Welcome to another issue of Net Interest, my newsletter on financial sector themes. Every Friday I go deep on a topic of interest in the sector and highlight a few other trending themes underneath. If you enjoy Net Interest, please spread the word. It really makes a difference when you recommend this newsletter to others.

Wells Fargo’s Rehabilitation

Over the past few days, the biggest banks in America all reported their first quarter earnings. It may have been their best quarter ever. In this week’s Net Interest, we look at some of the key trends that emerge. In particular, we take a close look at Wells Fargo which, for reasons we’ll get to, charted its own special course through the pandemic.

A Strange Quarter

There’s no doubt we’ll look back on the first quarter of 2021 as a strange time. Perhaps that’s the result of the economy being so much better than we had anticipated it would be. Unemployment ended the quarter at a rate of 6.0% in the US but banks had been budgeting for a lot mor…