Big banks are crushing it right now. Citibank reported revenue was up 9% in just the third quarter, up 15% in a year. JPMorgan’s investment banking revenue was up 16% in the quarter. Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo also did very well. 

It's not one bank here or there, it’s all the banks — all the big ones, anyway. They’re doing great. Why is that happening now, at a time when consumers and small businesses are feeling so anxious?

“Goliath is winning,” said Mike Mayo, a managing director at Wells Fargo Securities. “Wall Street banking is concentrated among the largest players: Citigroup, Bank America, JPMorgan, a few others. And they continue to gain share.”

But the big banks’, well, bigness, isn’t the only thing they’ve got going for them right now.

“The universal thread is the increase in activity in things like mergers and acquisitions, investment banking, IPOs,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth.

Banks get paid to set up those deals, and corporations and investors are aching to do them.  Think: Investors who have put money in private companies for a decade and desperately want to get bought out or have an IPO. Or mergers that companies have been too afraid to do, but this year they saw their chance.

“There seems to be a more favorable regulatory environment for actually getting mergers approved,” Hogan said.

Things got put on hold in spring with the trade war, but in the summer it felt like maybe that situation was calming down. So some of that pent up demand for dealmaking started to flood out.

“As we got resolution on some of those, you know, geopolitical issues, that backlog ended up coming back to the banks,” said Gabriel Hack, a senior analyst with Moody’s Ratings.

But the same chaos that caused a lot of deals to be put on hold also pushed more companies to change their investments, buy or sell, or find creative ways to hedge. And to do any of those things, you need banks.

“Looking broadly across asset classes, we’ve seen significant increases in trading volumes,” he said.

Whether it’s from economic joy or economic anxiety, trading is trading, and banks make money off of it. 

And the very fact that stocks are so high right now, makes companies feel like they can handle a little more debt — you need banks for that too. 

“Once you have both more equity and more debt, you have more money. Then, you can put a lot in your shopping cart,” said Amiyatosh Purnanandam, a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin.

And banks are more than happy to ring them out at the cashier.