How banks make money

 

Peter Girnus

@gothburz

I run consumer deposit pricing at JPMorgan Chase. Our standard savings account pays 0.01%. That's one one-hundredth of a percent. Leave $10,000 with us for a year and we'll pay you $1. Leave $50,000 and we'll pay you $5. We publish this on a rate sheet. We don't hide it. We don't have to. On Sunday, Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, published a note called "Is an Agentic bank run coming?" I read it at 6:40 in the morning. I read it twice. It was the most frightening thing I've ever read, because it described my job. "If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system." The cheap deposits are you. Online, Revolut, SoFi, Wealthfront and others pay between 3.3% and 5%. Your $10,000 would earn between $330 and $500 there. With us it earns $1. That difference is what we call the relationship. People think banks compete on rates. We compete on you being busy. On the password you forgot. On the routing number you'd have to find. On the eight minutes it would take you to move your money, and the weekend you'll do it, and the weekend after that. In the second quarter, JPMorgan Chase made $25.6 billion in net interest income. My division, Consumer and Community Banking, made $5.3 billion in profit. Our average consumer deposits went up 3%. You stayed, and you brought friends. We call you loyal. I've built a 30-year career on that word. Here's what scares me. An AI agent doesn't get busy. It doesn't forget the password. It doesn't put things off until the weekend. It reads every rate in the country before you finish your coffee, and it doesn't care how long you've banked with us. It has no relationship with me at all. Meta has an agent called Muse that can already see your accounts. It can't move your money yet. Slok is careful to say this hasn't shown up in deposit data. It's a scenario. So I'm treating it like one. We have a plan. First, we'll promote our relationship rates. They're a little higher than 0.01%. You qualify by meeting the conditions. The conditions are on page 3. Second, security. We're very concerned about agents moving your money without you. So any agent that wants to move funds will need to verify by phone, during business hours, with a human, who will be at lunch. Third, we'll tell you the agents are dangerous. My father worked at a branch. He knew every customer by name. At Thanksgiving, people came up to him and thanked him for keeping their money safe. He paid them interest you could feel. He thought that was the job. I pay them $1 a year on $10,000 and they still thank me. I think this is the job. Slok called it "a problem for the entire financial system." He's right. The system needs you not to check. So I'm not that worried. You did the math. And tomorrow your $10,000 will still be with us, earning $1 a year, because the transfer form is long and it's almost the weekend. I'd bet the bank on it. I'm the bank.

The hate wasn't where they'd told me to look for it.

 

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

For a long time, I didn't really have a camp. I had an intuition, that's all. When I listened to the left, I often had the feeling that they were lying to me. When I listened to the right, it rang truer. But I had never seriously delved into the subject. I wasn't particularly enlightened. I was focused on something else: building. And above all, I hardly knew anyone in the camp that's labeled as untouchable. I'd already been told who they were: the far right, the reactionaries, the heirs of fascism. Bitter people, closed-off, hateful. Without fully believing it, I'd never taken the time to go check for myself. These past few months, that's changed. I've met a ton of these people. French, Americans. Entrepreneurs, intellectuals, journalists, ordinary folks. And I have to be honest with you: nothing matched the portrait. I found people with a disarming kindness. Who take the time. Who listen all the way through before responding. People often far more open-minded than those who caricature them. Capable of saying "you might be right" or "I don't know." People with surprisingly little resentment, even though they'd have every reason for it given how they're talked about. And above all, people who've grasped the scale of the problem, while so many still refuse to face it head-on. Péguy wrote a line I reread often: "We must always say what we see. Above all, we must always—which is more difficult—see what we see." That's exactly it. I didn't even have to change my mind: my intuition was confirmed. The hardest part was accepting the scale of what was right in front of me. Because in the camp that proclaims itself benevolent, I've often found the opposite of what it claims. Resentment. Jealousy toward those who succeed. Constant suspicion. The need to point fingers at a culprit. And a growing disconnect from reality, from what ordinary people live through, from plain common sense. Tocqueville sensed it nearly two centuries ago. Observing democratic America, he wrote: "I know of no country where, in general, there reigns less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion." He wasn't talking about a dictatorship. He was talking about a soft, invisible pressure that pushes everyone to self-censor out of fear of exclusion. We're there. Elon Musk gave a name to this mechanism: the "woke mind virus." You can find the phrase brutal. But it describes something real. An ideology that spreads less through conviction than through fear. That doesn't debate, but disqualifies. That judges people by their affiliation rather than their actions. It's no coincidence he bought Twitter presenting himself as a "free speech absolutist." When you can't speak anymore, you end up not thinking anymore. And it's no coincidence either that so many of those resisting this mindset are entrepreneurs. When you build a company, reality catches up with you every day. A product works or it doesn't. A client pays or they don't. You can't lie to yourself for long. Those who build develop an almost physical relationship to the truth, because every illusion costs cash. An ideology that never confronts reality, on the other hand, can drift indefinitely. It doesn't have to answer to anyone. Those who follow the media without critical distance don't realize it. Not out of stupidity. Out of comfort. I myself settled for an intuition for years without going to see for myself. But once you've seen, you can't pretend you haven't. They sold me monsters. I found people who build, who doubt, who listen, who love their country without hating anyone. The hate wasn't where they'd told me to look for it.

French students protest

We saw this today right outside our building. High school students shooting loud firecrackers, running in mobs, etc.

This guy puts his own spin on it.

Dr. Maalouf ‏

@realMaalouf

·

3h

Absolute chaos across France: 625 arrests 83 police officers attacked 32 teachers injured Hundreds of schools burned down Vehicles and churches set on fire North African and far-left students have declared war against the French state.

This one is more factual.

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

I made a name for myself on X for my analyses of the construction of wokism. Today, I'm going to explain to you what the left is trying to do. Look closely at this image. It's not just a news item. It's a method. The left has always needed youth. Not to raise them. To use them. A teenager has energy, anger, a need for belonging, and almost no perspective. It's the ideal fuel for anyone who wants to seize power without having to convince adults. What our high school students are experiencing today is a double manipulation. The first is gentle. It's the one from the progressive left, the one embodied by Macron. For years, it has explained to this generation that society is a machine of oppression, that authority is suspect, that demands are violence, and that everything is owed to them. It demolished the landmarks, then acts surprised that nothing holds together anymore. The second is brutal. It's the one from the radical left, the one embodied by Mélenchon. It reaps what the first has sown. It turns resentment into mobilization, mobilization into power plays, and watches 16-year-old kids do the dirty work in front of the cameras. Unsubmitted deputies have supported this blocking movement. Today, it's the gate of a high school burning in Roubaix. One prepares the ground. The other lights the fuse. Nothing new. Stalin had the Komsomols and the Pioneers. He made Pavlik Morozov—a kid presented as having denounced his own father—a national hero. The message was crystal clear: your loyalty goes to the Party, not to your family. Thirty years later, Mao unleashed the Red Guards on teachers, parents, books. Teenagers humiliated, beat, sometimes killed those who were supposed to educate them. Each time, the same logic: cut youth off from transmission, then turn it against the society that carried it. And the left has understood one thing that many still refuse to see. France is reaching the end of a cycle. There are only two ways out. The first: the end of collectivist hegemony. The return of order, merit, the authority of the one who knows over the one who learns. A country that functions again. The second: fragmentation. Communities that no longer speak to each other, a state that holds nothing together, institutions burning one by one. Lebanon or Singapore. Lebanon, we called it the Switzerland of the Middle East. It unraveled faction by faction, until the collapse. Singapore was a swamp with no resources. It became one of the world's most prosperous countries through order, merit, and demands. There will be no middle ground. No lukewarm. No "at the same time." The left knows this. That's why it's sending the children to the front line. It's up to us to choose, before they choose for us.

 

Objectivit

@Obejectivit

·

18h

Translated from French

I completely agree with your analysis. That said, LFI needed to manipulate these young people, of whom, by the way, it couldn't care less. They are just the means to establish a totalitarian regime. Civil war is at our doorstep and they will not stop pushing the French towards it.

Caravans of illegal immigrants

 

Larry Alex Taunton

@LarryTaunton

Illegals: A Warning to Americans: Since ~2019, I have tracked caravans of illegals from So America to the US. I interviewed them, followed them into cartel towns and jungles, and observed all that they were willing to do — sell themselves, go without food, steal, risk every kind of danger, make Faustian bargains, etc. — to get to the US. Always I had this feeling, a memory, really, from my years of studying history, that I couldn’t put my finger on, but it was trying to penetrate my conscious being. Then it came to me: They are tougher than Americans. Writing on the fall of Athens, historian Will Durant said, “Nations are born stoic and die epicurean.” That is, nations are born amidst struggle and hardship and collapse as seekers of pleasure. I said I had a memory of sorts that was trying to find expression, and it ran along much the same lines as Durant’s observation. I remembered that Rome collapsed, not in a day, but over the course of centuries that accelerated into decades, as wave upon wave of uncivilized Germanic tribesmen, “illegals” so to speak, poured across the empire’s northern frontier and eventually sacked Rome itself. Rome had been built on strong, large families; unity of purpose; and the hard work of its people. Its armies were, at its height, citizen armies. Men fought to preserve what they knew and loved. Near its end, Romans were a lazy, self-indulgent people who paid others to do their fighting. Infanticide, which was common throughout Rome’s history, became a capital offense and a woman who aborted her child, also common, could be executed or exiled. This wasn’t due to any moral considerations, a recognition of the personhood of an unborn child, or anything like that at all. It was a much too late recognition that with the dramatic decline in the size of Roman families as prosperity increased, came a decrease in tax revenues and an over-reliance on foreigners to fill the ranks of the army — all of which would prove disastrous for Rome. Sound familiar? All of this was somewhere in the back of my mind, a feeling at first, as I observed the third worlders making their way by the millions to our borders. I saw them in the violence of Africa, the intrigues of the Middle East, and everywhere there is misery south of our border. Generally speaking, they are a people inured to suffering (theirs or that of others), are accustomed to death, unaccustomed to the comforts Americans take for granted, have lived in nothing but squalor, do not share your views of private property or civil discourse, view violence as a part of daily life, lack even the most basic education, and have little sympathy for the low pain threshold of Americans. These are the people coming to take your inheritance from you. Coming from a “might makes right” world, they know no other policy. They have no vested interest in preserving American law or culture, and that is because it isn’t their heritage and they don’t understand it. Democrats seem to think they will be immune from all of this because they foolishly believe these newcomers will view them as benefactors. They do not. I’ve met them, been in their cardboard camps, walk with them on trails, heard their hopes and dreams, and in none of it is there such nuanced thinking. America is, for them, a ripe fruit theirs for the taking. Once you open the castle gates and lower the drawbridge, you no longer control the outcome. Indeed, you have surrendered it. And why are Democrats willing to do that? Because they hate Americans more than this still ill-defined rabble, and they don’t understand what’s coming. These people are tougher than you, and they don’t give a damn about you. Be careful how you vote. The future you hope for will be, I promise, very different from the rosy one media promises you. I’m speaking from firsthand experience.

Stephen Miller

@StephenM

Large swaths of corporate media exist at this point primarily to propagandize and radicalize subsets of the population into supporting the liquidation of national sovereignty. Willfully omitted by the CNN propagandists is that these are minors who cartels have recently tried to smuggle across the Southwest Border but who were rescued by Border Patrol. These minors will now be safely and humanely reunited with their families by dedicated public servants who have devoted their lives to combatting child trafficking. It is because of the efforts of these public servants that there is no longer a raging UAC (“unaccompanied alien child”) catastrophe — the Trump Administration swiftly, urgently and righteously ended the child trafficking nightmare. Between ten to twenty thousand children a MONTH were successfully smuggled by cartels into the US under Biden, who worked with taxpayer NGOs to deliver the smuggled children to unknown adults in the US, whereupon they disappeared. The NGOs then submitted knowingly fraudulent asylum claims to try to keep the children from ever going home or seeing their families again. These same Democrat-NGO networks for cartels were also ruthlessly exploited by TDA and MS-13 to insert gang members into the United States and violent criminals into our high schools (automatically allowed in merely by claiming to be 17), subjecting innocent American children to unspeakable horrors. It was one of the darkest of many dark chapters of the Biden era. The Trump Administration put the child traffickers out of business and CNN considers this a great tragedy to be urgently reversed. New depths of “journalistic” depravity and immortality.