Morgan Stanley, the smallest of the six U.S. banking giants, is set to report quarterly results Wednesday.
‘Unlikely to Repeat’
There are signs that such success may beget problems for Wall Street in an era in which coronavirus cases keep shaking the economy, leaving millions jobless. Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, the incoming chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, already has suggested he’d like to hear more regularly from the leaders of the country’s largest banks.
“They have a lot of power, and we need to know more about how they do their business,” Brown said in comments to reporters this month. “The more we hear from them, the better.”
Meanwhile, the question is whether JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs can continue to widen the gulf between them and their rivals.
Goldman, for its part, said its backlog for investment banking has increased “significantly,” driven by activity in advisory and equity underwriting. JPMorgan said markets have remained active and that it’s seen a “strong performance since the start of January.”
But a capital-markets record in unusual times raises the bar high for setting the next one.
“The comps become difficult,” Jim Shanahan, a senior equity research analyst at Edward Jones, said in an interview. “There could be some drivers from the capital-markets standpoint that just seem unlikely to repeat.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.