The Big Five “Wall Street banks” – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley – reported all-time record jumps in “trading revenue” and profits in the second quarter of 2026. But in the wild enthusiasm of the Wall Street media, there was next to no reporting of lending, what commercial banks are supposed to do as their main business line. The London Financial Times headline was typical: “Wall Street banks smash records on stock trading boom.” It evoked “a speculative trading frenzy in AI-linked groups.”
According to Investment News for July 14, JPMorgan Chase, which the paper took as its example, saw its net revenue rise 27% from a year earlier. Its investment banking revenue rose 30%; “markets revenue,” which combines equity (stock market) income with fixed-income (bond market) revenue, rose by 35%; in “wealth management,” 44,000 new customers found themselves newly wealthy from playing the markets, and “card fees” and other fee income grew by 19%; the “consumer and community banking unit,” which unit can also handle all of the above in these post-Glass-Steagall years, had revenue up 8%. CEO Jamie Dimon exulted, “We’re in a very healthy, active, exuberant market with very high prices and very high volumes, and we benefit from that.”
Other big banks’ results were similar in the above categories.
