Correspondent Blog

We have used the term “second-order thinking” in our writings, and some bankers were curious about what exactly we mean. The term came to popularity in banking after Howard Marks wrote his seminal work on investments – The Most Important Thing. The “most important thing,” as described in the book, is the ability to drill…

In a recent article (here), we discussed why banks that take risks to earn higher revenue demonstrate lower performance as measured by ROA.   Empirical evidence, historical bank failures, and common sense teach us that many risks do not translate to higher yields.  While in that blog, we specifically considered the risk-return tradeoff for credit risk;…