A plea for banking............................

...............................................the old-fashioned way.   John Kay surveys changes to the banking industry over the past twenty years, and is not impressed.  Me neither.

"Yet these cleverer people managed things much less well than had their less intellectually distinguished predecessors. They were rarely as clever as they thought they were — or sufficiently clever to handle the complexities of the environment they had created."

"There may be less need today for the networker, the individual who knows whom rather than what; technology helps make connections, although it cannot displace personal relationships. But efficient capital allocation requires above all the knowledge and experience to assess the quality of the underlying assets, and the capacities of those who manage them."