Are branches assets or fossils? By almost any measure, America's biggest banks are behemoths. JPMorgan Chase's balance-sheet weights in at $2.7trn, Bank of America's (BOfA) at $2.4trn. Citigroup tips the scales at almost $2trn and Wells Fargo at $1.9trn. Their combined market value is nearly $1trn. Last year they raked in over $100bn after tax. Yet by one gauge, the titans are curiously tiny. To..
A Nobel prizewinner on when investment horizons matter Finance theorists are, as everybody knows, unworldly people who can scarcely tie their shoelaces, still less change a car type. Robert Merton confounds this stereotype. As he talks amiably at the London office of Dimensional Fund Advisors (he is the firm's resident scientist"), you sense that here is a man who could fix a flat in no time. He..
Though it looked good in trials, social interventions are much harder to make work at scale A year and a half ago The Economist wrote about a promising approach to cutting poverty in Bangladesh ("On their bikes", January 27th 2018). RDRS, a charity, was offering small loans to more than 100,000 poor farmers on the condition that they migrated temporarily to a city for work. Everything seemed to ..