Morgan Stanley on Wednesday reported second-quarter results that crushed Wall Street expectations on the back of higher trading revenues.

Here’s what the bank reported for the second quarter compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: $2.13 vs. $1.96 expected
• Revenue: $16.79 billion versus $16.07 billion expected

Net income rose 15% to $3.54 billion, or $2.13 per share, from $3.08 billion, or $1.82 per share, for the same period a year ago. Revenue increased 12% from $15 billion.

Institutional securities reported net revenue of $7.64 billion, compared with about $6.98 billion a year ago. The strong performance was propelled by higher client activity with notable strength in equity trading.

“Morgan Stanley delivered another strong quarter,” Ted Pick, CEO and chairman of the bank said in a statement. “Six sequential quarters of consistent earnings … reflect higher levels of performance in different market environments.”

Wealth management was another strong segment for the bank, which delivered net revenues of $7.76 billion on higher asset management revenues. A year ago, the business saw revenue of $6.79 billion.

The bank’s stock dipped more than 2% on Wednesday following the results. Shares of the company have risen about 10% this year.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the percentage change and figures for net income.

BEIJING — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was all smiles and compliments as he made his third trip to China in just about half a year.

As the leader and co-founder of the world’s first, newly-minted $4 trillion market cap company, Huang had particular reasons to be happy when he met the press on Wednesday: Nvidia expected it would be able to resume sales of its less advanced H20 artificial intelligence chips to China after a three-month pause.

“Many of my competitors are my friends,” he noted.

Huang said his understanding was that allowing Nvidia chips into China was part of an exchange with the U.S. for Beijing to release critically needed rare earths. CNBC has reached out to the White House for comment.

Wearing his iconic black leather jacket, Huang walked into the sunny courtyard of the Mandarin Oriental hotel about 15 minutes earlier than scheduled and took multiple questions in the nearly 90-degree Fahrenheit weather.

“Only in China can we do this out in the sun!” he said.

Then he realized the press conference was supposed to be held inside an air-conditioned room.

“What are we doing out here? Why didn’t somebody say so?” he said.

He was swarmed by local reporters asking for signatures of books and T-shirts. “Who needs an autograph? I’ll do it while I’m listening.”

Here are the highlights of what he said over 90 minutes:

Earlier in the week, he met with Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun, whom he labelled as “a brilliant business person.” He said the two discussed artificial intelligence for large language models, autonomous driving and robotics.

Xiaomi uses Nvidia’s automotive chips in its electric cars.

Huang said he told U.S. President Donald Trump about his planned voyage to China during a meeting with the White House leader last week to celebrate Nvidia’s $4 trillion market cap.

“[Trump] said, ‘Have a great trip,'” Huang said.

Nvidia on Tuesday said it expected to resume its H20 chip shipments to China soon following assurances from the U.S. government. The company was forced to halt such sales in April due to new U.S. requirements at the time.

“In terms of the H20 ban and the lifting of the ban, it was completely in control of the U.S. government and China government. The discussion has nothing to do with me,” Huang said, rejecting the idea that he had played a part in changing Trump’s mind.

“It’s my job to inform the president about what I know very well, which is the technology industry, artificial Intelligence, the developments of AI around the world,” he said.

Huang emphasized Nvidia complies with the final policy decision and that tariffs are just something the company has to “adapt to.”

U.S. chip restrictions nearly halved Nvidia’s market share in China, Huang said in May. Due to the U.S. export controls on China, the company said it missed out on $2.5 billion in sales during the April quarter and will likely take another $8 billion hit in the July quarter, pegging its sales at $45 billion over the period.

The U.S. effectively banned Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips to China back in 2022.

“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said in response to a CNBC question, “and the reason for that is because technology is always moving on. It’s not like wood.”

He stressed that, years from now, there will be better and better technology available, adding, “I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well.”

But Huang would not give a definitive answer about how many orders Nvidia had received, or when the company would restart local sales of its chips — which he acknowledged were not the company’s best, but which could still train AI models.

He said the U.S. government was still processing the licenses for Nvidia to sell the chips to China, and that the company would need to restart its supply chain — a process he indicated could possibly take nine months.

Underpinning Huawei’s AI model capabilities is an entire tech system that doesn’t rely on any of Nvidia’s chips or tools. Instead, Huawei has developed its own Ascend chips, which works with the company’s “CANN” system that acts as an alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA. It has also built an AI-specific cloud computing system called CloudMatrix that launched last year.

Asked about indications that Huawei’s AI chip systems are still challenging for many developers to switch over to, Huang said, “That’s just a matter of time.”

He said “the important thing to realize I’ve been doing this for 30 years, they’ve been doing it for a few, and so the fact they’re already on the dance floor tells you something about how formidable they are.”

Huang rained down praise on Chinese AI models, as he had during a speech Wednesday morning at the opening ceremony of the high-profile supply chain expo in Beijing.

“The Chinese models, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, are excellent,” he said, referring to the breakthrough from a Chinese startup, Alibaba’s model and another one from an Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot.

“I think over time it will be increasingly less important which one of the models are the smartest,” he said. “It’s going to be which one of the models are the most useful.”

China-developed DeepSeek shocked global investors in January with the release of an AI model that undercut OpenAI on development and operating costs. It’s not clear how DeepSeek managed to develop the model under broad U.S. chip restrictions on China, but the startup’s parent, High-Flyer, reportedly stockpiled Nvidia chips.

One aspect that Huang said he particularly appreciated about Chinese AI models was that they are open source, making them available for people to download for free and use on their own computers.

He said many companies in many countries downloaded DeepSeek R1 — “99%” of people — to use it locally for healthcare, robotics, imaging and other applications.

As Huang was about to end the press conference, a reporter asked whether he would come back to China again this year.

“I hope so. You have to invite me.”

The value of cryptocurrencies stolen by criminals surged in the first six months of 2025 after a high-profile hack and a wave of physical attacks targeting crypto holders and their relatives.

So far this year, $2.17 billion has been stolen from crypto services — already eclipsing the $1.87 billion of funds stolen from platforms in 2024 — and this is expected to reach $4 billion by the end of 2025, according to a report published Thursday by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.

Overall, the combined value of digital tokens stolen from both crypto platforms and individuals hit more than $2.8 billion and is already approaching the $3.4 billion in crypto stolen last year.

The bulk of the funds stolen from services came from February’s cyberattack on Dubai crypto exchange Bybit, which saw North Korea-linked hackers make off with $1.5 billion. It’s estimated to be the largest crypto heist in history.

However, the rise in stolen crypto assets was also driven by a spike in attacks on individual crypto wallets. Personal wallets accounted for over 23% of total thefts, with attackers increasingly turning to physical violence and coercion to access funds, Chainalysis said.

In January, David Balland, a co-founder of crypto wallet firm Ledger, was kidnapped with his wife from their home in central France. Before they were freed, the attackers cut off Balland’s finger and sent footage of it to his fellow co-founder Eric Larcheveque demanding ransom money.

Separately, in May, the father of a crypto entrepreneur was taken in broad daylight by four men wearing ski masks. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of several million euros and cut off one of the man’s fingers. He was freed by police days later.

Eric Jardine, cybercrimes research lead at Chainalysis, told CNBC that the rise in crypto-related thefts was primarily being driven by increasing crypto adoption and price appreciation.

“Adoption means there are more services and users in the crypto ecosystem, making thefts more common. Price appreciation means that services and individuals in crypto have more USD value to lose, even if the total assets stolen are relatively constant over time,” Jardine said via email.

Jardine suggested that the uptick in attacks on individual crypto holders could relate to the fact that crypto trading services are beefing up their security.

“If services become better at security, malicious actors will potentially move to targeting individual wallet holders and trade off a single large-scale heist in favor of a large number of smaller-scale victimizations,” he said.

Meanwhile, rising wealth accumulated through holdings of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin has resulted in a rise in crypto influencers flaunting their lifestyle on social media platforms.

Jardine stressed it was important not to blame the victims of physical crypto-related attacks, adding that “showy displays of wealth can quite obviously attract the attention of a bad actor when compared to a more modest outward facing lifestyle.”

Nearly everywhere you look in the world of finance, things are going surprisingly well — at least for now.

Wall Street is humming thanks to a boom in stock and bond trading and a pickup in corporations acquiring competitors and taking out massive loans. At the same time, Main Street is holding up as the American consumer continues to spend, borrow and repay loans, according to reports this week from the largest U.S. banks.

It makes for an unusually profitable environment for financial firms. The six biggest U.S. banks generated about $39 billion in second-quarter profit, outstripping analysts’ expectations and collectively jumping more than 20% from core earnings a year ago.

It’s a remarkable result after a tumultuous start to the quarter. The period began with shock and plunging markets on April 2 over President Donald Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs. JPMorgan Chase economists said at the time that the policies would probably cause a recession this year.

But markets roared back after Trump responded to distress signals coming from U.S. bonds and delayed the most punishing tariffs on most trading partners. Investors have begun to tune out the administration’s barrage of tariff pronouncements as bluster or noise, and corporate leaders are stepping off the sidelines to pull off multibillion-dollar transactions, bank results show.

“Look how far the world’s come in three months,” Wells Fargo banking analyst Mike Mayo told CNBC. “Throughout the quarter, you had a pickup in investment banking, loan growth and optimism with economic scenarios. Here we are, with talk of a recession pretty much absent.”

That dynamic was clear at JPMorgan, the largest and most profitable U.S. bank. It produced about $15 billion in quarterly profit, which is nearly as much as the next three largest banks combined.

Trading benefited from turbulent conditions in the quarter as Trump roiled markets with rapidly evolving policy statements. But the real surprise came from investment banking, which involves mergers advice, IPOs and debt and equity issuance. Revenue at JPMorgan jumped 7%, producing $450 million more than analysts had expected, just weeks after managers had warned of an approximate 15% decline.

“The pickup in investment banking fees, to some extent, reflects people accepting uncertainty and deciding to move on with transactions,” JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum told reporters on Tuesday. “The corporate community has sort of accepted that they just need to navigate through this.”

That means it’s less likely that a recession will cause a spike in U.S. unemployment this year, hurting consumers ability to repay their debts. That was clear in the bank’s provision for credit losses, which was 14% smaller than in the first quarter.

The economy is squarely in the “soft landing” scenario, Barnum told reporters this week.

At the same time, consumers and companies are borrowing more money from JPMorgan, where loan growth rose 5% compared with a year ago, fueled by rising credit card and wholesale loans, the bank said.

Those stats mean that, at least for now, banks are giving the all-clear signal on the U.S. economy in the early months of the second Trump presidency. Even in a time marked by turbulence and rising geopolitical risks, the economy has defied expectations for a downturn.

“Banks are economically sensitive businesses, and so how the economy performs under the administration is going to matter to their results,” said Matt Stucky, chief portfolio manager for equities at Northwestern Mutual wealth management. “So far, the economy continues to push forward.”

The situation even made JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who frequently warns about risks he sees, sound relatively optimistic about the economy.

“It’s been resilient, and hopefully it’ll continue to be,” Dimon told reporters this week. “It’s always good to hope for the best, prepare for not the best, and we’ll see… One thing I would point out, the world is much bigger and much more diversified” now and that makes for a “slightly more stable global economy than you had 20 years ago,” he said.

Trump’s sweeping spending bill, signed into law this month, preserves corporate tax rates and expands business deductions. On top of that, deregulatory efforts across industries will boost the economy, Dimon said.

Last month, the Federal Reserve released a proposal to amend the capital that banks need to hold for lower-risk assets, potentially freeing up billions of dollars for the banks that they could use to boost share repurchases, buy competitors or fuel more loan growth, executives said this week.

Taken together, it’s hard to conceive of a better setup for banks than right now, Barnum said.

“We’re essentially firing on all cylinders,” Barnum told analysts. “Rates are a good level for us. Deal activity is high. Capital markets are very strong. Consumer credit is excellent. Wholesale credit is excellent.”

To be sure, sentiment can shift on a dime, and risks including inflation, the mounting U.S. deficit and geopolitical turmoil are still out there, Barnum noted.

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf, fresh off finally removing the yoke of a Federal Reserve punishment that capped his bank’s balance sheet at 2017 levels, sounded ebullient during an earnings call this week. His company recently gave all its employees a $2,000 bonus to celebrate the milestone.  

“This is an incredibly interesting and fun time,” Scharf told analysts Tuesday. “We’re starting to see deposit flows, as we’ve talked about. We’ve got new account growth. We’ve got expenses in check. Credit is performing well… We have less constraints.”

The shares of another former laggard, Citigroup, have climbed nearly 30% this year as CEO Jane Fraser convinces investors her turnaround plan is working.

Fraser this week sounded like a CEO on the attack, disclosing the bank’s new luxury credit card and plans to issue a Citi-branded stablecoin. She also marveled at the resiliency of the U.S. economy.  

“The strength of the U.S. economy, driven by the American entrepreneur and a healthy consumer, has certainly been exceeding expectations,” Fraser told analysts. “As I’ve been speaking to CEOs, I have yet again been impressed by the adaptability of our private sector.”