Morning Agenda: Jamie Dimon’s Pay Rises to $27 Million

JAMIE DIMON’S PAY RISES TO $27 MILLION | JPMorgan Chase paid Jamie Dimon, its chairman and chief executive, 35 percent more in 2015 than the year before,
Liz Moyer reports in DealBook.

Mr. Dimon received $27 million, much of it in stock linked to the bank’s performance, a week after the bank recorded a record profit of $24.4 billion for the year, according to a securities filing.

Pay disclosures are being scrutinized as banks face pressure from shareholders to overhaul pay practices. This has caused many of them to shift more pay to stock that will be granted only if the company meets certain performance goals.

JPMorgan started using performance share units as part of the variable pay for its top executives this year. Its shareholders nearly voted down 2014 pay for the top executives at last spring’s annual meeting, prompting the move to performance-based awards.

Overall compensation on Wall Street is down as companies grapple with volatile markets. Goldman Sachs did not raise the amount of money it set aside for employee pay, and pay declined at the investment bank and wealth management divisions of Morgan Stanley.

Mr. Dimon’s salary remained at $1.5 million, but his cash bonus dropped to $5 million from $7.5 million the year before. His stock award, however, jumped to $20.5 million from $11.1 million.

HILLARY CLINTON’S OPPONENTS ATTACK HER PAID SPEECHES TO WALL STREET | Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches are emerging as a central line of attack in the bitter primary clash with Senator Bernie Sanders,

Nicholas Confessore and Jason Horowitz report in The New York Times.

Mr. Sanders has argued that Mrs. Clinton is too personally beholden to Wall Street to effectively rein in the industry’s excesses. He even appeared to mock her speaking fees as borderline bribes from a powerful industry: “You got to be really, really, really good to get $250,000 for a speech.”

The attacks have garnered Mr. Sanders applause in Iowa, where the median household earns about $52,229 a year.

Republican strategists are also testing how they can use Mrs. Clinton’s speaking fees against her in an election defined by rising economic inequality and stagnant middle-class wages.

Even her supporters are questioning the wisdom of accepting the fees when she knew she might run for the presidency again.

Mrs. Clinton has tried to parry this by highlighting her support for tighter regulation and comparing herself to President Obama, who took campaign contributions from Wall Street but went on to enact some of the furthest-reaching financial regulations in decades. Mr. Obama has never earned speaking fees from Wall Street.

Some believe her biggest vulnerability is not her position on financial regulation, but her personal relationship with Wall Street executives and the millions of dollars she, her husband and their family foundation have accepted in speaking fees and charitable donations from banks, hedge funds and asset managers.

Mrs. Clinton and her husband have earned more than $125 million in income from speeches since 2001 — one-fifth of that in the last two years. Mrs. Clinton’s speechmaking has been a tour through high finance from GTCR, the Chicago private equity firm that the Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, helped found, to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

“Although they needed money, I think that Bill was raking in enough that Hillary didn’t have to do it,” said Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor, who has supported Mrs. Clinton. “To people who earn $200,000 in seven years, it looks ridiculous.”

ON THE AGENDA | General Electric’s webcast on its full year earnings starts at 8:30 a.m. Schlumberger will hold a conference call on its earnings at 9 a.m.

FUNDS ROLL IN FOR START-UP HARNESSING BITCOIN TECH | The former JPMorgan Chase executive Blythe Masters has raised $52 million from several big banks for a start-up built on the Bitcoin’s underlying technology,
Nathaniel Popper reports in DealBook.

Digital Asset Holdings, the start-up, said it had raised money from 13 financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Citi, BNP Paribas and Santander. The company also signed a deal with Australia’s primary stock exchange, ASX, to provide technology that would speed up the settlement and transfer of money after trades.

Digital Asset Holdings based its technology on the blockchain — the database in which Bitcoin transactions are recorded. It is maintained by users in a decentralized fashion and has been hailed as a faster, more reliable alternative to existing systems.

Financial institutions have been researching ways to use blockchains to modernize their systems and the Nasdaq stock exchange has already integrated it, but questions remain about how the technology can be used in the real world.

The disparity means there are concerns about start-ups like Digital Asset Holdings. Potential investors said it took Ms. Masters longer than expected to pull together her funders and some big-names ultimately declined to participate.

But she still raised more money than had been previously discussed. This round of fund-raising values Digital Asset Holdings at $100 million.

| Contact amie.tsang@nytimes.com

Philips Calls Off Sale of Controlling Stake in LED Business | The Dutch electronics giant said in October that United States regulators had raised “unforeseen concerns” about a deal to dispose of 80.1 percent of the unit.
NYT »

Big Merger in Cable Faces Rising Opposition | If approved, the merger would most likely include strong conditions meant to prevent Charter from leveraging its market power to hurt rival streaming services.
NYT »

How Symantec Let Bad Math Lead to a Shaky Deal | Carlyle’s buyout of the software company’s Veritas unit was never actually worth the $8 billion headline figure, Richard Beales and Jeffrey Goldfarb write in Breakingviews.
Breakingviews »

Asian Brewers Step Up in Battle for SABMiller Beers | Japan’s biggest brewer, Asahi, and Thai Beverage, the maker of Chang beer, are competing with at least four private equity firms to buy the Peroni, Grolsch and Meantime beer brands from Anheuser-Busch InBev.

THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Executive Defends Avon and Cerberus Deal | Avon’s chief executive, Sheri McCoy, said the New York-based company decided to be partners with Cerberus following “an exhaustive review of all our options.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Chinese Firms Are Deep in an Overseas Shopping Frenzy | The Chinese stock market rout this month has not slowed the volume of foreign acquisitions, which has already reached one-third of last year’s record tally, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
BLOOMBERG NEWS

Sell-Off Puts Cloud-Computing Upstarts in Play | The recent market selloff is pummeling the business-technology sector, but it may come with a silver lining for its top players: an opportunity to buy cash-poor upstarts that have been eating away at their business.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Blackstone Gains From Banks’ Financial-Crisis Pain | As banks retreat from businesses regulators deem risky, private-equity firms have entered the breach.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Hong Kong I.P.O. Could Bring Chinese Lender Out of the Shadows | One of China’s 68 trust companies — lightly regulated lending and investment firms whose operations and assets have been largely a black box for outsiders — is seeking underwriters for a listing in Hong Kong as early as the third quarter of this year, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

European Central Bank Says It’s Ready for New Stimulus | Saying “conditions have worsened,’’ Mario Draghi, the central bank president, indicated that new measures might come in March.
NYT »  | How to Make Sense of Plummeting Global Markets

Markets in Asia and Europe Rally as Investors Seek Bargains | Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index staged a forceful rally, closing 5.9 percent higher. Markets in Hong Kong and Shanghai also closed higher.
NYT »

Cuomo Picks Maria Vullo as State’s Top Financial Watchdog | Ms. Vullo was nominated to lead the Department of Financial Services, which was created in 2011 to oversee Wall Street after the financial crisis.
NYT »

Dov Charney Argues in Court for His Return to American Apparel | Mr. Charney, who was fired from American Apparel in 2014, said that the board conspired to wrest control from him and that his alliance with investors was the only way to save the company.
NYT »

This Time, Cheaper Oil Does Little for the U.S. Economy | Oil’s downturn may not have helped the economy because more oil is being produced domestically, and consumers may not be spending their windfalls.
NYT »

Freeport-McMoRan Battles the Oil Slump | Once an aggressive bidder for trophy assets, the company now finds itself in the position of a desperate seller as the price of oil and other commodities falters, James B. Stewart writes in the Common Sense column.
Common Sense »

China’s Vice President Vows to Look After Stock Market Investors | Calling the country’s market “not yet mature,” Vice President Li Yuanchao said the government would bolster regulation in an effort to limit volatility.
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