Matt Levine, Columnist

Bank of America Made $168 Million Last Quarter, More or Less

A bank's earnings are a quantum event; they are entirely probabilistic, and the answer you get depends on who's doing the observing.

October 15, 2014 at 8:48 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Bank of America reported earnings this morning, and here is your fun quiz on those earnings. It has one question. The question is, was Bank of America's income last quarter:

I mean, right there in the headline of the earnings release, you can see that Bank of America made $168 million last quarter, which is a positive number with nine whole digits. It had to pay $238 million of dividends to its preferred stockholders, though, so after those dividends it lost $70 million, a negative number. So right there it's a mess.