As you look at our results, you’d see that year-over-year earnings in our primary businesses with exceptions with the consumer real-estate business made progress that shows stability in a volatile rate geopolitical environment. Importantly as you think about our company, we have been investing growth while taking out expense. We’ve reduced our overall headcount during 2014 by around 8% but at the same time we invested. We invested by reallocating resources to sales capacity from those savings increasing in all our core businesses. We invested by reallocating expense reductions to product capabilities and both capabilities our cash management capabilities and other capabilities around the world. We’ve invested some of the savings in our technology spending over $3 billion in 2014 to improve and protect our company.
Now you can see the results in the appendix pages and Bruce will touch on them in the line of business presentations. We expect to continue this effort going forward. We have teams working on it everyday. They are working to be allocating non-productive expense to drive towards growth. The line is to obtain a good expense management come to be expected from our company. At the same time we are laser focused on winning money market sharing and grow with our customers as the economy continues to improve and we look forward to reporting that progress during the year ahead.
With that I’ll turn it over to Bruce to take you through the quarter’s numbers.
Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer
Great. Thanks, Brian and good morning everyone. Let’s start on Slide 3 and I am going to go through the details. During the fourth quarter, we recorded $3.1 billion of earnings or $0.25 per diluted share. Let me give you a few thoughts on revenues. There were two significant adjustments to revenue, as well as negative DVA charges that in the aggregate reduced reported revenues this quarter by $1.2 billion pretax or roughly $0.07 a share after tax. Of the components of the $1.2 billion impact, we recorded a roughly $578 million negative market-related adjustment which as you all know we refer to as FAS 91 and net interest income for the acceleration of bond premium amortization on our debt securities that was driven by lower long-term rates. Otherwise our core net interest income which excludes this market related adjustment was pretty stable with the fourth quarter coming in a little bit better than we signaled to you all during our third quarter earnings call.
In addition, this quarter we adopted FVA which is for Funding Valuation Adjustment and incurred a $497 million charge against our sales and trading results as a result of that adoption. And as we normally provide to you our credit spreads tightened and this tightening caused the negative charge for DVA in the trading account of approximately $130 million during the quarter. Expenses during the quarter were well managed. Our total non-interest expense in the fourth quarter was $14.2 billion which included approximately $400 million in litigation expense during the quarter. This level of expense is the lowest level of expense that we’ve seen since the Merrill Lynch merger. And credit cost during the quarter improved as our provision for credit losses was $219 million and included 660 million in the release of reserves.
On Slide 4, reduced asset levels in our global markets business drove our balance sheet levels lower, coming down $19 billion from the third quarter of ’14 and we finished at just over $2.1 trillion in assets. We continued our focus on balance sheet optimization for liquidity as we continue to shift our discretionary portfolio into HQLA eligible securities from non-HQLA loans and also improved our deposit composition. As we have signaled to you in the third quarter earnings call, discretionary portfolio first lien loans declined from the third quarter of ’14 levels, but we were very pleased with the loan growth we saw in our core businesses during the quarter.
