Economics
Banks Brush Off Market Uncertainty With Record Deal Fees
- Investment banking, consumer lending lead to higher profit
- Biggest firms earn more than $29 billion, helped by tax cuts
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Rising uncertainty in markets didn’t stop the biggest U.S. banks from hauling in record revenue from investment banking.
Wall Street’s largest firms posted a surprise jump in advisory and underwriting fees that took their total to $8.54 billion. That, along with better-than-expected trading gains and the lowest level of bad loans in almost a decade, led the six biggest U.S. lenders to report second-quarter earnings that mostly surpassed estimates.