US banks reward shareholders after Fed greenlight

Some of the United States' biggest banks announced they would pay tens of billions of dollars to shareholders in dividend increases and stock buybacks after getting the go-ahead from the Federal Reserve.

The Fed lifted some Covid-era restrictions on banks last week as they proved able to successfully weather changing economic circumstances.

In response, investment bank Morgan Stanley decided to double the amount it pays per share from the third quarter onward, and announced a share buyback program of up to $12 billion by the end of June 2022.

"Morgan Stanley has accumulated significant excess capital over the past several years and now has one of the largest capital buffers in the industry," CEO James Gorman said in a statement.

The largest US bank in terms of assets, JPMorgan Chase, has said it plans to raise its dividends by a more modest 11 percent.

And Bank of America, which announced a $25 billion buyback program in March, said it would increase its dividends by 17 percent, while investment giant Goldman Sachs said it would increase dividends by a heftier 60 percent.

Citigroup said it would leave dividends unchanged for now. The Fed banned the country's largest banks from engaging in share buyback programs and had capped shareholder dividend payouts during the pandemic, saying they needed to conserve capital during the crisis.

Begun at the start of the pandemic, the measure was originally only supposed to last until December 2020, but was extended until March 31 and then again until the end of this month.

The OPEC+ group of oil-producing countries will meet on Thursday and are expected to agree to boost production in August in order to meet demand and dampen recent price rises.

While improvement in demand drove the group's most recent rises in production, now price levels will also be a guiding force behind the club's decisions.

After demand dropped when the coronavirus pandemic broke out last year and crude prices briefly turned negative, the club led by Saudi Arabia and Russia imposed sharp production cuts in order to raise prices.

The 13 members of OPEC and their 10 allies in the OPEC+ grouping were rewarded by seeing prices for the two contracts of reference, Brent and WTI, recover to around $75 per barrel, levels not seen since October 2018.

However that strategy has worked almost too well and the group is currently following a policy of cautiously turning the taps back on.

While on the face of it buoyant prices are a boon for producers-and some of them will be pushing to increase output to cash in-there are also risks.

Russia is expected to favour increasing output, as it has done at several recent OPEC+ meetings.

Moscow "may be more inclined to support a production increase in order to ensure a higher market share while limiting the risk of rising non-OPEC production," according to Ole Hansen from Saxobank.

"Pressure will likely not only come from within the group, but there will also be growing calls from key consumers to cool the market down, as countries come out of the other side of Covid-19 lockdowns," says Warren Patterson of ING bank.

India is a notable example. The world's third-largest consumer of crude has been hit by a vicious coronavirus wave in recent months and has urged OPEC+ "to phase out crude output cuts to temper rising inflationary pressures", noted Stephen Brennock from PVM.

"If prices remain this high, this will eat into consumers' disposable incomes and potentially choke economic growth, which, over time, will weigh on crude prices," explained Fawad Razaqzada of Thinkmarkets.

The OPEC+ states have left themselves soom room for manoeuvre as they are currently still planning to leave 5.8 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude in the ground over the month of July that they could easily extract and sell.

Most investors are currently expecting a modest rise of some 500,000 bpd over the month of August.

But OPEC+ always has the capacity to surprise.

The outlook for crude demand has been steadily improving in recent months.

In its last report in midJune, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that global demand would outstrip pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022.