Banking Stocks Slip Despite Hiring Spree to Fuel M&A Deals - Here’s Why Traders Aren’t Buying It

Wall Street's hiring binge meets investor skepticism—traders dump banking stocks despite expansion pushes.

The Talent Gambit

Major banks ramp up recruitment drives to capitalize on anticipated merger waves. They're bringing in heavy hitters from rivals, bulking up teams, and positioning for what they hope will be a deal-making frenzy.

Market Reality Check

Instead of cheering, investors hit sell. Stock prices dipped across the sector—because throwing bodies at problems doesn’t fix structural issues. Higher payrolls mean squeezed margins, and nobody’s convinced the M&A boom will materialize.

Same old banking playbook: spend money to make money, until you don’t. Maybe try innovating instead of just consolidating?

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According to a Reuters report, Wall Street banks have been busy in recent months scooping up dozens of senior executives to handle a revival in mergers and IPOs activity.

Stock Sentiment

Goldman Sachs (GS) was flat in early trading, with JPMorgan Chase (JPM) off 0.1% and Bank of America (BAC) also down 0.1%.

Merger activity and IPO sentiment has been in the doldrums for much of 2025 as concerns over the impact of President Trump’s tariffs created economic uncertainty and unease.

This hit banking and financial stocks in the first few months of the year, but as can be seen below, there has been a pick-up since.

The hiring hike is most often associated with Spring, so to see this take place in the dying days of summer is significant.

“It’s been an active summer in investment banking,” said Troy Rohrbaugh, co-CEO of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank. “But we’ve also been strategically hiring for the long-term in sectors and geographies where we think we can continue to grow share.”

Summer Joy

Only last week JPMorgan hired Jerry Lee from rival Goldman Sachs as its news global chair of investment banking. This added to other recent hires of senior bankers in technology, energy and activism defense. It has also hired more than 300 bankers between January and April across its global banking unit.

“Just at the moment when hiring was really supposed to kick off, strong tariff uncertainty really shook the markets and shook a lot of these banks, and therefore they said ‘Hey, let’s hold off’,” said Meridith Dennes, managing partner at financial search firm Prospect Rock Partners. “As the markets stabilized, hiring started to pick up in July.”

According to the report other senior hires were Citigroup’s (C) new co-heads of M&A, Guillermo Baygual and Drago Rajkovic, as well as Pankaj Goel, co-head for technology investment banking who all came from JPMorgan, hired by Citi’s head of banking Viswas Raghavan.

The total number of U.S. M&A transactions in January to May was 4,535, similar to the same period in 2024 with 4,515 deals,

Analysts however believe that brighter economic sentiment and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill makes for an attractive M&A market as the year comes to a close.

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