Banks – Rolling Alpha

Category: Banks

Financial Deregulation: the Donald, the Dimon and the Dodd-Frank

Financial schizophrenia, executive orders, low-hanging fruit, casual nepotism. Just your average new world order day.

Why Bank Transfers Take 3 Working Days

Bank transfers are one of the modern financial world's great mysteries. I can send an email 24/7 - but not a bank transfer. The reason might surprise you.

The Math of Banking Reserves

Yesterday, I wrote a post about fractional banking. Fractional banking is based on reserves. I recommend that you read that post (or even re-read it!) before coming to this one. To summarise the fractional banking process: Let’s say that the Central Bank has printed $100 worth of notes, for usage by the general public. The Central […]

Fractional Banking – Meh. Not so bad.

This week, I’m planning to bore the pants off everyone with a small rant about Basel III. It’s affecting my life. It’s affecting your life. And even if I understand why people like Bernie Sanders want banks to be “better”, I doubt that we grasp the real cost of all that “better”. But before I get there, […]

Bank Cards and Airport Lounges: A Thought

This: Has a lot of people upset. In and amidst all of the goings-on all over the world, you’d be amazed at how many emails I’ve received suggesting that this should be a post. Accompanied by much forwarding of this moneyweb article: FNB’s incredible shrinking SLOW Lounge rewards. For The Non-South-African Readers: A Background My read on […]

How Bank Runs Cause Depressions: Time and Fractions

Last week Thursday, I wrote a post about the Wizard of Oz. And how the Wizard of Oz has to be one of the most satisfying allegorical tales of monetary reform. Read it here: The Wonderful and Economic Wizard of Oz. Although it was all wrong. Because if the Wicked Witches were really the East […]

How Supermarkets Become Banks

In my day job, I spend most of my time dealing with “cash flow”. *breathes deeply* In my mind, hellfire is not a raging furnace: it’s a slow leak of heat that might be burning you, but it might also be okay, and because you can’t tell, you hover eternally on the brink in a […]

Banking in the shadows. Like Batman.

There is much noise being made about “China’s shadow banking sector”. As though it’s this unique Chinese invention that’s oh-so-troubling-because-it’s-not-democracy, or something. Some quotes from Time Magazine: “An expansion of risky and complicated financial practices in the world’s second-largest economy has the potential to explode into a major economic crisis.” “J.P. Morgan figured in a […]

Stuff You Should Know About Reserve Requirements

Disclaimer: this particular post is going to be fairly technical. And I’m doing it because I have readers in the finance/banking field who may or may not know what Basel III actually entails. But I have a post planned for tomorrow that might change the way you look at the poor (I’m very excited about […]

What is all this talk about Banks and Basel?

When I was just a young accounting kid, growing up in a small-town office family*, I used to have regular email communications with the worldly cousins in the Big City**. We would visit once or twice a year (they never visited us) and stay in out-of-town lodges located near the South African equivalent of strip […]