Record Profits Are Still in Sight for Big Banks Despite Rate Cuts
- Top U.S. firms stay on pace to top last year’s $120 billion
- Results upend expectations for trading, investment banking
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For the first time in four years, interest rates hurt instead of helped the biggest U.S. banks. It wasn’t enough to knock them off pace to top last year’s profit record.
Revenue at the six largest firms climbed from a year earlier for the 12th time in the past 13 quarters, helped by better-than-expected gains in trading and a surprise jump in investment banking. JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s biggest bank, notched a new revenue record. That all came in spite of the group’s net interest income posting its first drop since 2015 as the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates twice in the quarter.