BoA Customers Spending 10% More In 2022, CEO Moynihan Says

U.S. consumers are likely in fine shape and are likely to keep spending for now, according to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, CNBC wrote Tuesday (May 24).

“Consumers are in good shape, not overleveraged,” he said.

The bank’s customers have bigger checking and savings accounts than they did before the pandemic. In addition they have been spending 10% more in May than a year prior.

All this comes as the Fed is in the middle of an inflation-fighting campaign which has resulted in drastically falling stock markets.

There has been concern over inflation at multidecade highs. The central bank has been trying to cut back on easy-money policies, which could result in a recession.

“The Fed has this typically very difficult thing of getting them to slow down without slowing down too much,” Moynihan said. “I believe they are going to be able to manage this flow, but it’s going to be tricky.”

His outlook has been more optimistic than other bank CEOs, which included JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who said it was a two-thirds chance there would be some kind of a recession coming up.

“The odds are the following: something like, yes, they can engineer a soft landing, a third of a percent chance,” Dimon told Bloomberg. “Probably a third of a percent chance they can engineer a mild recession … and then there’s a chance this could be much harder than that.”

See also: CFPB: BoA Must Pay $10M for Illegal Garnishments

According to a report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Bank of America has to pay $10 million for processing illegal out-of-state garnishment orders against customers’ bank accounts.

The report said BoA unfairly froze customers accounts and “charged garnishment fees, garnished funds, and sent payments to creditors based on out-of-state garnishment court orders that should have been processed under the laws and protections of the states where the consumers lived.”