Morgan Stanley today rounded off the first-quarter reporting season for Wall Street’s biggest banks in bullish fashion, with chief executive James Gorman hailing the bank’s post-crisis rebound and highlighting its sales and trading performance, which helped boost underlying profits at its institutional securities arm by $1bn.

Losses caused by changes to Morgan Stanley's debt-related credit spreads, known as debt valuation adjustments, at the division amounted to $2bn in the first quarter, a sharp increase on the $189m that Morgan Stanley reported in the same period last year. The losses dragged net revenues at the institutional securities unit down 15% to $3bn from a year earlier and left the unit with a $312m pre-tax loss, compared with a $432m profit in the first quarter of 2011.