The Institutional Risk Analyst

“Moynihan is trying to demonstrate that the business can grow and hedge funds different investors in stock want price appreciation not just dividend. The decision to host the investor day was made long ago - JPM does it every year. Jamie Dimon has taken away the excuses of big banks that they can’t grow.”

As we note in a recent article published by The Daily Reckoning, “The Bezzel: Is it 1925 All Over Again?,” that tales of woe regarding the Fed-fueled credit boom in commercial real estate and private credit will continue to grow in number in 2026.  When it comes to fraud, cockroaches are an inconvenience, but wharf rats carry the plague and are an existential threat.

Is the impending ZoMa administration in NY City Hall any worse than the devastation caused by the 2019 Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act of 2019? We think that the panicked crowd of New York landlords and developers have greatly exaggerated the impact of ZoMa, who is a slick salesman but has even less substance that the disastrous Mayor Bill de Blasio. 

The latest statements about a possible stock offering for the GSEs seem to be designed to boost the share price in the near-term and do not provide any more information than we had when such statements were made previously.  Given the management changes announced yesterday and the other requirements for a successful offering, we have a hard time believing that a GSE stock offering will occur this year.  Notice how the shares of Fannie Mae popped for a couple of days this week

The first obvious point from the Q3 2025 earnings and commentary so far is that the larger banks in the US and Europe are starting to back away from private credit markets. When you hear Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon making cautionary statements about private credit and recent disasters like First Brands and Tricolor, that tells you that they are trying to mitigate potential shareholder lawsuits down the road.

So the $200 billion asset Fifth-Third Bank (FITB) is buying $80 billion asset Comerica Incorporated (CMA)? Is this the start of a wave of similar transactions among regional banks? Hopefully not. This deal neither creates great value nor promises significant synergies, but it does make for a bigger regional bank with so-so financial metrics. Essentially FITB is rescuing CMA shareholders.

Below we set up Goldman, Morgan Stanley and the other asset gatherers as we go into Q3 2025 earning this week.  As you might expect, GS is ahead of where it was a year ago in terms of non-interest income, earnings overall and equity market value.

With the FOMC cutting the target for fed funds one quarter point last week, we expect to see funding costs for banks continue to fall, part of the larger narrative that has seen bank loan demand and share repurchases leaving a great deal of dry powder.  Deposits are growing 2x loans, meaning that the balance must go into securities. One of the reasons that lenders of all sorts have been pushing down loan yields is to capture assets in a market that is short quality duration.

In this edition of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we ponder the world of credit and investing as sovereign nations see their debt ratings sinking below that of global corporations. Meanwhile, the price of gold is reaching new highs. Then we set up the Q3 earnings of the top-seven US depositories for subscribers to our Premium Service as we surge into quarter end with equity markets at all-time highs and global central banks turning the money spigots wide open.

PNC went down less in April, but then lagged the leaders in our bank test group, not exactly a rousing vote of confidence in the $550 billion bank. The acquisition of FBHC may not help. The traditional rule of thumb in banking is that paying anything more than 1.25x book for a bank is usually not recovered.  We do not have a position in PNC.

If we were to select one characteristic that describes the financial markets today it would be confirmation bias. The human tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories is among the most powerful and dangerous trends in financial markets, especially when the predominant passive investment strategies favor a net-long position. Nowhere is confirmation bias more apparent than the market for private-equity backed IPOs. 

The largest bank loan portfolio increases reported by the FDIC were in loans to non-depository financial institutions and broker-dealer loans to purchase or carry securities, including margin loans. This situation is inherently unstable.

The prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming Mayor of NYC and the rise of other socialist elements in the Democratic Party means that owners of New York real estate are facing effective expropriation of their property.  And the real losers are New York consumers.

SOFI is up almost 300% while the Bitcoin futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are up less than 100%.  Below we provide some thoughts on the banking group as we head into September. 

When Pinnacle Financial Partners, Inc. (PNFP) announced an all-stock transaction last week to acquire Synovus Financial Corp. (SNV), we were unimpressed. The markets sold off on the news and there then followed a series of stock downgrades and credit rating agency actions that were disconcerting to put it mildly. 

Whalen Global Advisors LLC (WGA) has published the latest edition of the WGA Top 50 Banks, the fifty top performing large commercial banks in the US. Drawn from the members of Peer Group 1 and other sources, WGA screens the group based upon five proprietary measures of financial and market performance.

Citi has grown corporate loans 10% to $330 million at the end of Q2 2025. In fact, Citi increased its full-year net interest income guidance and raised its revenue forecast to the high end of its previous range. Citi saw assets and NII grow in 2025, but efficiency remained in the low 60s, a tangible indication that Fraser is making progress.

Smaller issuers of stable coins will soon be competing with Verizon (VZN) and JPMorgan (JPM), while platforms offering turnkey coin solutions will multiply like Lantern Flies. 

We all were more than a little amused to learn that in the most recent bank stress tests the Federal Reserve Board decided to ignore the massive financial and reputation risk in private equity and private credit. With cash bids for private assets plummeting, and sponsors in full flight due to prospective litigation by jilted clients, how do the Fed and other bank regulators retain any credibility? Our friend Nom de Plumber had an appropriate observation...

Imagine if the Fed had to tell the public that federal deficits were bad for bank safety and soundness? We haven't had a Fed chairman since Arthur Burns who would speak publicly about the inflationary aspect of federal deficits.