Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Goldman Sachs’s profits more than doubled in the second quarter to $3bn as the Wall Street bank reaped the benefits from an accelerating recovery in dealmaking.
Net income for the quarter exceeded the $2.8bn analysts were expecting and was up from $1.2bn a year earlier.
A rebound in mergers and acquisitions and debt deals has helped drive Goldman’s shares up by roughly a quarter this year, outperforming the 13 per cent rise in the KBW Bank index and the 18 per cent advance in the S&P 500 over the same period.
Investment banking revenues rose 21 per cent to $1.7bn in the quarter, just short of forecasts. Revenues from fixed income trading were up 17 per cent at $3.2bn while Goldman made $3.2bn in equities trading, up 7 per cent from a year earlier.
The performance of both businesses was better than analysts had forecast.
A recovery in investment banking will help Goldman draw a line under a fraught 12 months in which chief executive David Solomon’s management of the bank came under fire.
“We are pleased with our solid second-quarter results and our overall performance in the first half of the year, reflecting strong year-on-year growth in both global banking and markets and asset and wealth management,” Solomon said in a statement.
