What happened there?

So banks came out with this tokenized deposit solution.

They are essentially just a digital asset representation of traditional funds.

The thinking was that that could be enough to combat some of the rising competition in the crypto world.

As other firms have gotten into stablecoin, not just crypto firms, but, you know, like BlackRock, DoorDash have gotten in on this market.

Banks have kind of said, "Maybe we need to be a little bit more defensive here."

Are there any risks here for banks in launching something like this?

You know, it's largely a defensive strategy without knowing that stablecoins will take off.

That's a 39% jump from a year ago and beat analyst estimates.

We had this really historic IPO, being SpaceX, and that was great for these big banks, specifically Goldman.

Uh, you saw revenue from its equity underwriting business more than double, and that was the bank that led this IPO.

We saw a lot of volatility in the market because of the Iran conflict, which is good for traders, and then also M&A activity, uh, we saw some records there.

As far as volumes go, in the first half of the year, we saw the highest levels both in the US and globally for M&A activity.

She says that the banks' results also suggest that consumers are doing well.

There were some concerns that higher gas prices would pressure consumers, but they've been pretty resilient.

We saw consumers continue to spend on cards, and we also saw delinquencies actually improve from a year ago at these big banks, and JP Morgan actually dismissed this idea of the K-shaped economy that a lot of executives have been talking about the past year plus, and this is the idea that the bottom half of the income spectrum has been doing a lot worse, or certain pockets of it have been.

Gina, why did this deal happen?

So all of the banks, aside from the largest ones, are under a lot of pressure right now and have been under pressure to grow bigger as banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup become more dominant in the market and it becomes harder for the smaller guys to compete.

So the super regionals, as we call them, these are banks around the size of Fifth Third, even they are at a point where they're looking to scale up, and on Comerica's side, they have been under pressure to sell for a very long time.

They are more of a mid-size bank, a lot smaller than Fifth Third, and they're also near this regulatory threshold of a hundred billion dollars in assets where it becomes a lot more costly for them to complete the compliance work they need to for regulators.

So as more of these regional banks look to compete with the big ones, could we expect this to be the kind of first domino in a series of consolidations, or remains to be seen?

We have heard about an expected wave of consolidation for a while now, and some things are still creating challenges.

Interest rates are still high.

There aren't as many big banks willing to sell right now, but there is one really positive sign for banks looking to do deals, and that is the regulatory environment.