After weeks of watching investors stack up skepticism like seasonal firewood and toss shares aside like walnut shells, America’s biggest lenders began to face them head-on Tuesday.

JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs reported higher profits than a year ago in the third quarter, with their combined haul climbing 14% year over year to $32 billion. Citi and Wells Fargo beat Wall Street analysts’ profit forecasts. Goldman, powered by its vaunted equities trading desk, blew them out of the water. But JPMorgan, America’s largest bank, missed expectations for the first time in almost three years. Not a bad quarter and there were many signs of a healthy economy, but not enough to overshadow the laundry list of risks under the surface, which JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon tallied up as “large fiscal deficits, sticky inflation, elevated asset prices, rising interest rates and geopolitical conditions.”

Where Credit Is Due and IPOs Askew

In recent weeks, the market has taken to bank stocks like a vampire to a tanning bed. The State Street SPDR S&P Bank ETF is down 7.5% in the last month and just completed its worst quarterly performance since the spring 2023 regional banking crisis. The trend continued Tuesday, with the ETF falling 0.7% thanks to the laundry list above.

The good news is consumer and business credit quality, key pillars of the economy and lender activity, still look encouraging. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for example, reported fewer credit card defaults. Wells Fargo noted the 2.69% share of credit card users delinquent on payments for 30 days or more was essentially unchanged from a year ago. And JPMorgan’s net interest income, a key profitability gauge that measures the difference between earnings on loans and payouts on deposits, jumped 6% in the quarter to $24.7 billion.

At the same time, the ongoing bond selloff and other economic uncertainty took a toll on dealmaking. Companies including OpenAI, Holtec, SB Energy and Oura have put initial public offering plans in a holding pattern while they wait for more clarity, delaying banks’ underwriting profits in the process. Take the first nine months of the year, when companies raised more than $1 trillion, according to Dealogic, or more than they did in each of 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The phenomenon was concentrated in the first half of the year, as global IPO volumes fell 8.2% in the third quarter to $53.7 billion. The slowdown showed up on bottom lines:

• Investment banking fees at JPMorgan, while up 14% year over year, declined 8% compared to the second quarter. Goldman’s fees, up 21% from a year ago to $3.2 billion, were slightly more resilient, down 5.8% compared to the second quarter.
• JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said on a media call that, despite the sluggish second half of September, he expects delayed IPOs will ultimately go forward and is confident in the investment banking pipeline.

Off on the Wrong Foot: The bond-market turbulence is also being felt at fixed-income desks, where revenue at Goldman, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo took a surprise downward trajectory. The $4.4 billion in revenue generated by Citigroup’s fixed-income traders, however, was the best in a decade. Someone give them a bonus with a 5.2% 10-year yield.

You’re old enough now, Siri. Do you think you could be a little more helpful around the house?

On Tuesday, Apple introduced HomeView, a smart home hub that allows families to do everything from adjusting the thermostat and locking the doors to FaceTime and watching videos via the touch screen or their voice. HomeView, with its seven-inch display, will be available just in time for the holidays on Nov. 13.

The last time the tech giant made a push this big into the smart home market was arguably 2014 when it debuted HomeKit. But now that Google and Amazon have a strong hold on this niche with the Nest Hub and Echo Show, it’s time for Apple to follow its usual playbook: act as perfector of its competitors’ products, instead of innovator of its own.

HomeView Hopes Privacy Sells

New Apple CEO John Ternus is reportedly pushing the company to introduce new products and become more experimental, but smart homes aren’t exactly what comes to mind. Despite tech giants trying to convince us we need a system to automatically brew coffee, open curtains and see who’s at the door, smart homes never quite took off, in part because of their complexities and privacy concerns.

But with HomeView, Apple is hoping it can differentiate:

• One of the new product’s biggest selling points is its ability to offer six members of a household a personalized experience with their messages, calendar, reminders and more synced from their devices to the hub via facial recognition. Google and Amazon have similar offerings, but Apple seems to be hoping that its emphasis on safeguards against snooping — paired with the sleek features like color-matching cables the company has become known for — will attract customers.
• The smart home appeal to companies is that they can get a foothold in your home with other products, too, though that hasn’t always worked for Amazon and Google. But Apple may have a chance at fighting off the Android ecosystem and making money on its new device thanks to its premium pricing. The HomeView costs $299, while Amazon’s Echo Show 8 costs $199.99 and Google’s Nest Hub, $99.99.

Robot Speak: HomeView also features the new Siri virtual assistant, Siri AI, which can offer each person using the device personalized responses whether it’s helping them make a phone call or discover new music. While Siri AI can conversationally answer questions about “virtually any topic,” per Apple, analysts aren’t so sure it’s enough to bring consumers to the crowded smart home market, Reuters reported.

It’s not a typo. Walmart, once notoriously stingy with employee benefits, is offering an expanded suite of healthcare perks for its workers.

On Tuesday, the Big Box supergiant and America’s largest private sector employer told workers that it plans to expand free insurance coverage to more than 250 prescription drugs, including GLP-1s for some workers with type 2 diabetes, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. Consider it an against-the-grain move in corporate America’s larger war on rising healthcare prices.

Looking Trim

Forget about diesel. It’s healthcare costs that continue to be at the epicenter of America’s inflation conundrum, and employers and employees alike are feeling the pain. Total health benefit costs per employee are set to rise by more than 8% next year, according to a recent Marsh survey of 1,800 US employers. That’s the highest year-over-year jump since 2003. Prescriptions are at the center of the trend, with the total tab for prescription medications expected to reach more than $560 billion in 2026, an increase of 8.3%, according to a report out this summer by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “A big part of this is GLP-1s,” John Poisal, deputy director at the National Health Statistics Group at CMS, told reporters.

Unlike Walmart, many large employers are now looking for ways to trim their healthcare bills:

• Pepsi, Starbucks, Lowe’s, Cigna and PwC, as well as several state governments, are among the 6% of large employers cutting coverage this year for GLP-1s for weight loss (note Walmart does not provide coverage for the weight-loss version of the drug), according to a recent study by Marsh subsidiary Mercer. Another 5% said they are considering making the cut next year; roughly half of employers offer coverage of GLP-1s for weight loss.
• Roughly half of large employers plan to make cost-cutting changes to healthcare plans, such as raising deductibles or copays. Including broad coverage for GLP-1s can increase monthly premiums on employer-sponsored plans by as much as 14%, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Baby Steps: Don’t give Walmart too much credit. Most companies offer coverage for GLP-1s for diabetes, even if coverage for weight loss has been scaled back. Still, the new insurance plan is part of a broader initiative to boost worker morale; the company has slowly increased employee wages over the past decade, boosting retention by as much as 10%. It’s not much, but it’s progress for a company long criticized for paying such low wages that thousands of employees receive aid from federal government assistance programs such as Medicaid and SNAP.