The Biggest Bank in America, 2002-2026

Who is the biggest bank in America? This race answers it every quarter from 2002-06 to 2026-06, using the total assets each bank reports to its regulator. Where it ends: JPMorgan Chase $4.09T, Bank of America $2.65T, Citibank $1.98T, Wells Fargo $1.91T, Goldman Sachs $759B, U.S. Bank $706B, Capital One $662B, PNC $610B. Things worth watching for: Washington Mutual grows, then stops dead in September 2008 — still the biggest bank failure the country has had. Wachovia disappears at the end of 2008, bought by Wells Fargo days after it nearly failed. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley appear out of nowhere at the end of 2008, because that is when they were allowed to become banks. Bank One, Fleet, National City, Countrywide and MBNA all leave the race by merger. Silicon Valley Bank vanishes in the first quarter of 2023, two days before Signature Bank. Two things worth saying plainly. The unit here is a BANK, not a banking group: FDIC collects the numbers charter by charter, so Citibank and its separate credit-card bank in South Dakota are two bars, and adding them together would mix the regulator's numbers with our own arithmetic. And a charter keeps its number through renames, so the bar carries the last name that charter used — the one at the top spent the 1990s as Chemical Bank before it became Chase and then JPMorgan Chase. Data: FDIC BankFind API (banks.data.fdic.gov), quarterly Call Report field ASSET, every insured bank, top of the list by assets. Which of these names did you think was already gone?