Malick Diop felt something shifting on Wall Street. He’d joined Morgan Stanley in the grim days of 2009, when big banks were trying to pay back taxpayer bailouts and deflect public fury. But four years later, the ire was fading and ambition was the order of the day, according to a Bloomberg analysis. “It really felt like, for the first time, the job and the career weren’t defined by the context of the financial crisis,” Diop said. “We are past this now. And now it’s time for us to do new deals.” In the years that followed, his rise to managing director traced a new boom. He helped orchestrate a multibillion-dollar deal with SoftBank Group, whose breakneck investments defined an era, then closed a huge SPAC merger at the height of that rush. Diop didn’t know it, but he was playing a small role in something almost unfathomably lucrative: The first trillion-dollar decade for the six giants of U.S. banking. That’s not $1 trillion of total revenue; it’s pure profit. Such a haul didn’t seem possible before the decade began, when Wall Street was the target of a global protest movement and politicians at both ends of the spectrum were seething over bailouts or aiming to break up too-big-to-fail lenders. They swelled instead, outpacing corporate America so handily that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and even hobbled Wells Fargo & Co. are on track to make more profit over those 10 years than all but a few publicly traded companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley aren't far behind. Together, the six are poised to make even more next year.
