incentives
The Bank and the Company Store Are Solving the Same Problem
Huntington Bancshares tempered its outlook this week, and the reason is almost boring: rates went up, yields went down, and the spread the bank lives on got thinner. $HBAN isn’t alone. Every regional bank runs on the same machine. Take deposits cheap, lend them out dear, keep the difference. When rates move against you, the…
The Alligator Was Never the Problem
A man kept finding an alligator in his yard. He fed it. He asked, reasonably enough, why it had come. The real answer was upstream and had nothing to do with him: the water that used to hold the animal had been drawn off for fields miles away, and the swamp had nowhere left to…
The Layer Beneath the Headline
India barred a JPMorgan unit this week over alleged stock-market manipulation, and the story produced exactly the cycle you would expect: regulatory overreach, fairness in price discovery, the integrity of cross-border capital. All of those concerns are real and none of them is the point. India barring a major bank unit from its markets is…
Good Ideas Travel at the Speed of Taste
In 1958, a programming language shipped with if-then-else. That sounds like nothing. But the dominant language of the day, Fortran I, didn’t have it: if you wanted a decision, you wrote a conditional jump and managed the consequences yourself. The same small language carried eight other ideas, among them functions you could pass around like…