Trump Pushes 10% Credit-Card Rate Cap as JPMorgan Doubles Down With Apple Card Deal

JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported another multibillion-dollar quarter and a major bet on credit cards, even as President Donald Trump pressed a pledge to cap what those cards can charge Americans.

The largest U.S. bank said it earned $13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, or $4.63 per share, down 7% from a year earlier. Results were weighed down by a $2.2 billion provision for credit losses tied to JPMorgan’s agreement to take over the Apple Card portfolio from Goldman Sachs.

Stripping out that one-time charge, JPMorgan said its adjusted profit was $14.7 billion, or $5.23 per share, ahead of Wall Street estimates. Revenue rose about 7% to roughly $46 billion. The bank generated a return on tangible common equity of about 18% for the quarter and 20% for the full year.

Those results arrived in the same news cycle as Trump’s call for a nationwide 10% ceiling on credit-card interest rates—an idea that rattled bank and card-issuer stocks and highlighted how reliant big lenders have become on high-APR lending.

“Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%,” Trump wrote Jan. 9 on Truth Social, accusing card companies of “ripping off” Americans with rates of 20% to 30% and higher. The White House amplified the message the next day on X.

There is no law imposing such a cap. Legal scholars say the president lacks clear authority to unilaterally dictate maximum rates for private-sector lenders, and that any attempt to do so by executive order would almost certainly face immediate court challenges. Trump has nonetheless claimed that companies that do not comply would be “in violation of the law,” without citing a statute.

The tension between Trump’s message and JPMorgan’s numbers captures a broader clash over the economics of credit cards at a time when household borrowing and interest costs are at record highs.

A $2.2 billion bet on Apple’s card

JPMorgan’s quarter was dominated by the Apple Card transaction, announced Jan. 7. Under the deal, the bank’s Chase unit will become the new issuer of Apple’s consumer credit card, replacing Goldman Sachs as the lender behind the product. The portfolio, which will transfer over about 24 months subject to regulatory approvals, carries more than $20 billion in outstanding balances.

In preparation, JPMorgan booked a $2.2 billion provision for credit losses in the fourth quarter related to the forward purchase commitment. The move does not reflect actual losses today but rather reserves against expected future losses once the accounts land on JPMorgan’s books.

The charge cut about 60 cents from quarterly earnings per share. Without it, the consumer and community banking division, which houses the card business, would have posted even stronger results. The unit generated roughly $19 billion in revenue and about $3.6 billion in net income in the quarter, according to company figures.

The reserve build also highlighted the underlying risk in the Apple portfolio. Analysts noted that the size of the provision suggests Apple Card customers, on average, may be somewhat riskier than JPMorgan’s existing cardholders, or that the bank is taking a conservative stance ahead of the handoff.

Even before Apple Card, JPMorgan was the largest U.S. credit card lender by balances, with about $235 billion outstanding. The acquisition is expected to solidify that position.

Cards as profit engine — and political target

Credit cards are among the most lucrative products in consumer banking, combining double-digit annual percentage rates (APRs) on revolving balances with interchange fees merchants pay on each transaction. For JPMorgan, card lending is a major contributor to the $25.1 billion in net interest income it generated in the fourth quarter and to the roughly $103 billion it projects for 2026.

Industrywide, the scope is vast. Americans owed about $1.23 trillion on credit cards as of the third quarter of 2025, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, the highest level on record. Total household debt stood at $18.59 trillion. The average credit-card rate was about 21% in November, Federal Reserve figures show, near multi-decade highs and far above banks’ own funding costs.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has estimated that roughly 195 million Americans have credit cards and collectively paid about $160 billion in interest in 2024. Delinquency rates have climbed from unusually low levels during the pandemic and are now above pre-2020 norms, particularly for younger and lower-income borrowers.

Those numbers have turned card APRs into a live political issue, drawing fire from both the left and the right.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, and Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced legislation in February 2025 that would cap credit-card rates at 10% for five years. The “10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act” has stalled in the Senate Banking Committee, but it provides a blueprint for what Trump is now urging. A similar bill in the House, sponsored by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, has also not advanced.

Supporters of a cap describe current rates as “loan sharking” and argue that large financial institutions are profiting excessively from household distress.

“Charging working people 25 or 30 percent interest on their credit cards while banks make record profits is extortion, plain and simple,” Sanders said when introducing the bill. Hawley called the measure “just like President Trump campaigned on.”

Banks warn of tighter credit and lawsuits

Banks and card issuers counter that a 10% ceiling set far below current market rates would force them to sharply curtail lending, especially to customers with lower credit scores, and would backfire on many of the borrowers it is meant to help.

On a call with analysts Tuesday, JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said such a cap would be “very bad for consumers, very bad for the economy.”

“If you set price controls significantly below where risk-based pricing would otherwise land, you are going to have to cut back the amount of credit you offer,” Barnum said. He warned the policy could have the “exact opposite consequence” of the administration’s stated intention by pushing people out of mainstream credit and into higher-cost alternatives.

Trade groups representing banks and card networks have delivered similar messages. In a joint letter opposing earlier APR-cap proposals, organizations including the American Bankers Association and the Consumer Bankers Association said a 10% limit would “eliminate access to credit cards for millions of consumers” and divert them to pawn shops, auto-title lenders, unregulated online lenders and even illegal loan sharks.

The Electronic Payments Coalition, which represents card networks and banks, has estimated that between 82% and 88% of existing U.S. credit-card accounts would be closed or severely restricted if issuers were bound by a 10% rate ceiling. Rewards programs would likely be scaled back substantially.

JPMorgan executives also signaled they are prepared to challenge any attempt to impose a cap without clear legal authority.

“If you wind up with weakly supported directives to radically change our business that aren’t justified, you have to assume everything is on the table,” Barnum said when asked about potential litigation.

How much relief — and for whom?

Some consumer advocates and policy researchers dispute the notion that a 10% cap would make cards unworkable. A study by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, which analyzed Trump’s campaign-era proposal, concluded that a nationwide 10% limit could still leave the card industry profitable, while saving consumers on the order of $100 billion a year in interest.

The research suggested, however, that lenders would likely respond by tightening credit for borrowers with scores below roughly 600 and by reducing generous rewards that are popular with higher-income customers who pay their balances in full each month.

Those distributional effects are central to the debate. The current system—built around high APRs and rich rewards—effectively redistributes income from more indebted, often lower-income “revolvers” to affluent “transactors” who harvest cash-back and travel points. Some fintech executives, including the chief executive of buy-now-pay-later provider Klarna, have described this as “reverse income redistribution.”

A broad cap on interest could unwind parts of that model, reducing costs for people who carry balances but also eroding perks for frequent-flyer cardholders and other heavy rewards users.

Limited tools, rising pressure

For now, Trump’s announcement remains more political signal than legal directive. Any binding nationwide rate cap would almost certainly require an act of Congress, followed by detailed rulemaking by federal regulators. Even then, it would face years of court challenges over Congress’s power to regulate rates across state lines and over any impact on existing contracts.

Still, the immediate market reaction underscored that investors are taking the threat seriously. Shares of Capital One Financial, Synchrony Financial, American Express and other major bank and card-network stocks fell in the days after Trump’s post. JPMorgan stock dropped about 3% on Tuesday despite its earnings beat, as traders weighed the Apple Card reserve and the possibility of tighter political constraints on card profits.

The episode also fits into a broader effort by the administration and populist lawmakers to reshape the economics of payments and consumer credit. Trump has signaled support for the Credit Card Competition Act, a separate bipartisan bill aimed at loosening the grip of Visa and Mastercard on transaction routing and lowering interchange fees.

For JPMorgan and its peers, the message is that their most reliable profit engine has become a political lightning rod. The bank’s willingness to absorb a $2.2 billion upfront hit to acquire Apple’s card business shows it is betting that double-digit card returns will endure, even if the rules change at the margins.

Whether a hard 10% ceiling ever materializes is uncertain. But the combination of record card debt, elevated interest rates and unusual left-right agreement that something in the system must give suggests the fight over how much Americans pay to borrow on plastic is only beginning.