Last year was a tumultuous one for American farmers and manufacturers as President Trump squabbled with trading partners around the world. American banks, however, had a ball.

JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, reported record profits on Tuesday, and Citigroup posted its best results since before the 2008 financial crisis.

Chase earned $36.4 billion last year, up from $32.5 billion in 2018. It earned $8.5 billion in the final three months of last year, also a record. Citi could not quite match that performance, but its $19.4 billion profit for 2019 beat the previous year, and its $5 billion result for the year’s final quarter surpassed the profit it earned in the same period in 2018.

One reason for their success: the 2019 turnaround in the financial markets. The end of 2018 seemed to portend a reckoning as investors fretted over the trade war and the Federal Reserve’s plans to drain cash from the financial system. But rate cuts by the Fed last year helped markets creep steadily to new highs.