Big banks post big earnings, but lending is more muted
Marketplace Morning Report
Marketplace
4.5 • 927 Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
It’s a big week for bank earnings. JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup reported quarterly results on Tuesday; Bank of America and Morgan Stanley report on Wednesday. Overall, banks are pulling in plenty of revenue — especially from their investment banking and trading departments. But the old-fashioned business of lending out money has been more of a mixed bag. We'll unpack. Also on the show: a major cryptocurrency scam and the economics of Broadway contract negotiations.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Laughing all the way to the big banks. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. This is the week. Banks reveal how much they made this summer. Yesterday, J.P. Morgan Chase announced profits up 18 percent. Revenue at City went up across everything it does. Bank of America and Morgan Stanley this morning reported higher than expected profits and |
| 0:21.7 | revenue from jet set stuff like investment banking and trading securities. But the more down-to-earth |
| 0:27.8 | business of lending out money not as strong. Marketplace's Justin Ho reports. Lending in general was |
| 0:33.9 | fairly muted in the most recent quarter. Tom Collins, with the consulting company |
| 0:38.0 | West Monroe, says that's partly because there are a lot of businesses that are reluctant to |
| 0:42.1 | take on more debt right now. It's companies that are especially rate sensitive or potentially |
| 0:47.5 | tariffs sensitive. On the consumer side, Colin says there's still a lot of hesitation around |
| 0:53.1 | mortgages, thanks again to high interest rates. |
| 0:56.3 | Same story with home equity lines of credit. |
| 0:58.7 | Rates have stayed high enough that it has not made economic sense for people to tap into that equity. |
| 1:05.1 | But one type of consumer credit that has been growing is credit cards. |
| 1:09.2 | J.P. Morgan Chase says loan volumes on its cards are up over the last |
| 1:12.7 | year. Michael Pierce, Deputy Chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, says that's likely because |
| 1:17.9 | consumer spending has been picking up recently. Particularly in consumer discretionary spending, |
| 1:23.1 | so things like travel, trips away, hotels. That's where we've seen a big rebound in spending |
| 1:29.3 | growth. Pierce says a lot of that spending is being driven by higher income households. Think |
| 1:34.3 | older consumers who might own their own stock market portfolios. You know, really the value |
| 1:39.8 | of their portfolios is a huge determinant of how confident they're feeling, of how much they feel they're |
| 1:45.1 | able to spend. And so, yeah, we see when the stock market's high and going higher, you know, |
| 1:50.2 | consumers opening their wallets. But Pierce says there are plenty of people who are not feeling that |
| 1:54.5 | confident. The consumers where I think we're seeing struggles and continuing signs of struggles |
| 1:59.2 | are those, you know, tend to be younger, |
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