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Wells Fargo Tumbles After Another Ugly Quarter: Loans Shrink Again As Home Lending Tumbles

Wells Fargo Tumbles After Another Ugly Quarter: Loans Shrink Again As Home Lending Tumbles

In a day when the big banks reported generally stellar earnings (especially Bank of America and Morgan Stanley on the back of record advisory fees),…

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Wells Fargo Tumbles After Another Ugly Quarter: Loans Shrink Again As Home Lending Tumbles

In a day when the big banks reported generally stellar earnings (especially Bank of America and Morgan Stanley on the back of record advisory fees), easing the bitter aftertaste from yesterday's disappointing report from JPMorgan, even perennial Wall Street disappointment Wells Fargo managed to beat expectations with net Interest margin posting a much awaited bounce, although there was the usual "but" of higher expenses and failure to post an increase in loan growth..

Wells Fargo reported EPS of $1.17, beating expectations of $0.99, thanks to revenue of $18.83BN, also stronger than the $18.37Bn expected. This translated into income of $5.1 billion, which however was padded by a $1.7 billion reserve release "due to continued
improvements in the economic environment", resulting in an allowance coverage for total loans down 22 bps from 2Q21 and down 52 bps from 3Q20. 

The firm also took a $250 million charge related to its latest regulatory order, which drove costs higher than analysts expected.  

The company's earnings summarized:

There was some much awaited good news on the Net Interest front, where both net interest income and margin posted a modest sequential improvement, rising $109MM or 1% from Q1, due to rising yields in Q3. Still, on a Y/Y basis, net interest income decreased $470 million or 5%, "reflecting the impact of lower loan balances due to soft demand and elevated prepayments, and the impact of lower yields on earning assets, partially offset by a decline in long-term debt and lower mortgage-backed securities (MBS) premium amortization."  In any case, since Wells Fargo is the most net interest income-reliant bank in the US, the reversal in NIM was certainly good news.

With NIM down Y/Y, expenses followed and the bank reported that noninterest expense (which consists mostly of personnel expenses) was flat sequentially and down 12.6% from a year ago, though analysts had expected a 14% drop. And even though headcount fell to 253,871, from 259,196 at the end of June, personnel expenses actually rose 1% from a year ago "as lower salaries expense driven by reduced headcount reflecting efficiency initiatives was more than offset by higher incentive and revenue-related compensation."

But perhaps the most important, and disappointing aspect of Wells' results was that total average loans shrank again, and while commercial loans posted a small increase sequentially of $1.2BN to $478.2BN, Consumer Loans dropped by almost $2BN from $377.7BN to $375.9BN in Q3, and down a whopping $58.1BN from a year ago.

The total average loan yield of 3.29%, was down 4 bps from 2Q21 and down 12 bps YoY reflecting the repricing impacts of lower interest rates, as well as lower consumer real estate loans.

Meanwhile, as we have been discussing for the past 5 quarters, average deposits - a proxy for the Fed's QE - were up $51.9 billion, or 4%, YoY "as growth across most businesses was partially offset by targeted actions to manage to the asset cap, primarily in Corporate Treasury and Corporate and Investment Banking." The good news it that this remains the cheapest funding possible for Wells - at an average deposit cost of 3 bps, it was stable with 2Q21 and down 6 bps YoY reflecting the lower interest rate environment.

The biggest U.S. banks have been struggling with weak loan growth as consumers and businesses, bolstered by massive government stimulus programs during the pandemic, refrained from borrowing. The rise of the delta variant has also delayed a return to normal and slowed economic activity. Average loans fell 8%, Wells Fargo said.

There was more bad news in the bank's consumer banking and lending group, where total revenue was down 4% YoY. Some more details:

  • CSBB up 2% YoY primarily due to an increase in consumer activity, including higher debit card transactions, and lower COVID-19-related fee waivers; up 2% from 2Q21 primarily driven by higher deposit-related fees and higher net interest income on higher deposits
  • Credit Card up 4% YoY on higher point-of-sale volume and lower customer accommodations and fee waivers provided in response to COVID-19
  • Auto up 10% YoY and up 7% from 2Q21 on higher loan balances

What was most disappointing was that Home Lending - where Wells Fargo once dominated the market - was down 20% YoY primarily due to lower mortgage banking income on lower gain on sale margins, origination volumes, and servicing fees, as well as lower net interest income on lower loans outstanding. In short, it is the biggest housing bubble in US history - bigger even that 2007- and Wells still can't capitalize on it!

Finally, while for Wells, Banking and Sales and Trading are mostly an afterthought - after all, who would pick the trading desk at Wells over, well, anyone else - and the bank is not even close in the same ballpark as its bigger peers, it did post a modest, 2% increase in corporate and ibanking revenue to $3.385 billion, which was also up 1%, or $47MM, from last quarter.

  • Banking revenue was up 12% YoY "on higher advisory and equity origination fees, and higher loan balances, partially offset by lower deposit balances predominantly due to actions taken to manage under the asset cap"
  • Commercial Real Estate revenue up 10% YoY reflecting higher commercial servicing income, loan balances, and capital markets results on stronger commercial mortgage gain on sale volumes and margins and higher underwriting fees; down 7% from 2Q21 on lower capital markets volumes and commercial mortgage servicing income

Yet here too there was a disappointment, as markets revenue dropped 15% YoY to just $1.176BN on "lower trading activity across most asset classes primarily due to market conditions"

As Bloomberg notes, the mixed results were a reminder that challenges remain for Scharf, who took the helm of Wells Fargo in 2019. The bank has been cutting jobs and slashing costs as Scharf seeks to boost the firm’s profitability after years of scandals, which have continued this year as the bank has seen several settlements with regulators, a sordid legacy of its ugly past.

“The significant deficiencies that existed when I arrived must remain our top priority,” Scharf said in the statement. “We are a different company today and the operational and cultural changes we’ve made are enabling us to execute with significantly greater discipline than we have in the past.”

Or not: during the quarter, Wells Fargo was hit with a new regulatory action and a $250 million fine over its lack of progress addressing long-standing problems -- a topic that is sure to come up on the bank’s analyst call. The firm is also still under a Federal Reserve-imposed asset cap, which limits its balance sheet.

Bottom line: another swing and another miss, with Wells shares the worst performing of all banks this morning.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/14/2021 - 10:19

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Government

Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…

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Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

Credit: source: https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.

The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.

Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.

“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”

Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.

Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.

The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.

Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.

“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”

The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.

Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”

Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.

“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”


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International

There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

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While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

More Travel:

According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

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International

The next pandemic? It’s already here for Earth’s wildlife

Bird flu is decimating species already threatened by climate change and habitat loss.

I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.

I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.

This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.

How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.

This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.

This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.

H5N1 originated on a Chinese poultry farm in 1997. ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

The first signs

Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.

We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.

Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.

Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.

Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.

A roving sickness

Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.

In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.

Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.

The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.

Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.

At the crossroads

Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.

Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.

It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.

Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.

Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.

A colony of king penguins.
Remote penguin colonies are already threatened by climate change. AndreAnita/Shutterstock

How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.

To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.

Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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