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Airline Fuel Costs Take Off Like a Rocket

Everyone probably knew well ahead of major U.S. airlines filing their Q2 earnings that fuel costs would be bad — but wow, did anyone expect it would be this bad?  All six U.S. majors have now filed their Q2 earnings reports. ( Jetblue was the last, filing earlier this week .) As we’ve noted many times before, all six disclose their total fuel costs and average price per gallon of fuel every quarter. Calcbench tracks all this, which allows us to chart the airlines’ price of fuel over time.  Figure 1, below, shows the average price per gallon for all six airlines. Brace for impact. What verb can one even use to describe the increase in costs for Q2, the first quarter that fully captures the higher costs driven by the U.S. war against Iran? Soar? Spike? Pop? Rocket?  We previously wrote about jet fuel costs in early July , when Delta Air Lines ($DAL) was the first airline to report Q2 earnings. At the time, we did some trigonometry to ca...
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Catching Up on Tariff Disclosures

Now that we have more companies filing their Q2 earnings releases and quarterly reports, we wanted to take another pass at one of our favorite corporate disclosure issues these days — tariff refunds! As we’ve noted in previous posts, companies started to make disclosures about tariff refunds earlier this spring after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s use of certain tariff powers in February. That was Q1, when many companies weren’t certain what they wanted to say because the ruling and the subsequent process to obtain tariff refunds was still new. Now we’re in Q2, and things have changed considerably. Many companies are disclosing specific refund amounts they’re seeking or have already received. Others have made more exotic moves, such as Children’s Place ($PLCE) selling off its expected tariff refund at 67 cents on the dollar .  Let’s see what a few other firms have said about tariffs. FedEx FedEx ($FDX) filed its latest annual report on July 20, for the fisca...
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Q2 Earnings: Our First Look

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The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker is now back in action, for our first analysis of Q2 2026 earnings data. So far, among the large companies that dominate the beginning of earnings season, the overall numbers look solid. Figure 1, below, tells the tale. With roughly data from roughly 280 non-financial firms, revenue is up 13.6 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 33.1 percent, and net income up an eye-popping 85. 1 percent.  Those numbers might look impressive at first glance, but don’t pass around the Friday afternoon cocktails just yet. That 85.1 percent growth in net income is deceptive. It includes a single one-time gain of $97.8 billion that tracks back to Google’s ownership stake in the newly launched SpaceX ($SPCX). That’s right. Google ($GOOG) owned roughly 6 percent of SpaceX stock as of June 30. Because SpaceX soared after its IPO on June 12, that led to a huge increase in the value of Google’s ownership stake — and under U.S. accounting rules, that ga...
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Charticle: Wall Street Return on Equity

Five major Wall Street banks reported their Q2 earnings this morning, so what better way to demonstrate the speed and ease of Calcbench data analytics than to whip up a chart of the banks’ return on equity?  “ROE” is one of the most important performance metrics banks disclose in their earnings releases. It’s calculated by dividing net income for the period into shareholder equity, and is expressed as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more efficiently the firm is generating wealth for shareholders.  ROE disclosures are also tagged and indexed by Calcbench, which means a bank’s ROE numbers are available for your inspection within minutes of the bank filing its earnings release with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  We went to our Multi-Company page and to research quarterly ROE numbers for the five Wall Street titans who filed Q2 earnings this morning: Bank of America ($BAC)  Citigroup ($C) Goldman Sachs ($GS) JPMorgan Chase ($JPM) Wells Fargo ($WFC...
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Here Come the Surges in Airline Fuel Cost

Fuel Cost Q2 2025 $2.21 per gal Fuel Cost Q1 2026 $2.78 per gal Fuel Cost Q2 2026 $3.66 per gal   Delta Air Lines ($DAL) filed its Q2 2026 earnings statement on Friday , and we all know what that means: an opportunity to see just how ugly airlines’ fuel expenses are these days. Prepare for a rapid ascent, readers.  All major airlines report fuel costs — both their total fuel expense for the quarter and average cost per gallon — as individual items on the earnings release. Calcbench tracks those disclosures, so with a few quick keystrokes we can see how soaring energy prices from the war in Iran this spring surged through the airlines’ financial reporting.  Figure 1, below, shows average cost per gallon for the six major U.S. airlines since the start of 2024. Right now we only have Q2 numbers from Delta — bu...
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