The Upshot of Some Banks Paying Higher Rates on Deposits

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Banks offering market rates on deposits — Ally and Capital One among them — attracted many billions of dollars in customer funds after the Federal Reserve began lifting rates aggressively in 2022. More traditional banks responded by:

Matching the rates offered by Ally, Capital One and others.

Continuing to pay next-to-nothing on deposits.

Pinning Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s picture to the office dartboard.

Read on: Traditional banks’ steadfastness on deposit rates allows them to continue to maintain their historic lending function, but the high-deposit-rate banks have shifted to loans of shorter maturity and, research suggests, higher risk, with implications for the entire financial sector.

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Women, who hold roughly 12% of C-suite jobs at U.S. companies, advance somewhat faster at firms that:

Are de-centralized and therefore enable lower-ranked managers to develop a record of objective performance.

Are centralized and thus bring managers into direct contact with top executives.

Read on: Success in a centralized organization often relies on how well workers coordinate, cooperate and negotiate with others. This depends on networks and social connections that are often predominantly male, which tend also to be exclusionary and difficult for women to join.

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Considering social programs that redistribute wealth to support lower income people, some Americans suspect potential recipients mightn’t be hard working enough. A study reduces this objection by showing:

Babies.

Elderly people.

High school students as they graduate.

Read on: Buy-in for redistributive policies was higher when study participants were randomly assigned to learn about inequality between babies, who, it’s implied, couldn’t possibly be personally responsible for the income bracket they were born to.

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The United Nations in 2015 laid out a plan to end poverty and hunger, achieve gender equality, promote peace and economic growth, and protect the planet. So far, results are at best mixed, and a paper by operations management experts suggests:

Breaking the 17 original Sustainable Development Goals down into 170, and focusing efforts on smaller, discrete improvements.

Looking for instances in which multiple goals are met by a single solution.

Blaming COVID-19 and global warming and moving the date to achieve improvements from 2030 to 2050.

Read on: Improving farmland productivity, for instance, reduces the incentive to cut down forests, simultaneously protecting terrestrial ecosystems (Goal No. 15), raising farmer incomes and reducing poverty (Goal No. 1), increasing food security (Goal 2) and improving overall health and well-being for at-risk populations (Goal 3).

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We’re encouraged to live in the moment, but we’re also inclined to keep voluminous to-do lists and self-judge based on getting that stuff done — meaning the moment is often occupied by completion of a task we deem urgent, if not important. Study participants were able to increase feelings of contentment by:

Working harder at task completion in hopes of gaining free time.

Deleting all productivity apps from their phones.

Taking a broader view of time — past, present, future — which seems to open up opportunities for satisfying activities.

Read on: Researchers surmise that taking a bird’s-eye view of one’s time may mitigate a tendency to focus solely on the urgency of the present, and that contemplating past, present and future may help us make time for activities that generate more happiness.