Rebecca Ungarino

The coming batch of report cards from America’s largest banks is set to reflect that Wall Street’s core businesses are doing exceptionally well, driven by a Main Street that’s doing well enough. Strong equities-trading and investment-banking activity this spring should propel earnings at Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, which each report within hours of each other on Tuesday. Morgan Stanley, U.S. Bancorp, and other lenders are scheduled to report in the days after.

JPMorgan Chase’s profit in the second quarter rose 41% from a year ago to $21.2 billion, the bank said Tuesday. Excluding significant items, the bank's’s net income was $16.9 billion. Shares of the largest U.S. bank rose 1.3% in premarket trading.

Citigroup’s profit in the second quarter rose 45% from a year ago to $5.8 billion, the bank said Tuesday. That amounted to $3.15 a share, topping the $2.74 that analysts expected. Revenue of $24.8 billion topped the $23.

JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets, raised its net interest income outlook for 2026, saying it now expects full-year net interest income of some $105.5 billion, depending on market conditions, or $96.5 billion excluding the bank’s markets business. Investors closely track net interest income, or NII, as both a core measure of banks’ profitability in their core function—lending—and as a significant revenue driver. NII represents the sum that banks generate from interest-earning assets, such as loans and mortgages, less what they pay back out to customers.

Mike Santomassimo, the bank’s CFO, attributed the positive credit trends to the U.S. economy and consumers remaining resilient even in the face of stickier-than-expected inflation. Santomassimo attributed that sturdiness to a relatively stable jobs environment. “We are not seeing cracks,” Santomassimo said on a call with reporters.

Under CEO Jane Fraser, Citigroup has spent years working to fix its internal processes, risk management, and performance—and now the bank is nearing the end of what it calls its “transformation” initiative. “We’ve made substantive progress and reached completion of our programs in our controls and risk-management facets,” Citi CFO Gonzalo Luchetti told reporters on Tuesday. Fraser said at Citi’s investor day presentation this past May that some 90% of work tied to the transformation initiative has reached, or has nearly reached, management’s desired state.

Mike Mayo, the widely-followed bank analyst at Wells Fargo, has grilled JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on quarterly earnings calls for years. JPMorgan’s call with analysts on Tuesday was no exception. Mayo asked Dimon why he was confident that Troy Rohrbaugh, the newly named bank co-president and chief of the vast Chase consumer- and community-banking business, was the right person for the role.

Many of the same factors have propelled big banks’ strong performance: a solid economic backdrop with low unemployment, corporate clients’ appetite for executing big deals, and lots of trading activity.

Shares of Citigroup fell 5% on Tuesday after the bank reported second-quarter earnings that underwhelmed investors, diverging from rival lenders whose shares rose in afternoon trading. The move was the largest decline since April 4, 2025, when Citi’s stock fell 7.8% following President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announcement. Citi reiterated its earlier full-year target of 10%-11% for return on tangible common equity, or RoTCE.

Heads of the largest U.S. lenders say their bankers have more deals lined up—even after their latest earnings results showed strong growth, thanks to clients’ confidence in carrying out big-ticket transactions. Goldman Sachs ’ investment-banking fees jumped 55% from a year ago to $3.4 billion in the second quarter. Strategic mergers and acquisitions have been the largest driver of that work, he said, while management teams look to seize on a more relaxed regulatory environment around dealmaking.