Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of national banks, which includes the largest banks on Wall Street, quietly issued its quarterly report on trading in cash instruments and derivatives on Friday. The report contained a shocker: stock (equity) trading had plunged 88.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 versus the fourth quarter of 2017 on a consolidated basis at the bank holding companies, which includes the results of their commercial and investment banks. Equally stunning, stock trading was down an even more staggering 91.7 percent from the third quarter of 2018. (See chart above from the report.)
This bombshell statistic is something that we have not heard a peep about from either the Wall Street banks on their earnings calls or the business media.
In fact, Wall Street banks have been telling business media that their trading pain in the fourth quarter came from fixed income (bond) trading. The media reports now read like something from Alice in Wonderland when compared to the OCC report.
Reuters reported on February 25, 2019 that while Wall Street banks overall did better than their European counterparts “The biggest losers, however, were the divisions that trade fixed income, currencies and commodities…However, equity trading picked up, particularly for Wall Street banks, where revenue rose 10 percent.” That statement contrasts with this statement in the OCC report: “The quarter-over-quarter decrease in trading revenue was across all instrument categories with the largest decrease due to equity trading.”
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