JPMorgan Chase is scheduled to report third-quarter results before Tuesday's opening bell, kicking off a week of earnings from the country's largest banks that will give investors their clearest read yet on how higher interest rates and a months-long oil-price shock are showing up on Wall Street's books. Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are due to follow with their own reports later this week.
Analyst estimates compiled ahead of the release put JPMorgan's third-quarter earnings per share at roughly $5.93 to $5.94, with revenue forecast between about $51.2 billion and $52.2 billion, according to separate previews from Hudson Labs and Financial Modeling Prep. Those figures are previews, not results — JPMorgan has not yet released its actual numbers as of this writing — but they offer a baseline against which Tuesday's report will be judged.
What to watch
The backdrop for this earnings season is unusual. The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point to 3.75%–4.00% on September 16, its first increase since 2023, after months in which markets had instead priced in cuts. At the same time, Brent crude has traded above $100 a barrel for weeks amid continued disruption near the Strait of Hormuz, feeding into the inflation pressure the Fed cited in its statement.
For the banks, that combination cuts two ways. Higher policy rates tend to widen the margin lenders earn between what they pay depositors and what they charge borrowers, a tailwind for net interest income. But the same rate backdrop raises funding costs, pressures borrowers already contending with pricier fuel and goods, and complicates the credit-loss provisions banks set aside for loans that sour. Trading and markets divisions, meanwhile, have had unusually volatile oil and bond markets to work with this quarter, which can cut either way for fixed-income and commodities desks.
Comparisons to a year ago will also be messy. JPMorgan's second-quarter results this year were lifted by a one-time gain tied to its Visa shareholding, a reminder that headline net-income figures this earnings season may need to be read alongside the banks' own adjusted measures rather than taken at face value.
With the four largest U.S. banks all reporting within days of each other, the week should offer a reasonably complete picture of how the industry is absorbing a Fed that is hiking rather than cutting, and an oil market that refuses to calm down — two forces that, taken together, are new territory for bank balance sheets this cycle.
