Thursday, October 15, 2009

Urbane planning

Peter Eavis, Wall Street Journal:

Forget friendly tellers and the tedious task of making loans. To be successful in banking right now, what you really need are bond traders.

That's good news for a bank like J.P. Morgan Chase -- whose third-quarter results ballooned on the back of strong fixed-income trading revenue -- but augurs badly for financial firms dependent on traditional banking. Indeed, numbers contained in J.P. Morgan's results suggest it will be a long time before the business of making loans recovers.


My understanding of modern banking is that lending institutions are more than happy to extend loans as long you can demonstrate a likelihood of default, and a developer is eyeing your neighborhood.

I guess we're waiting on the developers.

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