Q4 Bank Earnings Setup: BAC, C, JPM, TFC, PNC, USB, WFC

December 18, 2025 | Earlier this week we had a great discussion with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec of Bloomberg Business Week about the state of the credit markets as we come up on Q4 earnings. As we told Bloomberg, what people are worried about today are the risks that are not visible in the financial data “because they know that a lot of things are being fudged.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors have charged top executives of the bankrupt subprime lender Tricolor with what they called a years-long, “systematic fraud” scheme. As readers of The IRA know very well, we expect to see more examples of the type of fraud visible in the defaults by Tricolor and First Brands in the new year.

And as Eric Platt and Sujeet Indap noted in the FT this week (“‘JPMorgan has crossed a line’: How Altice’s debts ensnared US banking giant”), the large banks are increasingly being forced to chose sides in the world of private credit. "JPMorgan Chase is facing the ire of some of the world’s biggest investors over the bank’s role in a complex multibillion-dollar refinancing at Patrick Drahi’s telecoms group Altice USA that threatens them with heavy losses," they wrote.

Earnings Setup: The Top Seven Banks

Below we take our readers through the top-seven US depositories by assets, a list which excludes Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) because their primary business units are broker-dealers, not banks. Goldman Sachs Bank USA had about $650 billion in total assets and $400 billion in domestic deposits in Q3 2025, but the more important metric at GS is the $3.5 trillion plus in assets under management. 

As with the first two quarters of the year, the standardized data release by the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) shows improving earnings and falling credit expenses, but the picture beneath the surface tells a different story.  Banks today face a variety of market and risk exposures that are masked by credit risk transfers and other techniques to obscure the total risk taken by each bank.

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