New York
The biggest global investment banks are minting money like never before amid the coronavirus pan-demic, as the financial statements show a total profit of more than $170 billion from a dozen of the big-gest firms in the past four quarters.
A string of trading wins certainly helped the sector in the early days of Covid-19 and as last year’s market volatility faded, investment bankers were ready to fuel the boom in takeovers and fundraising through special purpose acquisition vehicles.
Banks with wealth and asset management units enjoyed buoyant equity markets as the world econ-omy began to recover, aided by unprecedented gov-ernment support programmes.
The same trend also proved a boon to retail units, long seen as a drag on earnings, as they started to unwind loan loss provi-sions. —TLTP
