They funded the same trade bodies, signed the same comment letters, ran the same advertisements and told regulators the same story about credit, competitiveness and the cost of holding idle equity. 

That campaign has largely worked. The Federal Reserve is now finishing a rewrite of capital rules that will leave the biggest lenders holding less capital than they do today.

And that is precisely where the alliance has broken. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are now feuding over a single technical adjustment inside the Fed’s proposal, with billions of dollars at stake, according to public documents and four people familiar with the discussions who spoke to Reuters. 

The disagreement is narrow, highly technical and almost entirely invisible to anyone outside the regulatory bar. It is also worth more to the banks involved than most of the rest of the package combined.

What the surcharge does
The instrument at the centre of the argument is the capital surcharge applied to global systemically important banks, known as GSIBs. 

There are eight of them in the United States, namely JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon and State Street. 

The surcharge is an extra layer of common equity tier 1 capital they must hold on top of everyone else’s requirements, calibrated to the damage their failure would inflict on the wider system.

The Fed built the surcharge after the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis, originally around five systemic risk factors carrying equal weights of 20% each, one of which was short-term wholesale funding. 

The logic was drawn straight from the wreckage of that period. Before the crash, the largest Wall Street firms funded their balance sheets aggressively with short-term liabilities that, for several of them, disappeared almost overnight, a dynamic that accelerated the collapse of Lehman Brothers and forced Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to convert into bank holding companies.

Short-term wholesale funding, or STWF, covers repurchase agreements, commercial paper, brokered and uninsured wholesale deposits and similar instruments. It is cheap, flexible and prone to vanishing at exactly the moment a bank needs it most.

The tweak that split the room
In March the Fed proposed changes it said would make the surcharge more risk-sensitive, including a revision to how short-term wholesale funding is treated. The mechanics matter here.

At present the Fed measures short-term wholesale funding as a ratio of risk-weighted assets. That normalised comparisons across the eight banks, but it also pushed the effective weighting of the funding measure to roughly 30% of the overall calculation. 

The Fed has proposed scrapping the ratio and simply measuring the absolute dollar amount of short-term wholesale funding a bank carries. 

The recalibration is designed to bring the funding component back to around 20% of aggregate Method 2 GSIB scores, its originally intended weight, with the Fed attributing the drift to early data limitations.

Strip out the jargon and the change is simple. Today a bank’s funding risk is judged relative to how risky its assets are. Under the proposal it would be judged on its own, in dollars.

That single substitution redistributes billions across the industry, because the eight banks look very different once the denominator disappears.

Winners, losers and the maths behind them
The banks that benefit are the ones with small risk-weighted asset books relative to their funding. The banks that lose are the universal lenders with enormous balance sheets that were, in effect, being flattered by a large denominator.

According to 2026 federal data, short-term wholesale funding accounted for 37% of Morgan Stanley’s liabilities and 30% of Goldman Sachs’s. For Bank of America the figure was 24%, and for JPMorgan 21%.

The scoring effects are stark. Morgan Stanley currently carries the highest funding score among the eight at 333 basis points, despite ranking only fifth in absolute terms with $503bn of short-term wholesale funding, because its comparatively small $529 billion risk-weighted asset base inflates the ratio. 

Under the proposal its score would fall to 116 basis points, a decline of 65%. JPMorgan runs by far the largest short-term wholesale funding book at $903 billion, yet ranks only fourth on the current measure at 165 basis points, because its $1.9 trillion risk-weighted asset denominator dilutes the result. 

Under the proposal JPMorgan would move to the top of the table at 208 basis points. Goldman Sachs, second highest today at 271 basis points on $552 billion of funding, would drop to 127 basis points.

Translated into capital, the numbers are large enough to explain the sudden loss of solidarity. The overall package still reduces requirements for all of them, but JPMorgan told the Fed in a June letter that the funding tweak would cost it $13 billion of additional relief it would otherwise have received, and Bank of America $9 billion. 

In the same letter JPMorgan estimated that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would each pick up a further $1 billion to $2 billion, a figure that is its own calculation of a rival’s gain rather than an independent one. 

Better Markets has reached the same directional conclusion, namely that the two investment banks stand to benefit most.

The Main Street argument
The change caught executives at JPMorgan and Bank of America by surprise, the people told Reuters, because the two largest US lenders sit on deep deposit funding and the revision hands the advantage to commercial rivals who rely more heavily on wholesale markets. 

To them it also sat awkwardly with the stated rationale for capital relief under President Donald Trump’s regulators, which has been to expand lending into the real economy.

That has become the core of their public case. According to the same account, JPMorgan and Bank of America executives have lobbied Fed officials, at times in joint meetings, to kill the proposed change, arguing that the new formula could constrain lending and support riskier trading activity instead. 

JPMorgan’s business banking chief Stevie Baron made the argument publicly in a blog post in August, warning that the proposal as drafted would encourage trading over lending to small businesses and customers.

The formal objections were filed in June. In separate comment letters submitted on June 18, JPMorgan and Bank of America told the Fed it had not adequately justified removing risk-weighted assets from the denominator, arguing the change could distort how reliance on short-term funding is measured and produce uneven outcomes across the largest US banks. 

Bank of America’s chief financial officer Alastair Borthwick wrote that a gross funding measure with no denominator risks overstating the danger posed by a larger firm whose relative reliance on such funding is low.

Bank of America has kept its public language broad. A spokesperson said the bank supports changes that drive Main Street lending, job creation and affordability. The Fed, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley all declined to comment.

The case for absolute dollars
The two investment banks take the opposite view, and they have the more orthodox regulatory argument on their side.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley filed their own letters backing the revision, on the grounds that it would improve the accuracy of the surcharge by better aligning the funding measure with the risk it is meant to capture. 

Goldman argued the change would produce a more transparent and economically grounded measure, while Morgan Stanley, which two of the people who spoke to Reuters described as especially active in pressing the case, told the Fed the revision could improve liquidity in the Treasury market by cutting the capital banks must hold against dealing in government bonds.

Financial reform advocates, who agree with almost nothing else in the Fed’s package, agree with them on this point. 

Better Markets argues that the damage a funding run inflicts depends on the absolute dollar volume of run-prone liabilities, not their ratio to a risk-weighted figure, since a bank forced into a fire sale must liquidate real assets at real prices regardless of what risk weights those assets carried. 

The group also notes that scaling by risk-weighted assets creates a perverse incentive, because banks that successfully optimise their risk weights downwards see their funding scores rise, while banks that become genuinely riskier see them fall.

Christopher Appel, director of banking policy at Better Markets and a Fed official from 2019 until March, said the surcharge is a key remaining safeguard as regulators trim overall capital levels and that the revision would better gauge funding risk. 

“It’s absolutely critical that the Fed get this right,” he said. Appel was among many staff who left the central bank this year as the administration overhauled federal agencies.

The wider package
The funding dispute sits inside a far larger rewrite. On March 19, the agencies released a linked set of proposals covering Basel III implementation, a revised standardised approach and the GSIB surcharge methodology, marking a decisive retreat from the 2023 drafts that would have pushed capital requirements sharply higher across the industry. 

Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman set out the logic a week earlier, saying the Basel III element would raise requirements slightly for the largest banks while the surcharge proposal would produce a modest decrease, leaving a small net reduction.

The surcharge proposal does several other things beyond the funding measure. It adjusts the fixed systemic indicator coefficients to account for economic growth and inflation, replaces year-end snapshots with daily and monthly averages, and narrows the Method 2 surcharge bands from 50 basis points to 10 basis points to soften the cliff effects of moving between buckets. 

Industry economists have long complained that fixed denominators calibrated to 2012 and 2013 activity levels cause Method 2 scores to drift upwards over time for reasons unconnected to systemic risk, with a bank holding a constant global market share seeing its size score rise by 29% over the period.

The aggregate figures are substantial. The surcharge proposal alone is expected to cut common equity tier 1 requirements for GSIBs by roughly 3.8%. Taken together, the March package is estimated to reduce required CET1 by up to 4.8% for Category I and II GSIB organisations, 5.2% for Category III and IV regional banks and 7.8% for community banks.

Not everyone at the Fed agreed. Governor Michael Barr put the surcharge cut at $33 billion and said that once the recent changes to the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio are included, tier 1 requirements for GSIBs fall by 6.0%, or $60 billion. 

“These significant reductions in capital requirements are unnecessary and unwise,” he said, while accepting that some elements, including annual averaging and narrower scoring bands, were genuine improvements.

Why the banks still object
It is worth noting that even the banks winning relief are unhappy with the headline outcome. Jamie Dimon told shareholders in April that the proposals remain flawed in specific areas and that some aspects are, in his words, nonsensical, while backing timely finalisation because everyone wants to move on. 

On JPMorgan’s first-quarter call, executives said the bank was planning for a surcharge of 5.2% in 2028, a 70-basis point increase on the current 4.5%, which combined with the Basel III risk-weighted asset changes would mean roughly $20 billion more GSIB capital on its present balance sheet.

That is the frame JPMorgan has adopted throughout. It is not arguing that the surcharge should disappear. 

It is arguing that the calibration remains disconnected from the Fed’s own stated rationale, and that the funding tweak makes the disconnection worse.

The timing explains much of the urgency. The infighting risks complicating the Fed’s effort to finalise the reforms before 2027, when Democrats are widely expected to take the House of Representatives and step up scrutiny of the administration’s regulators.

Access has not been the constraint. JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley executives have each met Fed officials on the GSIB proposal at least four times since March, according to public Fed memos reviewed by Reuters. 

The four people cited by the agency said it was unclear who will prevail. Bowman has told banks to limit their feedback, and three of them believe she will stay close to the current draft, partly because she wants the rule done by year-end.

All four banks support the overhaul in principle. What has changed is that a rare window has opened to maximise individual gains at a rival’s expense. 

The industry pushed for years to soften the surcharge with limited success, and only made progress when the Fed’s 2022 capital review triggered an unprecedented and unified backlash. Unity was the tactic that worked. It has not survived contact with the spoils.

What to watch
Three things will determine how this lands. The first is whether the Fed keeps the absolute-dollar measure intact, softens it with a partial denominator, or phases it in. 

A compromise that preserves the principle while smoothing the distributional effect is the most likely landing zone for a regulator trying to close a file before the calendar turns.

The second is the Treasury market question. Morgan Stanley’s argument that lower capital charges on repo activity would deepen liquidity in government bonds is the one strand of this dispute with consequences well beyond bank shareholders, and it is the argument most likely to resonate inside a central bank that has spent years worrying about Treasury market fragility.

The third is durability. Better Markets has pointed out an internal tension in the package, arguing that if risk-weighted assets cannot be trusted as a denominator for the funding measure, the accompanying Basel III proposal doubles down on the same metric across the rest of the capital framework. 

A rule finalised in December on a narrow supervisory majority, into a Congress about to change hands, is not obviously a settled rule.

For now, the spectacle is the story. Four of the most powerful financial institutions in the world spent a decade arguing that capital regulation was too blunt to reflect real risk. 

The Fed has finally accepted a version of that argument, and two of them have discovered they preferred the blunt version after all.

The post Wall Street’s capital truce collapses over one line in Fed rulebook appeared first on International Finance.

The group, which was first announced in October 2025 when just 10 banks were ⁠involved, also eyes expanding into stablecoins pegged to other G7 currencies, with the euro emerging as the top priority.

Stablecoins, which are used to move money around the world in the form of cryptocurrency, have seen a revival in interest, especially after the rebound in crypto prices in 2024.

United States President Donald Trump’s support for the sector has further sparked the idea of using blockchain in the mainstream financial system.

The financial group will compete with a separate consortium of 37 financial institutions, which formed ‌a ⁠company called Qivalis, with the latter planning to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin later this year.

The post Goldman Sachs, BofA-led consortium plans 2027 stablecoin launch appeared first on International Finance.

According to compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, bonuses for equity traders and equity capital markets bankers are projected to rise by between 20% and 30% this year, the largest increase across Wall Street. Bankers advising on mergers and acquisitions are expected to receive payouts that are 15% to 20% higher than in 2025.

The upbeat outlook follows a strong earnings season for the largest US banks, driven by robust trading volumes, a resurgence in corporate dealmaking and increased underwriting activity.

“Most of the excitement is coming from the equity side, with stock markets at record highs and volatility increasing trading volume,” said Alan Johnson, founder of Johnson Associates.

Investment and commercial bankers are expected to see bonus growth of at least 10% to 15%, while fixed-income traders could receive increases of between 7.5% and 12.5%. Compensation for bankers underwriting bonds and loans is forecast to rise by between 5% and 10%.

The recovery in dealmaking has been one of the biggest drivers of higher compensation. Years of subdued mergers and acquisitions activity have given way to a growing pipeline of transactions, generating substantial fees for Wall Street firms.

Among the year’s biggest mandates was SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering (IPO), which reportedly created a fee pool of around USD 500 million. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which led the deal, are estimated to have earned roughly USD 100 million each, while Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan collected about USD 75 million apiece.

Johnson said the resilience of the US economy had surprised many bankers, despite geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, inflationary pressures and shifting expectations around interest rates.

The post Trading, dealmaking booms to hand Wall Street bankers bumper bonuses, says consultancy appeared first on International Finance.

While investments in most private equity, private infrastructure, private real estate and private credit traditionally have been dominated by institutional investors like pension funds, asset managers are now looking to challenge the monopoly by increasingly offering their services to people seeking better returns on their personal wealth.

“One of the new vehicles, the WVB All Markets Fund, will blend public equities, fixed income and index strategies and Blackstone’s private markets offerings, while the WVB Blackstone All Privates ⁠Fund will give access across Blackstone’s platform,” the companies said in a statement.

WVB All Markets Fund will be the multi-asset solution for investors who want to simplify the integration of public and private markets.

“The fund will integrate Wellington’s expertise in active public equities and Vanguard’s strengths in active fixed income and index strategies with exposure to Blackstone’s leading perpetual private markets platform. The fund will trade under the tickers WVBIX, WVBAX, and WVBMX,” the alliance remarked.

WVB Blackstone All Privates Fund, on the other hand, will serve as a professionally managed solution providing a simple access point to Blackstone’s leading perpetual private markets platform, putting private equity, private infrastructure, private real estate, and private credit in a single bracket.

“The new closed-end funds will be available at launch to Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank clients, providing advisors on one of the industry’s leading wealth management platforms with access to the first solutions from the strategic alliance. The alliance also anticipates broad participation and adoption from the RIA community and will explore additional distribution opportunities across the wealth ecosystem over time,” the companies added further.

“Our clients are increasingly seeking broader access to private markets and thoughtful ways to implement these strategies over time. Our scale and integrated platforms are expanding access to differentiated investment opportunities that can support more resilient long-term portfolios,” said Mark Sutterlin, head of alternative investments at Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank.

The solutions will help advisors build more diversified portfolios for high-net-worth and mass-affluent clients in a simplified investment framework. The funds have been tailored to assist advisors in constructing long-term portfolios that seek strong performance, long-term growth, and broad portfolio diversification.

Elaborating more about the product, the allinace said, The WVB All Markets Fund and WVB Blackstone All Privates Fund bring together Wellington’s nearly 100-year heritage of active management, fundamental research, and multi-asset allocation expertise; Vanguard’s 50-year legacy of delivering high-performing active strategies and index funds with a relentless focus on cost efficiency and investor outcomes; and Blackstone’s 40-year track record of cycle-tested performance and leadership position as the world’s largest alternative asset manager and number one provider of private markets solutions for individuals.”

“The launch of the WVB All Markets and WVB Blackstone All Privates Funds reflects the strength of our strategic alliance with Vanguard and Blackstone. By combining our deep active management and asset allocation capabilities with Vanguard’s scale and expertise in fixed income and indexing and Blackstone’s leadership in private markets, we are delivering thoughtfully constructed solutions designed to meet investors’ evolving needs. We are particularly pleased to introduce these funds initially through the powerful Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank platforms,” said Jean M. Hynes, CEO and Managing Partner, Wellington Management.

“For five decades, Vanguard has worked to improve investor outcomes through disciplined active management, low-cost index strategies, and a client-focused approach. Through this collaboration with Wellington and Blackstone, we are extending that mission into integrated public and private market solutions. Launching these funds with Bank of America Private Bank and Merrill is an important first step in expanding access to those solutions,” remarked Greg Davis, President and CIO of Vanguard.

“Blackstone has delivered performance in private markets for individuals for more than two decades, helping them access the premium returns, lower volatility, and diversification that private markets can provide. These new solutions bring together the performance and scale of Blackstone’s private markets platform with the exceptional strengths of Wellington and Vanguard, creating simple and comprehensive access for advisors and their clients to help build long-term wealth,” concluded Jon Gray, President and COO of Blackstone.

The post Alliance of Wellington, Vanguard, Blackstone launches funds targeting wealthy investors appeared first on International Finance.

That revenue came from broadcasting, sponsorship, licencing and ticketing, all controlled centrally by FIFA, meaning the organisation captured the upside while leaving host cities to absorb most of the costs, according to researchers who study the economics of the tournament. It was a structural feature of how modern World Cups are financed, not a one-off quirk of 2026.

Gains for broadcasters
Broadcasters had a good tournament too, though the picture was uneven. Fox paid an estimated USD 485 million for US English-language rights, a sum several industry analysts reckoned was two to three times below what the rights should have commanded in an open market.

That discount translated into outsized returns: strong ratings, including the most-watched English-language soccer broadcast in US history for a USA last-32 tie, left Fox on course for close to USD 1 billion in advertising revenue from the tournament alone.

T-Mobile’s new AI tool will not let smartphones hang at FIFA World Cup

Telemundo, which held Spanish-language rights, had sold 90% of its inventory before a ball was kicked, with Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America and Coca-Cola among the buyers.

FIFA’s decision to introduce mandatory in-game hydration breaks, framed as a player-welfare measure given the summer heat across host cities, doubled as a lucrative piece of advertising real estate.

Fox alone was expected to generate around USD 250 million from the breaks, with 30-second spots during the early rounds fetching USD 200,000 to USD 300,000, and premium knockout-stage inventory rising to USD 750,000.

British broadcasters took a different path: the advertising-free BBC and the heavily regulated ITV declined to commercialise the pauses, even as ITV reported it had sold out its regular inventory and delivered record World Cup revenues regardless.

Tournament sponsors
Sponsorship followed a similar trajectory. Analysts at Ampere put 2026 sponsorship revenue at around USD 2.4 billion, up more than a third on Qatar, while the top tier of official FIFA partners paid between USD 65 million and USD 95 million for the rights to use tournament branding. The United States, as host, dominated the sponsor roster, accounting for 14 of the 26 commercial backers on FIFA’s books.

Gambling firms were another clear beneficiary. With more than 100 matches on the calendar, up from 64 in 2022, financial services firm Macquarie estimated roughly USD 50 billion was wagered globally, or about USD 500 million a match, making it the largest betting event ever recorded. Flutter Entertainment, owner of Paddy Power, Betfair and Sky Bet, reported a corresponding jump in stakes placed through its platforms.

Impact on host cities
The picture looked rather different at street level. FIFA’s own projections, produced with the World Trade Organization, put the global GDP impact of the tournament at USD 40.9 billion, with the US capturing USD 17 billion of that and roughly 185,000 jobs created, concentrated in hospitality and accommodation.

Set against annual US output, though, that gain amounted to a rounding error: Saxo Bank calculated it at less than 0.1% of GDP, hardly the growth driver host-city officials sometimes implied it would be.

Sports economist Victor Matheson of the College of the Holy Cross put it plainly to ABC News before a ball was kicked: Cities should expect a mix of winners and losers, not a uniform windfall. That call held up.

Philadelphia, for example, had anticipated around USD 770 million in local economic impact, among the largest of the eleven US host cities, but the spending clustered tightly around stadiums and tourist districts rather than spreading through the wider local economy.

Canadian host cities illustrated the cost side starkly. Hotel rates in Toronto and Vancouver rose 200% to 300% during match weeks, pushing a typical $200 room past $600. Airbnb had offered Toronto homeowners cash incentives to list their properties for the tournament, a move tenant advocates warned would accelerate displacement of long-term renters.

Transit systems absorbed costs FIFA didn’t cover: New Jersey’s transit authority faced a USD 48 million bill to move fans to and from matches, while Boston raised its game-day rail fare to the stadium to USD 80.

Post-tournament scenario
History suggested some of the enthusiasm would cool once the tournament ended, and the data bore that out. Laboure had pointed to France 1998, when post-tournament demand fell well short of pre-event hype.

By April, around 80% of US hotel operators were already reporting bookings running below forecast; two-thirds of New York hoteliers said the same; and in Seattle, almost eight in 10 hotels described the tournament as something close to a non-event commercially. Final numbers, host cities say, did little to change that verdict.

FIFA World Cup 2034 to bring positive momentum to Saudi stock market: Report

Alexander Budzier, a fellow in management practice at Oxford University and chief executive of Oxford Global Projects, was blunter still, arguing that the long-term economic benefits claimed for hosting major sporting events routinely fail to materialise once independent researchers examine the data afterwards, rather than the inflated projections issued beforehand.

And, the winner is…
None of that troubled FIFA’s finances. Between broadcasting fees, sponsorship and ticketing, the organisation’s revenue streams stayed largely insulated from whether individual host cities saw a lasting boost or a temporary sugar rush.

For Fox, Telemundo and the major sponsors, the tournament delivered handsomely. For the taxpayers of Toronto, Boston and a dozen other host cities left holding transit bills and watching hotel booking curves undershoot, the reckoning looks set to take rather longer to arrive, if it arrives in a form they can see on a balance sheet at all.

The post FIFA World Cup 2026: Who got the cash, and who was left with the bill appeared first on International Finance.

Few chief executives anywhere have become so bound up with the company they run that markets have coined a phrase for the value they personally add to the stock price.

That phrase is the “Jamie Premium.” And this summer, it is being put to its biggest test yet, as JPMorgan edges towards becoming the first bank in history to touch a USD 1 trillion market valuation.

The bank’s roots go back to 1799. Understanding how it got here means understanding the man who has run it for the last twenty years.

Who Is Jamie Dimon
James “Jamie” Dimon was born in New York City in 1956, the son of a stockbroker at American Express. He has said he picked up the language of markets at the family dinner table long before he ever set foot on a trading floor.

After Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, he joined Sandy Weill, the dealmaker who spent the 1980s and 90s stitching together what would eventually become Citigroup. Dimon was Weill’s right hand through most of it.

Then it fell apart. Weill fired Dimon in 1998, ending a 15-year working relationship that had, until that point, looked unshakeable. Dimon later said the episode hit his net worth harder than his self-worth, which is a tidy line for a man who spent the next 18 months weighing his options, including a serious conversation with Jeff Bezos about joining Amazon.

He chose banking instead. In March 2000, he took over as CEO of Bank One, a troubled Chicago lender that one analyst at the time said even Hercules couldn’t fix. Dimon put USD 60 million of his own money into the stock on his first day, cut costs, tightened up risk controls, and turned a bank that had posted a USD 511 million loss into one earning USD 3.5 billion within three years.

That turnaround caught JPMorgan’s attention. The two banks merged in 2004, and by the end of 2005, Dimon was CEO of the combined JPMorgan Chase. He took the chairman’s title a year later and has not left either post since, making him the longest-serving chief executive among America’s biggest banks by a considerable distance.

The Moves That Built an Empire
Dimon’s reputation was not built in the good years. It was built in 2008. While most of Wall Street was either drowning or being bailed out, JPMorgan went shopping.

In March that year, as Bear Stearns teetered on collapse, JPMorgan agreed to buy the storied investment bank for close to USD 1.4 billion, a fire-sale price backed by emergency Federal Reserve financing.

Six months later, Washington Mutual failed, still the largest bank collapse in US history, and JPMorgan bought its banking operations for roughly USD 1.9 billion.

Neither deal was clean. Both came loaded with legal exposure and legacy mortgage problems that JPMorgan spent years, and billions of dollars, untangling with regulators afterwards.

Dimon himself later grumbled that the two acquisitions became a convenient scapegoat for legal headaches the bank had inherited rather than caused. Still, the strategic logic held up. Lehman Brothers was gone.

Merrill Lynch had been sold in a rushed weekend deal. Wachovia had failed. JPMorgan, in the space of a single terrible year, had added a top-tier investment bank and a huge consumer deposit base while nearly everyone else on the street was shrinking.

The bank’s next real stress test came in 2012, when a botched derivatives trade out of its London office, the so-called “London Whale,” cost more than USD 6 billion and briefly dented Dimon’s reputation for having risk under control. He didn’t dress it up.

“The London Whale was the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of,” he wrote in his 2013 shareholder letter, a rare moment of a Wall Street chief executive owning a failure in plain language rather than corporate hedging.

He testified before Congress, rebuilt the risk function, and moved on. It remains the closest JPMorgan has come to a genuine credibility crisis on his watch, which says something, given how long that watch has now run.

What followed was less dramatic but arguably more important. Dimon built what the bank now calls its “fortress balance sheet,” a deliberately conservative capital cushion meant to absorb shocks that would sink less careful rivals. He had been saying as much for years.

“It’s hard to predict when a storm will happen, but one thing is inevitable, it will happen,” he wrote in a shareholder letter back in 2002, long before most of Wall Street took the warning seriously.

That philosophy was tested again in March 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank both collapsed within weeks of each other. Dimon personally led efforts to organise a rescue for First Republic.

When that rescue failed, JPMorgan bought the bank’s assets and deposits outright, adding yet another chunk of the US consumer banking market to its own.

He also pushed the bank hard into technology, spending billions annually on digital banking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, and built out its investment banking and trading arms so JPMorgan could compete seriously on both Wall Street dealmaking and Main Street lending at once, a combination few of its rivals can match at the same scale.

Record Numbers, Record Milestone
All of that is what has JPMorgan sitting at the edge of a historic number right now. In the second quarter of 2026, the bank posted net income of USD 21.2 billion, the highest quarterly profit any American bank has ever reported.

Total managed revenue climbed 27% year-on-year to USD 58 billion, helped by a surge in trading revenue, a rebound in investment banking fees, and a large one-time gain on the bank’s Visa stake. Strip that gain out and adjusted profit was still USD 16.9 billion, with a return on tangible common equity of 23%.

Loans grew 9% to USD 1.54 trillion. Deposits rose to USD 2.71 trillion. Credit quality, meanwhile, actually improved slightly, with card loss rates ticking down year-on-year, which suggests the growth isn’t coming from looser lending standards.

Put it together and JPMorgan’s market capitalisation sat at roughly USD 920 to 935 billion in mid-July 2026, within touching distance of USD 1 trillion. No bank has ever crossed that line. Getting there would put JPMorgan in a club currently occupied almost entirely by technology giants like Tesla, Meta, and Broadcom.

For context, JPMorgan’s current valuation is roughly equal to the combined market value of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup, three of its biggest domestic rivals, added together.

Explaining the “Jamie Premium”
Which brings us back to the Jamie Premium. It isn’t an official financial metric. You won’t find it in a filing. It’s a term analysts and investors use to describe the extra value the market attaches to JPMorgan simply because Dimon is the one running it, over and above what the bank’s underlying numbers alone would justify.

Investors and analysts have pegged that premium at somewhere between 10% and 15% of the stock’s value, a real sum given the size of the company.

The idea makes sense once you break it down. Buying JPMorgan stock isn’t just a bet on the bank’s assets and earnings. It’s also a bet on the judgement of the person deciding where that capital goes and how much risk to take with it, particularly through the next crisis nobody can yet see coming.

Dimon has now steered the bank through the 2008 crash, the European debt scare, a pandemic, the 2023 regional banking wobble, and a string of geopolitical shocks, without a single full-year loss along the way.

That record shows up in how the market prices the stock. When Dimon told an investor conference the shares were “very valuable,” traders piled in within hours, sending JPMorgan’s stock sharply higher.

There’s a catch, though. A premium built around one man is also a risk concentrated in one man. Dimon has spoken openly about succession, and the board has already said it plans to eventually split the chairman and CEO roles once he steps back.

Most analysts expect at least part of the Jamie Premium to fade whenever that handover happens, no matter how capable the next person turns out to be. Two decades of proven judgement isn’t something a successor can simply inherit on day one.

That day hasn’t come yet. For now, JPMorgan is standing at the edge of a milestone no bank has ever reached, carrying both the payoff of twenty years of disciplined, occasionally opportunistic leadership and the pressure of having almost no margin left for a mistake.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Inside Jamie Dimon’s rewiring of JPMorgan into Wall Street giant appeared first on International Finance.

The results suggest that corporate America has regained confidence after two years of subdued mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity and a prolonged drought in initial public offerings (IPOs).

Companies returned to debt and equity markets during the quarter, while volatile financial markets generated strong client activity that boosted trading desks across Wall Street.

Collectively, the five banking giants earned close to USD 49 billion in quarterly profit, highlighting the strength of the industry’s recovery and providing a positive signal for the broader American economy.

Breaking down the numbers
JPMorgan Chase once again led the pack, reporting net income of USD 21.2 billion, or USD 16.9 billion excluding one-off items, on revenue of USD 57.4 billion. Investment banking fees jumped 45%, while equities trading revenue surged 86%, helping the bank post another record-breaking quarter.

A wave of big-ticket IPOs and dealmaking made the venture the highest gainer among the American banks. The investment banking division, now run by recently promoted executive Doug Petno, rode a sharp rebound in the American IPO market, led by the blockbuster market debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. JPMorgan was among the lead underwriters on the deal.

The ⁠bank has raised its forecast for 2026 expenses to USD 107.5 billion from USD 105 billion on the back of higher volume and revenue-related expenses. JPMorgan’s market value currently stands at more than USD 920 billion, very close to Wall Street’s elite trillion-dollar club.

One of the major talking points from JPMorgan’s earning report was the 30% yearly jump in its investment banking fees. The bank was part of several landmark transactions during Q2, including as co-adviser on NextEra Energy’s USD 67 billion merger with Dominion Energy, apart from being the lead active bookrunner on Alphabet’s USD 85 billion equity offering.

JPMorgan gained massively from the positive momentum seen in the global M&A activities, whose value, so far in 2026, has gone beyond USD 3 trillion, as per the Dealogic data. The bank’s equity trading revenue surged 86%, while fixed-income trading revenue increased 6%.

Bank of America also exceeded market expectations, reporting quarterly profit of USD 9.1 billion, up 27% from a year earlier, on revenue of USD 31.6 billion. The bank benefited from resilient consumer spending, higher investment banking fees, and solid trading income as clients remained active in financial markets.

The venture’s Q2 sales and trading revenue jumped 33% to a record USD 7.1 billion from USD 5.3 billion a year earlier, outpacing CEO Brian Moynihan’s expectations of a 15% rise. Equities revenue climbed 70% to USD 3.6 billion.

The bank reported a net income of USD 9.1 billion, or USD 1.21 per share, in the three months ended June 30, compared with USD 7.2 billion, or 90 cents per share, a year earlier. Shares of the bank, with about an 8% gain so far in 2026, have outperformed peers JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

Just like JPMorgan, an upbeat global M&A ended up benefiting Bank of America as well. Its securities division acted as a joint book-running manager for the SpaceX IPO. Along with JPMorgan, the venture was also the financial advisor for NextEra Energy’s USD 66.8 billion deal to buy Dominion Energy. BofA’s total investment banking fees jumped 50% to USD 2.1 billion in the second quarter.

The bank’s net interest income (NII), the difference between what it earns on loans and pays out on deposits, rose 9% ⁠to USD 16 billion in the quarter from a year earlier. Average loans and leases rose 8% as well.

CFO Alastair Borthwick said that the positive forecast for full-year NII growth was supported by anticipated loan and deposit growth, fixed-rate asset repricing, and balance sheet optimization.

Citigroup delivered one of the strongest percentage increases among its peers. Quarterly profit rose 45% to USD 5.8 billion on revenue of USD 24.8 billion, driven by its strongest investment banking performance in several years and robust trading revenues.

Goldman Sachs, whose business is more heavily dependent on Wall Street activity than consumer banking, enjoyed one of the biggest earnings rebounds of the quarter.

Net income climbed 78% to USD 6.6 billion as a resurgence in M&A advisory work, equity underwriting, and market volatility fueled a sharp increase in investment banking and trading income.

Wells Fargo, traditionally more reliant on commercial and retail banking, also reported better-than-expected results. The bank posted a quarterly profit of USD 6.4 billion on revenue of USD 22.6 billion, with stronger commercial banking performance, improving credit quality, and higher fee income offsetting pressure on net interest income.

Analyzing things
After two years during which higher interest rates made net interest income the primary earnings driver, investment banking has once again taken center stage.

The recovery reflects a marked improvement in corporate confidence. Businesses that delayed acquisitions, public listings, and debt issuance during periods of economic uncertainty are returning to capital markets as financing conditions improve and expectations grow that the US Federal Reserve could begin easing monetary policy over the coming year.

At the same time, heightened volatility across equity, bond, and currency markets generated increased client activity, providing a significant boost to trading operations.

For Wall Street’s largest banks, this shift is important because it broadens earnings beyond traditional lending. While loan growth remains modest and deposit competition continues to pressure margins, stronger fee income from advisory work, underwriting, and trading offers a more diversified and sustainable source of profitability.

Another encouraging takeaway from the earnings was the resilience of the US consumer. Despite elevated borrowing costs and persistent inflation, household spending has remained healthy, and banks have not reported a significant deterioration in credit quality. Loan losses remain broadly contained, suggesting consumers continue to manage higher interest rates better than many economists had anticipated.

Technology companies are rushing to fund AI infrastructure, a trend that will further boost dealmaking and financing activities for Wall Street, generating lucrative fees ‌from capital raising and loans.

Goldman, which has already benefitted from its status of being the lead left underwriter on the SpaceX IPO, is all set to play a major role alongside Morgan Stanley in the upcoming listing of Anthropic. Citigroup, on the other hand, as a joint global co-ordinator on the SK Hynix sale, earned over USD 70 million from the deal.

BofA, since 2025, has helped raise nearly USD 500 billion for AI-related companies, accounting for 60% of such fundraising across investment-grade debt, while leveraging finance and equity capital markets.

Meta Platforms is working with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase on a roughly USD 13 billion financing ⁠package for a data center in El Paso, Texas. As per JPMorgan’s Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum, the firm is seeing decent capital expenditure and loan demand from companies that may not be AI-related but have an indirect ⁠link.

Still, caution remains
Nevertheless, bank executives struck a cautious tone about the second half of the year. Uncertainty surrounding US trade policy, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and Europe, and the trajectory of inflation could all influence corporate activity and financial markets in the months ahead. A slower pace of interest-rate cuts than currently anticipated could also affect borrowing demand and capital market activity.

Investors, meanwhile, responded cautiously despite the strong results. Analysts noted that many of the positive earnings drivers had already been priced into bank shares, while rising operating expenses and lofty valuations tempered enthusiasm. Even so, the first batch of earnings has delivered a strong opening to the reporting season.

Rather than relying solely on the benefits of higher interest rates, America’s biggest lenders are once again generating growth from the businesses that traditionally define Wall Street—advising companies on mergers, underwriting stock offerings, and helping investors navigate increasingly active financial markets.

Because the country’s largest banks sit at the center of corporate finance, consumer lending, and capital markets, their performance is widely regarded as an early indicator of economic momentum. Strong earnings across all five institutions suggest businesses are investing again, consumers remain willing to spend, and financial markets are regaining confidence.

If those trends continue through the second half of the year, Wall Street’s biggest banks may have done more than deliver impressive quarterly results – they may have provided the clearest indication yet that corporate America is entering a new phase of recovery, with investment banking, rather than interest rates, leading the way.

The post IF Insights: Wall Street’s investment banking rebounds on strong Q2 earnings appeared first on International Finance.

However, SpaceX was not alone, as shares of other US space companies were also down. Rocket Lab and Planet Labs ‌dropped around 3%, ⁠while AST SpaceMobile and ⁠Intuitive Machines declined around 7% and 3%, respectively.

Retail investors bought up SpaceX shares aggressively for the last three sessions, with a total net purchase of ‌over USD 300 million. On June 18, however, things remained muted, with ⁠only USD 9.1 million worth of net purchases noted by 2:00 pm ET (Eastern Time), as per Vanda Research.

Due to its relatively small public float and high valuation, analysts and portfolio managers have been cautioning investors to anticipate volatility early in SpaceX’s life as a public company. The stock’s five-day volume-weighted average price, or VWAP, on June 18, stood at USD 181.71 a share. As a metric, VWAP measures the average price a security has traded throughout the day, weighted by trading volume.

Going by the VWAP, a preferred measure used by traders to gauge investors’ positioning, the average post-IPO buyer is now in a near break-even situation. The decline has reportedly narrowed the profits for thousands of retail investors who gained access to the IPO through brokerage platforms like Robinhood, Fidelity, and SoFi.

“While many individual investors received only a fraction of the shares they requested—in some cases just one or a handful of shares—those allocations were purchased at the USD 135 offering price, leaving them with gains even after the recent pullback. After briefly pushing SpaceX’s market value close to USD 3 trillion, investors have begun reassessing whether the stock’s rapid advance can be justified by fundamentals,” reported CNBC.

Meanwhile, SpaceX, on June 16, announced the acquisition of Anysphere, the ⁠startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for USD 60 billion in stocks to boost its presence in the lucrative enterprise AI tools market.

The rockets-to-AI firm’s bankers are now reportedly preparing to meet investors to discuss ‌a bond offering of at least USD 20 billion, as the company, post its change of status as a newly public entity, seeks funding for an ambitious and capital-intensive AI expansion under which it eyes spending tens ⁠of billions of dollars in investment for data centers, computing hardware, and power infrastructure.

The offering would also mark the first time SpaceX is issuing investment-grade dollar bonds. Proceeds from the debt offering would refinance a USD 20 billion bridge loan that SpaceX took out earlier in 2024 after acquiring Musk’s AI startup xAI in February. Bank ‌of ⁠America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley provided the bridge financing and are reportedly expected to run the bond offering as well.

The post SpaceX’s IPO craze fizzles as rocket-and-AI firm’s shares lose momentum appeared first on International Finance.

As per JPMorgan, Banerjee, the global head of semiconductor investment banking ⁠and electronics at BofA, will join the financial institution as a managing director, to support the venture’s semiconductor and electronics clients.

Milani, who was BofA’s head of Americas internet investment banking, will be the banking biggie’s new managing director, apart from one of the spearheads of its AI effort.

Banerjee, during his four year stint at BofA, emerged as a successful dealmaker, after advising on nearly a dozen marquee transactions in the semiconductor sector, including ASML’s USD 1.4 billion investment in Mistral AI, IonQ’s USD 1.8 billion acquisition of Skywater, USD 8.2 billion sale of National Instruments to Emerson, USD 1.45 billion sale of EA Elektro-Automatik to Fortive, USD 339 million sale of Transphorm to Renesas and USD 600 million sale of AMI to THL ‌Partners.

Banerjee also advised on the restructuring of Renesas Electronics’ USD 2.1 billion investment in Wolfspeed, along with Intel’s USD 400 million minority sale of IMS and the USD 1 billion minority investment in Coherent’s silicon carbide semiconductor business.

Milani, on the other hand, as a leading internet banker at Bank of America, had worked on M&A advisory, financing deals for ⁠DoorDash, Unity Software, Lyft, Zillow Group, RealReal, Match Group, Grindr, Pinterest, Affirm Holdings, SoFi Technologies, Opendoor Technologies and Snap.

The high-profile inductions come in the backdrop of the financial biggie doubling down on its technology investment banking and M&A groups. By March 2026, rising AI investments pushed the JPMorgan’s technology budget toward USD 19.8 billion.

As per the reports, the venture has been steadily increasing its technology investment, covering areas like cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data systems, along with AI tools.

The post JPMorgan hires top tech investment talents from Bank of America appeared first on International Finance.

The note further echoed the bitcoin allocations recommended by other major asset managers. Recently, Bank of America greenlit wealth advisors to recommend a BTC allocation of up to 4%, while BlackRock has pointed to 2%. The guidance further emphasises Bitcoin’s role as a complementary portfolio component rather than a core holding.

Eid emphasised a measured approach, not turning crypto into the centrepiece of a portfolio but using it as a complementary asset that can help absorb shocks from currency depreciation and global volatility. It is worth mentioning that Brazilian investors experienced heightened volatility as the real strengthened approximately 17% against the dollar in 2025. This currency volatility also amplified local losses for investors holding dollar-denominated assets like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin (BTC), the virtual currency, had a turbulent 2025, which saw the cryptocurrency surge to an all-time high above USD 125,000 in October before retreating to current levels around USD 90,000.

“An asset distinct from fixed income, traditional stocks, or domestic markets, with its own dynamics, return potential, and — due to its global and decentralised nature — a currency hedging function. The idea is not to make crypto assets the core of the portfolio but to include them as a complementary component — sized appropriately to the investor’s risk profile,” Eid wrote.

Products like BITI11, a bitcoin ETF traded in Brazil, saw their performance in reais affected by the weakening fiat currency. But in periods of stress, like the one seen in late 2024, the global nature of BTC provided some insulation.

Eid, however, warned against trying to time the market and suggested a disciplined, long-term mindset. A small, steady exposure to bitcoin can act as a partial hedge and offer access to global returns, especially as traditional asset correlations become less reliable.

“It calls for moderation and discipline: set a strategic slice (for example, 1%–3% of the total portfolio), keep a long-term horizon and resist the temptation to react to short-term noise,” Eid concluded.

Talking about Itau and the crypto market, the venture, in September 2025, established a specialised unit within its asset management arm, “Itau Asset,” to develop cryptocurrency investment products. Itau Asset is currently led by Joao Marco Cunha, formerly managing director at crypto asset manager Hashdex. Itau is right now managing three regulated cryptocurrency products with combined net assets of RUSD 850 million (USD 156 million).

These include a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, the “Itau Bitcoin Index Unit Trust Fund” and the “Itau Flexprev Bitcoin Pension Fund.” Through its “Ion Itau” investment platform, customers can directly trade ten cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and the USDC stablecoin.

The post Brazil’s biggest asset manager urges investors to back bitcoin appeared first on International Finance.