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JPMorgan Chase unveiled its new 60-story headquarters to the public on Monday, one of the first major office buildings to be constructed after the COVID-19 pandemic and one that will remake the New York City skyline for decades. The bronze and steel tower at 270 Park, which reportedly cost $3 billion, replaced the Union Carbide Building, which sat on a full city block at 48th Street and Park Avenue for nearly 60 years. JPMorgan expects to house roughly 10,000 of its 24,000 New York-based employees in the new building, with employees starting their first workday at the tower at the same time as the company holds its ribbon cutting ceremony. For 225 years, JPMorgan Chase has always been deeply rooted in New York City. The opening of our new global headquarters is not only a significant investment in New York, but also testament to our commitment to our clients and employees worldwide, said Jamie Dimon, CEO and chairman of JPMorgan, in a statement. The building contains 2.5 million square feet and a blocks worth of public space. The bank also commissioned five new artworks for the building, adding to the banks already substantial art collection. The bank will house its trading operations in the building across eight floors. At 1,388 feet, the new building is taller than the Empire State Buildings roofline and is now the fourth-largest building in Manhattan. The building was a major engineering and architectural undertaking by Norman Foster, the buildings lead architect and Tishman Speyer. Engineers had to systematically demolish the old Union Carbide building over a period of two years the site sits above the rails of the Metro North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road that run underneath Park Avenue. For years, JPMorgan has worked out of several buildings around Grand Central Station, a result of the banks growth and acquisitions over the years. Corporate execs and investment bankers still use 383 Madison Ave, the former headquarters of Bear Stearns, and 277 Park, which housed Chemical Bank, also a predecessor of the current JPMorgan Chase. Parts of JPMorgan started using 270 Park in the mid-1990s, but the bank always struggled to fit all its operations in the building. With 270 Park finished, the bank says it will now start a renovation of 383 Madison. The completion of 270 Park is a major accomplishment for Dimon, who has been one of loudest voices about the need for employees to report to an office for work. The building was designed before the COVID-19 pandemic and was completed after the pandemic, when remote work became more common. Ken Sweet, AP business writer
Category:
E-Commerce
SpaceX has settled a lawsuit filed by the maker of the popular party game Cards Against Humanity over accusations that Elon Musk’s rocket company trespassed and damaged a plot of land the card company owns in Texas. Texas court records show a settlement was reached in the case last month, just weeks before a jury trial was scheduled to begin on Nov. 3. The card maker said in a statement Monday that it could not disclose the terms, and SpaceX did not return email and telephone messages left with the company and its Texas lawyer seeking comment. Cards Against Humanity, which is headquartered in Chicago, originally purchased the plot of land in 2017 as part of what it said was a stunt to oppose President Donald Trumps efforts to build a border wall. In its lawsuit, Cards Against Humanity alleges SpaceX essentially treated the game companys property located in Cameron County in far south Texas as its own for at least six months. The lawsuit said SpaceX, which had previously acquired other plots of land near the property, had placed construction materials, such as gravel, and other debris on the land without asking for permission to do so. Cards Against Humanity said in an email Monday to The Associated Press that SpaceX admitted during the discovery phase of the case to trespassing on its property. The company said a trial “would have cost more than what we were likely to win from SpaceX. The upside is that SpaceX has removed their construction equipment from our land and were able to work with a local landscaping company to restore the land to its natural state: devoid of space garbage and pointless border walls. The company has previously said 150,000 people had each contributed $15 toward helping purchase the land in Texas and that they had hoped to pay back those donors with proceeds from a settlement. Over the years, Cards Against Humanity says the land has been maintained in its natural state. It also says it displayed a no trespassing sign to warn people they were about to step on private property. The company was asking for $15 million in damages, which it says includes a loss of vegetation on the land. Were we hoping to be able to pay all our fans? Sure. But we did warn them they would probably only be able to get like $2 or most likely nothing, the company said. Sean Murphy, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
For most people, its natural to assume that if something is exclusive to the wealthiest echelons of society, it must be better. Asset management firms looking to access trillions of retail investor dollars explicitly reference this exclusivity when marketing private equity offerings. But investors should be wary when fund marketers talk about democratizing investing or opening access to areas previously only available to the elite. Reasons to be wary Investing is already democratized. The SEC eliminated fixed trading commissions in 1975, and innovation has made investing in publicly traded stocks cheaper and easier ever since. Online trading platforms allow people of modest means to easily buy shares in almost any publicly traded company. The advent of cheap, passively managed mutual funds and exchange-traded funds has made building a diversified portfolio easier and more affordable than ever. Moreover, public capital markets are a good thing. Investors who buy publicly traded stocks or bonds get transparency about their investment with ready liquidity. Meanwhile, private capital investments are often opaque and illiquid. There has been considerable debate about whether private investments generate higher returns. Measuring performance for private equity and private debt is not straightforward. Most industry benchmarks use internal rates of return, which arent really comparable to traditional performance measures like total return. Researchers have examined some of the findings related to this topic. A 2020 paper by Ludovic Phalippou, An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & The Billionaire Factory, argues that net of fees, returns for private equity funds have been in line with those of the public equity markets since 2006. PitchBook, which is part of Morningstar, has also gathered data on public market equivalent returns for private equity. Based on those metrics, private equity funds with 2020-2023 vintage years did not generate positive excess performance returns, although funds with 2011-2019 vintages fared significantly better. Semiliquid private equity and venture capital funds Even if private capital had a performance edge in the past, theres no guarantee that this advantage will continue or that those managers will be the better performers. As Morningstars Jeff Ptaknotes, private equity funds typically have widely dispersed returns, meaning a large gap between the top and bottom performers. Your returns could differ wildly from those of benchmark indexes. As large private equity firms increasingly tap retail capital, the instruments available to average investors probably wont be the best. Investment sage Bill Bernstein stated: The first people who invested in private equity got the filet mignon and the lobster tails, and the Vanguards and Fidelities of this world are going to wind up with tuna noodle casserole. On the venture capital side, getting access to the next startup unicorn early in the game sounds appealing. But for every SpaceX, thousands of early-stage companies never take off, and there is additional risk from leveraged exposure to privately held companies. Final thoughts When you hear about the virtues of access to investments that were off-limits, its worth considering who really benefits. As passively managed funds with rock-bottom expense ratios continue to gain market share, asset management firms are pressed to find new sources of high-margin revenue. That new source of revenue, in many cases, is you. Amy C. Arnott, CFA is a portfolio strategist for Morningstar. This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance
Category:
E-Commerce
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