At the White House on Wednesday, Donald Trump greeted a top executive at JP Morgan Chase by telling the banker to thank him, according to a report by Bloomberg News .
“I made a lot of bankers look very good,” Trump said, as quoted by Bloomberg . “But you’re doing a great job.”
According to the Bloomberg News study published Thursday, Trump’s tax cut package — which was passed by Congress in December 2017 — was worth $18 billion to the country’s six biggest banks in 2019. Since the tax cuts took effect, those six banks have reaped a $32 billion windfall, the report found.
Of the six biggest banks, JP Morgan Chase led the way, saving a total of $8.76 billion in the two years that the Trump tax cuts have been in effect. In fact, according to a Bloomberg report earlier this week, JP Morgan Chase enjoyed “the best year for any U.S. bank in history.”
The massive bank earned a whopping $36.4 billion in 2019 — on top of the $8.76 billion in savings they received from the tax cut package.
Bank of America came in second at a two-year, $7.57 billion savings compared to what they would have paid under previous tax rates. Wells Fargo placed third on the list, with $6.49 billion in extra cash.
The question remains in some people’s minds, however, if the big banks are the only beneficiaries of these new tax cuts. Are the middle- and lower-class Americans benefiting as well? According to an earlier study by The Center For Public Integrity , the answer is — not really.
While United States corporations reaped a $150 billion windfall from the tax cuts, only about six percent of that was handed back to employees in the form of pay raises or other additional income. Almost all of the remaining 94 percent was pumped into corporate stock buybacks — a financial maneuver that inflates a company’s stock price, benefiting the corporate shareholders.
That is only a small number of Americans, however. As the CPI report showed, 84 percent of all stocks are held by only 10 percent of the U.S. public.
In addition, according to a report by The New York Times published last week, the federal budget deficit leaped past the $1 trillion threshold last year.
That the deficit grew by 17 percent in the second year after the Trump tax cuts have been in effect is not a coincidence. Though that figure is less than the 28 percent explosion in the deficit in the first year of the tax cuts. A cut in interest rates implemented by the Federal Reserve in 2019 reduced the cost of government debt, which at least partly accounts for the slowdown in deficit expansion, according to The Times .