U.S. financial companies have seen their share prices surge since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election.

Investors believe the new administration will loosen capital rules, lower corporate tax rates, and boost capital markets activity.

But are investors getting overly optimistic? And what's the outlook from here?

To explain the outlook for the financial sector, I'm sitting down with my colleagues in

Goldman Sachs research. Richard Ramston is the business unit leader of the financials group,

and Alex Blasstein covers the asset management industry. Richard and Alex have just finished hosting

their financial services conference here in New York, where more than 100 firms across the

industry spoke about the outlook for their businesses.

Richard Alex, welcome back to the program.

Great to be here.

Great. Thanks for having us.

So there's obviously been a lot of excitement around financial services firms.

What are the key themes you're both tracking as we look toward 2025?

Richard, let's start with you.

So I think there's three or four things that really

matter. The first is banks are the most macro of the micro sectors. So what happens to the economy

is going to play a key role to the performance of these banks heading into next year,

both around the performance of net interest income, which

is very sensitive to what happens, not just to fed funds, but to the shape of the yield

curve. And then what happens to things like unemployment and corporate delinquencies, which is

one of the primary drivers to credit quality. So the state of the economy is going to be front and center.

We do have a new administration with new policies. That does create some uncertainty, which is

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