Wall Street made a killing during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic — at a time of sky-high statewide unemployment that has put 500,000 Big Apple residents out of work.
The securities industry raked in a massive pretax profits fortune of $27.6 billion for the first six months of 2020 — nearly eclipsing 2019’s profit total of $28.1 billion.
That’s an eye-popping 82 percent increase compared to the same six-month period last year, according to a new report released by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.
DiNapoli tied the gold rush to a frenzy of factors: the $2.4 trillion federal stimulus package, interest rates cut to zero and reduced borrowing costs — plus frenetic trading patterns posing a massive disruption to the financial markets.
“An injection of federal stimulus money, plummeting interest rates and rising volume in trading drove profits dramatically upward to a level hard to imagine in March,” explained DiNapoli.