference.

“We have a lot of work to go [on] consensus around it, but you got to be very careful as we go forward in that in our zeal to bring down costs — you don’t want to have negative secondary effects,” Johnson said.

— CNBC’s Emily Wilkins and Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.