The Recovery of major U.S. banks since 2008

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The Recovery of financial services, especially Banks, is a mix of positive and negative growth. As we know many banks were able to come out of the global crisis without much effect, however, some banks made it with a bare minimum in their pockets to survive and all have done the aftermath really well to recover from the crisis and to generate profit for the economy.
As we know that Lehman filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a loss of $600 billion and Merrill lynch barely made an escape with the help of Bank of America. Let's see where the top-notch banks are and how they performed over the last decade since 2008.

The list of banks that we'll be analyzing will be:

• J.P. Morgan
• Wells Fargo
• Bank of America
• Goldman Sachs 
• Citigroup
• Morgan Stanley

As you can see that J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo are the only 2 banks that have advanced in a better way then they have from 1998-2008 than from 2008-2018. Goldman Sachs was able to maintain similar growth/profit rate during both decades while the other three, Citi, BoA, and Morgan Stanley were not able to continue their winning streak and ended up lower profits, it can certainly be due to the stringent policies that are implemented on the banks to stop further flawed models to enter the sector like the subprime mortgages. 

One big reason which should be considered to analyze the growth of banks will be the legal problems that were faced. Bank of America alone has paid approximately $80 billion in fines since the crisis and the fines and legal scandals are associated not to one but to all of them.

To conclude, what we can say from the analysis of the 6 major banks is that the decade from 2008-2018 has been similar to the previous one i.e. from 1998 to 2008 with a slight profit in the latter decade. The banks amassed $643 billion in cumulative profits from 2008 to 2018, however, amassed $634 billion from 1998 to 2008.