With Stocks (and Financials) At All Time Highs, Bank Earnings Are Landing — To Mixed Results
‘Tis the season! Christmas in July? No. Earnings season. It’s back and bound to excite, starting as it always does — with the banks.
Last we were celebrating this quarterly festivity, we weren’t celebrating at all. We were fretting about novel concepts like tariffs, credit downgrade drama, and a tumbling dollar. Some things never change — but on the bright side, the market is back at all-time highs.
And in recent days, so too are financials. Is that rally bound to continue?
Bank boom or bust? In recent weeks, after acing the Fed’s annual stress tests, financial institutions popped to all-time highs on news that they’d raise their dividends or conduct beefy share buybacks. That was perhaps the canary in the coalmine — that results for this quarter wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for many financial giants, even if there were declines in revenue or profit. Really, what we were looking for was commentary from the 40,000 ft point of view of the economy — and what we got was confidence-inducing.
- Reports from JPMorganJPM and CitigroupC were boosted by trading and banking revenue, while custodian bank BNYBNY raised its net interest income outlook.
- Per WSJ, card spending atJPM andC rose 7% and 4% year-over-year, with Citigroup CFO Mark Mason praising the “underlying strength of the US.”
On the Flipside
In general, the first bank reports offered cautious optimism about the quarter-long recovery seen on Wall Street, but left the door open in regards to trade jitters. That’s because economists still widely hold that tariffs will lead to higher prices and inflation. And some of that pessimism is more pronounced in other, less optimistic reports.
- Wells FargoWFC cut its full-year guidance, expecting flat or limited NII growth this year, citing the uncertainty in the economy in the latest quarter.
- Asset management was also a tough point as State StreetSTT and BlackRockBLK, which own the SPDR and iShares ETFs, weathered outflows and large withdrawals.
What’s next on deck? Although the reports from the big boys offered reason for excitement for an upbeat start to earnings season, one major theme to watch in Q2 earnings season is how companies feel given the still-uncertain state of trade and tariffs. We’ll be digesting more bank reports from firms like Bank of AmericaBAC, Morgan StanleyMS, and Goldman SachsGS, among others, before ceding the floor to a wider variety of firms.