The latest round of quarterly earnings from the biggest banks on Wall Street cemented one clear signal about how corporate clients are now reacting to President Trump’s tariff threats: They’ve moved on.
Top bank executives made it clear again and again this week that their corporate clients are becoming used to the uncertainty surrounding trade and moving ahead with plans to merge with other companies, raise debt or go public anyway.
“Boardrooms appear more accepting of ongoing uncertainty broadly,” Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO Ted Pick said Wednesday.
Volatility “is going to, I suspect, be a feature, not a bug of the new world order and we will benefit from that,” Citigroup (C) CEO Jane Fraser said Tuesday.
Some said that new negotiations and trade pacts with certain countries also are helping clients get more comfortable with the uncertainty.
A narrower range of outcomes on global trade for clients “sealed their confidence and willingness to transact,” Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon said.
Bank of America (BAC) CEO Brian Moynihan told analysts his clients “continue to see clarity with the changes in trade and tariffs” and “we can see them start to understand the future and expect them to behave accordingly.”
The results backed these statements up.
Cumulative investment banking and trading results across Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) rose compared with the year-ago period.
These five big Wall Street banks reported collective second quarter trading and investment banking revenues of $33.8 billion and $8.7 billion, up 17% and 7% respectively when compared to the second quarter of last year.
Not that the market chaos triggered by Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcement wasn’t felt at all.
“April was just really slow,” Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America’s CFO told reporters during a Wednesday morning call. “Our M&A business did fine in terms of the number of deals this quarter, but the deals that we closed were just smaller,” Borthwick added.
Bank of America and Morgan Stanley reported drops of 9% and 5% across investment banking with both banks seeing weaker fees from their bond underwriting and merger advisory businesses.
Three of the big five lenders, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, saw total investment banking revenue grow from the year ago period.
There was lots of talk from the big banks this week about how a push to deregulate the banks will be a positive for them going forward, with some speculating about a dramatic rollback of bank rules imposed since the 2008 financial crisis.
