Not even Wall Street titans know the true cost of the coronavirus crisis

JP Morgan's $8.3bn bad loan provision is steep but it's guesswork - no one has a clue about the final bill

An $8.3bn provision for bad loans is steep, even for JP Morgan Chase, the biggest bank in the US. Is it even roughly the correct number, though?

Jamie Dimon, unrivalled titan of Wall Street, didn't quite shrug his shoulders nor did he indulge his normal habit of assessing the state of the world for lesser mortals. The provision was taken because of "the likelihood of a fairly severe recession", which is stating the obvious, but then his finance director said the reserves "could be meaningfully higher in aggregate over the next several quarters relative to what we took in the first quarter".

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