Investors are trying to do what Janet Yellen can’t.
They are circling around some of the world’s largest banks, pushing for a breakup into as many as four different companies, as expensive regulations from Yellen’s Federal Reserve make “too big to fail” a heavy burden for shareholders.
While JPMorgan — the largest US bank by assets — has been called upon to split up, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and HSBC are also in the too-big-to-fail camp and shareholders say they’re getting less bang for their buck, Ryan Mendy, chief operating officer of analyst firm The Edge Group, told The Post.
And those banks could get broken up by 2018, he added.
“At the end of the day, who cares about the bank as it is?” Mendy said. “It’s about the shareholder, it’s about the pension funds.”
Investors would get the most value if banks like JPM, HSBC and other gargantuans were broken up into a commercial bank for lending, an investment bank and an asset management company, Mendy said.
Break-up fever broke out on Wall Street in January after Goldman Sachs analysts said that rival JPMorgan could be worth as much as 25 percent more if it were broken up into as many as four companies.
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO, pushed back against those calls during an investor conference last week, arguing that clients are calling for a one-stop banking shop.
“In a capitalist world, OK, you better be giving the customer more — better, faster, quicker — or you lose,” he said then.
While Mendy said that his clients are starting to sniff blood in the water, not all activist investors have signed onto the plan.
One activist investor told The Post that breaking up the banks would be a goal for funds like Calpers, the largest public pension. Another advocated for decreasing bank leverage rather than breaking them up.