Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan assured its 208,000 employees not to worry about their jobs or their salary payments for 2020.
“We don’t want our teammates to worry about their jobs during a time like this,” Moynihan told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Friday. “We told them all; there’s no issue, you’re all going to be working now through year-end. No layoffs, no nothing.”
“We’ll continue to pay everybody, even those who can’t work from home because the type of work they do isn’t doable from home.
Moynihan explained in the interview that the bank was better prepared for the COVID-19 induced crisis because they had learned from the 2008 crisis and had some regulatory safeguards in place.
“What’s different this time is clearly our capital liquidity,” Moynihan said. “Everything that changed has led the banking industry be in a great condition to service clients continuously for the last few weeks as this thing has hit.”
“We’re going to make sure we maintain strong capital ratios and strong liquidity right through this crisis,” Moynihan said, referring to the worldwide economic crisis sparked by the introduction of stringent safety measures hoping to slow down the spread of the Chinese Communist Party virus, also known as the novel coronavirus.
NTD refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
The second-largest bank in the nation based in Charlotte, North Carolina, granted over $50 billion in loans this month and is currently processing more than 150,000 deferral requests over car loans and mortgages to offer a grace period to its Main Street customers, Reuters reported.
“We’ve put our capital to work to increase the new lines of credit, the draws in lines of credit, the access to markets,” Moynihan told Bloomberg.
Not only did Moynihan pledge to relax repayments, but he said the Bank of America also hired 2,000 extra workers and shifted 3,000 workers internally to its consumer and small business divisions to cope with the surge in requests due to the now global pandemic.
Other banks, like Morgan Stanley, City Group, Wells Fargo, issued similar assuages to their clients and employees.
“While long term we can’t be sure how this will play out, we want to commit to you that there will not be a reduction in force at Morgan Stanley in 2020,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said in an internal memo on Thursday, obtained by CNBC. “Aside from a performance issue or a breach of the Code of Conduct, your jobs are secure.”