, Columnist
Utilities, Analysts and Fines
Also taxes, prison arbitrage, and various blockchain dystopias.
Banks as utilities.
Banks are boring now. This is of course by regulatory design: The post-crisis mantra for many regulators and politicians and commentators has been to make banking boring. Often the way people express this is by saying things like "banks should be like utilities." Usually this is kind of a vague metaphor; the notion is that utilities are important, boring, heavily regulated, and no one gets all that rich running them, so the regulation must be doing something right.