The mechanism. On March 19, 2026, the Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC re-proposed the Basel III Endgame — junking the 2023 draft that would have jacked up capital requirements by roughly 19% for the largest banks. The rewrite recalibrates the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB), the framework that sets market-risk capital charges, and applies it "only to banks with significant trading activity." The agencies project aggregate capital requirements for Category I banks will fall modestly — the Fed itself has floated a capital-neutral-to-negative outcome. That's the opposite of the 2023 version, which threatened to make trading and underwriting meaningfully more capital-expensive. Comments closed June 18, 2026; a final rule is the next catalyst, and it lands unevenly by business mix — banks with the most risk-weighted assets tied to trading desks get the biggest swing.

Who cashes in:

  • GS — Goldman Sachs carries the industry's highest concentration of trading and underwriting risk-weighted assets among U.S. banks. The original FRTB draft was estimated to raise market-risk capital 73–101%; a materially softened final rule reverses the specific charge that penalized Goldman's FICC and equities trading books hardest, freeing capital for buybacks and re-rating a stock that's traded at a persistent discount to book multiples of banks with steadier fee income.
  • MS — Morgan Stanley's trading book is smaller relative to its wealth and investment management arms, so it has less to lose from the old rule and less to gain from the new one — but any capital relief still flows through to buyback capacity, and its "capital-light" wealth engine keeps compounding regardless of how the rule lands.
  • JPM — JPMorgan's Corporate & Investment Bank runs one of the largest trading books in the country; a friendlier market-risk calibration lowers its RWA denominator too, supporting the buyback-and-dividend math even as JPMorgan's diversified retail base means it was never as exposed as Goldman to begin with.
  • SCHW — Charles Schwab isn't a G-SIB and sits largely outside this rulemaking's market-risk scope; it benefits indirectly as a read-through beneficiary of a looser capital regime that keeps credit and trading liquidity flowing through the system it depends on for margin and securities-lending revenue.