Banking industry

The column kept one heading for the banks themselves, as distinct from the market in their paper. What sits under it is a reading of a single annual filing: Bank of America’s 10-K, taken apart line by line rather than summarised from a press release. The author’s method was to work from the document a bank is obliged to file, on the grounds that the obligation is what makes the number checkable.

That approach is the one the portal now applies to deposit pricing, credit cards and loan arithmetic in its banks and credit section, where the sources are supervisory reports and published schedules rather than filings alone. The page you are on is the archive entry: the piece stays at the address the column gave it, with its own date and byline, and nothing in it has been rewritten for the portal.

For a reader arriving from a search, the useful property of a piece built on a filing is that the filing can still be opened: it is lodged with the regulator, it is dated, and the argument can be checked against it line by line. That is the only sense in which a years-old article about a bank is current, and it is a real one. The index below lists what the column filed under this heading, newest first, with the date each piece carried when it was published.