By Nupur Anand
NEW YORK (Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are sticking with their businesses in China as escalating tensions with the U.S. loom over global markets, bank executives said on Wednesday.
JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank, is still investing in China even as its operations there evolve, said Vice Chairman Daniel Pinto.
“The size of our business would have been multiples of what it is today” if U.S.-China relations were better, he said. “But so far, we continue investing,” while carefully managing the exposure, size, liquidity and quality of its investments, Pinto added.
Chinese regulators have been “quite helpful” in granting licenses to financial institutions to help the nation develop its financial services industry, he said.
“We are not in the business of pulling out and going back in countries from one day to the other,” Pinto said. “We are still committed to the place. We have several thousand people there. The business is okay.”
Goldman is also staying put, Waldron said.
“We’re not leaving China, we’re very consistently engaged in those markets,” Goldman Sachs President John Waldron told a conference in Washington on Wednesday. “We’ve worked together on a number of important capital markets transactions this year, backing capital raising for companies that are based in China.”
Still, companies are going to change their behavior as changing relations between the two nations shift capital flows and supply chains, Waldron said.
On Monday, JPMorgan announced plans to hire bankers and invest up to $10 billion in U.S. companies critical to national security and economic resilience as part of a broader $1.5 trillion pledge.
(Reporting by Nupur Anand in New York, editing by Lananh Nguyen and Nick Zieminski)
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