Banking

Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) follows boxer Joe Pendleton, mistakenly taken to Heaven before his time, who must inhabit a new body on Earth to complete his life. Directed by Alexander Hall and written by Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller, the film balances fantasy, romance, and comedy with precise structure and restrained performances. Its strength lies in treating the afterlife as bureaucratic infrastructure and grounding ethical choices in tangible action — restitution, not revelation. Though its final act softens its earlier rigour, the film remains a masterclass in economical, character-led storytelling.

The Bank Dick

Directed by Edward F. Cline and written by W. C. Fields under a pseudonym, The Bank Dick (1940) follows Egbert Sousé, a chronically intoxicated Lompoc resident who stumbles into bank security work after foiling a robbery by accident. Built around Fields’s signature blend of verbal evasion, physical timing and moral indifference, the film favours set-piece gags over narrative cohesion. Milton Krasner’s straightforward cinematography and Arthur Hilton’s clean editing serve the performance without embellishment. Though its plot contrivances and thin supporting roles show strain, its endurance lies in Fields’s unyielding command of comic causality — a masterclass in how to be funny without ever trying to be liked.

Force of Evil

Abraham Polonsky’s 1948 Force of Evil follows lawyer Joe Morse as he helps gangster Ben Tucker rig the numbers racket in New York, only to confront the human cost when his brother Leo is drawn in. Shot by George Barnes and scored by David Raksin, it is a tightly wound, linguistically dense crime film that treats corruption as arithmetic and kinship as collateral. Preserved in the US National Film Registry, it remains a benchmark of film noir’s intellectual rigour.

Global financial crisis in 2009

The 2009 phase of the global financial crisis produced the first partial nationalisation of a German financial institution — Commerzbank — following its merger with Dresdner Bank and subsequent reliance on the SoFFin fund. The record shows that official explanations for state intervention shifted under pressure, and that market reaction preceded and shaped the aid. No broader systemic conclusions — about causes, contagion, or policy coherence — can be drawn from this material alone.

Bank of England

Founded in 1694 to raise money for naval rebuilding after defeat at the Battle of Beachy Head, the Bank of England began as a private institution lending to the Crown at interest, secured by shipping duties. It stayed in private hands for more than two and a half centuries until the postwar Attlee government nationalised it in 1946, and it did not gain formal independence to set its own interest rates until the late 1990s. Along the way it weathered the end of the gold standard, sterling devaluations, decimalisation, and the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted new regulatory bodies under its umbrella.

Medici Bank

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank in 1397 with 10,000 gold florins, building a holding-company structure of semi-independent branch partnerships and using bills of exchange to earn profit on currency conversion rather than charging interest banned under canon law. Wealth from the bank, later boosted by a papal monopoly on alum from Tolfa, let Cosimo de' Medici become Florence's unofficial ruler by 1434 without ever holding formal office. Bad loans to rulers including the English crown, mismanagement at the Bruges branch, and Lorenzo the Magnificent's neglect of the business left the bank unable to survive the political shock of the French invasion of 1494.

Lato (typeface)

Lato is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Łukasz Dziedzic and released in 2010. It was commissioned by a Polish bank, then cancelled and published under the Open Font License. As of August 2018, it appeared on over 9.6 million websites and ranked third on Google Fonts by usage. It has been applied in physical media including election billboards and information signs, and adopted by Save the Children for its logotype since 2022.

Bradespar

Bear Stearns

Bear Stearns collapsed because its business model depended on continuous short-term funding — and when counterparties stopped rolling over repo loans, liquidity vanished faster than capital could be deployed. Its balance sheet held value, but confidence did not. The firm was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a Fed-brokered fire sale.

Australian Securities Exchange

Bolsas y Mercados Españoles

PayPal

eBay acquired PayPal on October 3, 2002, for $1.4–$1.5 billion. It shut down its competing Billpoint service three months later. PayPal became the dominant, user-chosen payment method on eBay — used in over 70% of auctions and ~25% of closed listings — and by Q3 2012 accounted for 40% of eBay’s revenue ($1.37B). The deal was not about innovation. It was about controlling the checkout.

Enron

Enron was an American energy, commodities and services company founded in 1985 through a merger. It grew into a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper company — then collapsed due to institutionalised, systematic accounting fraud. Its 2001 bankruptcy was the largest fraud-related bankruptcy in U.S. history. It reorganised as Enron Creditors Recovery Corp. in 2004.

FTSE Group

General Motors Chapter 11 reorganization

International Bank Account Number

IBAN is a validation layer—not a payment rail, not a registry, not a protocol. It catches human input errors in account identifiers before they trigger costly rejections downstream. Its mechanism is simple: a fixed-position country code, two check digits, and a national account identifier, all validated via MOD-97-10. It works where people type numbers. It fails where logic, intent, or authority is required.

SWIFT