Sifting through big bank results is a largely thankless task but, unfortunately, it’s obligatory.

JPMorgan’s quarterly reports make for decent reading as these things go, mostly because Jamie Dimon is the Nick Saban of bankers. Even if you don’t care about bank earnings (college football) you might tune in to a JPMorgan earnings call (Alabama game) “just because,” so to speak. Saban’s retiring. Dimon isn’t.

Dimon’s results, as documented here first thing Friday, were mixed, but an upbeat NII forecast was likely to please investors.

At Bank of America, net income more than halved in Q4, as Brian Moynihan absorbed his share of the FDIC special assessment that bailed out uninsured depositors 10 months ago, as well as a charge associated with the LIBOR transition.

Net interest income which, along with loan volume, is what investors care about from BofA, was $14.1 billion, slightly better than estimates.

Q4 2023 marked the first YoY NII decline since Q2 of 2021. If rates were to fall 100bps across the curve, NII would take a $3.1 billion hit, BofA said. (They include that estimate every quarter in the slide deck.)

Loan balances were $1.053 trillion at the end of the year, up slightly from 2022 year-end and basically in line with estimates. Deposits defied expectations for a small decline, rising to $1.924 trillion. Consensus there was $1.85 trillion. Moynihan offered a wholly perfunctory assessment, as he’s prone to doing: “Record client activity and digital engagement [in 2023] led to good loan demand and growth in deposits.”

Over at Citi, Jane Fraser likewise booked the special assessment charge, along with a hodgepodge of other one-offs, including $780 million in severance costs. The bank’s slashing 20,000 jobs in a bid to save $2.5 billion. And then there was a $1.3 billion reserve build tied to the bank’s exposure to Russia and Argentina. If you’re curious, the split was $720 million for cross-currency exposures in Argentina and $580 million to account for “prolonged political and economic instability” in Russia. The bank also detailed an $880 million “translation loss” resulting from the peso devaluation.

That’s a lot of stuff, and the combined EPS impact was $2.00 — two whole dollars. Citi reported a net loss of $1.8 billion for Q4. Reported revenue fell 3%, but even if you exclude some of the one-offs, top-line growth would’ve only been 2%. “The fourth quarter was very disappointing,” Fraser conceded, while being careful to note that the bank made “substantial progress” in its restructuring and simplification efforts.

FICC revenue came up short at both BofA and Citi. Moynihan’s FICC crew managed $2.1 billion in revenue in Q4, down nearly 6% YoY (no) thanks to “weaker trading in rates and credit.”

At Citi, FICC was… well, not great. $2.6 billion in revenue represented a 25% YoY decline, and was the worst quarter for the bank’s fixed-income traders in half a decade. Rates and currencies trading tumbled 36% YoY. Overall (i.e., including equities) trading revenue fell 19% at the house of Fraser.

Of course, investors like to hear about expense discipline and job cuts (layoffs mean lower costs), and that can easily override other considerations when it comes to the stock price. Total firmwide expenses at Citi were $56.4 billion in 2023 ($54.3 if you don’t include the FDIC assessment and divestitures). The bank said Friday that expenses should fall to between $53.5 billion and $53.8 billion this year, and to between $51 billion to $53 billion over the medium-term, which Citi didn’t define.

The projected medium-term savings will be due to “efficiences from transformation efforts,” Fraser’s organizational structure overhaul and the bank’s exit from international consumer businesses. They (the savings) are also contingent on revenue growth.

Citi’s slides showed its headcount in 2023 at 239,000. It’ll be 180,000 by the end of 2026, Mark Mason said on a call.

Plainly, this is all far too much for investors to readily process. That’s always the case with big bank earnings, but this quarter’s results felt especially belabored and even more nebulous than usual.

Fortunately, you don’t really have to process the results if you’re Average Joe or Everyday Jane. For Main Street, parsing big bank earnings isn’t obligatory. These are, after all, banks which can’t fail. Can’t be allowed to fail, I mean. Main Street knows all about that, having funded the last bailout.

I was moving some money into a CD at BofA a few weeks ago to lock in the best rate ahead of all those Fed cuts STIR traders swear are coming, and the banker at my local branch fretted over the precedent set by the bailout of uninsured depositors last year. He was concerned about moral hazard.

“Our leader is very conservative,” he said, apparently referring to Moynihan. (“Take me to your leader!”) He went on: “But the fund couldn’t cover all of our depositors!” “The fund” was presumably the DIF.

I couldn’t help myself: “Do you really believe the US government would let me, or anyone else, lose money in a BofA savings product?” I asked him. “Well, no, but…” he trailed off. “I think we’re good,” I said. “We’ll bail ourselves out if we have to.”