Starting Thursday, reports will come out about how publicly-traded companies did in the second quarter of the year that ended in June. Profits should be pretty good. That’s mostly thanks to a resilient economy — and it’s happening despite a whole bunch of geopolitical uncertainty. Corporations have also been issuing a whole lot of new equity, selling brand-new shares in their companies to raise capital. Up until this year, they were hesitant to do that.“This has been a fraught couple of years when it comes to a changing environment,” said Kriti Gupta, a global investment strategist with J.P. Morgan Private Bank. “A changing environment in the markets, a changing political environment.”Gupta said this year, demand for stocks picked up, since markets have been rising.“This is companies that are buying back shares,” Gupta said. “This is households and retail investors that are getting more excited about the stock market gains that they’re seeing.”Companies partially need the money for mergers and acquisitions, which have been booming this year.“That process takes fundraising,” Gupta said. “And we’re in an environment where consolidation is something corporations have been encouraged to do.”Issuing stock isn’t the only way companies can raise money — they can also sell bonds. But that requires companies to pay back the money they borrowed over time, according to Drew Pascarella, a finance professor at Cornell University — which can be risky.So, Pascarella said, by issuing shares instead, “they’re taking less risk, in that they don’t have to pay it back, and they’re not burdened by that eventual need to return the capital, by contract, to the investor,” he said.Pascarella said that’s why companies in the AI sector have been issuing a lot of stock, because they don’t want to be hamstrung by the need to pay back bondholders.“And they’re looking for investors to believe in their story and take on additional risk by becoming owners in the company,” he said.Healthcare and real estate companies have been issuing new shares, too, along with companies with ambitious expansion plans.“I mean, we had a quantum computer company go public recently,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital. “[And] a developer of next-generation geothermal energy.”Kennedy said their plans are long-term, despite all of today’s geopolitical uncertainty.“Some of these companies are targeting five- or 10-year timelines,” he said.And Kennedy said investors are more comfortable making those long-term bets because the stock market has been holding up.