The banks are all right, and you're listening to Motleyful Money.

I'm Mary Long, joined today by Matt Frankel. Matt, thanks for joining us.

Hey, always good to be here. It's been a while. And you have me like once a quarter

when banks report earnings. It's always fun to talk about. I was going to say when banks report,

there is one person that we want to call. And that is you, Mr. Frankel. We got a bunch of big

banks reporting yesterday and this morning. The big headline is that they're doing pretty well. Net income rose 50% at J.P. Morgan,

close to that at Wells Fargo, more than doubled at Golden Sacks. City Group saw nearly $3 billion

in profit after posting a net loss of almost $2 billion a year ago. J.P. Morgan in particular

is worth highlighting because they made

$58.5 billion in profit last year. That's over a billion dollars a week. Not a bad paycheck.

Matt, what are the banks drinking and where can I get some of it? Well, it's not quite as good as it

sounds. One thing that's important to point out, if you remember

what was going on in 2023, there was all the bank failures and things like that. And there were a lot

of special assessments from the FDIC going on. That was all priced into the earnings that we're

seeing in the fourth quarter. It's not a great year-over-year comparison, in other words.

We had billions of dollars of FDIC special assessments, but bank profits are rising. There

are some really strong points. Investment banking gives a big growth catalyst right now. Some

banks have investment banking revenue up 30 to 50 percent in a lot of cases. We're seeing

that really rise. We're seeing trading revenue rise sharply,

especially fixed income in uncertain interest rate environments. You see a lot of fixed income

trading going on. And there's just a lot that's going right and not that much that's going

bad. There were a lot of fears that consumers were going to pump the breaks on spending,

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