The final frontier : the integration of banking and commerce. Part 1, the likely outcome of eliminating the barrier

Exploring the potential effects of removing the legal barriers between banks and commercial firms, this article surveys economic theory as well as experience in other developed countries and in U.S. nonbank conglomerates.Banks and banking ; Banking law

The Final Frontier: The Integration of Banking and Commerce. Part 1: The Likely Outcome of Eliminating the Barrier

The policy debate on whether to strengthen or to remove the legal barriers between banking and commerce has paid little attention to what the practical effects of removing the barriers would be. To help answer this question, this article, the first part of a two-part study, provides an overview of the potential gains of integrating banking and commerce. Economic theory, the authors note, suggests that joint corporate ownership of banks and commercial firms has several potential benefits, including economies of scale and scope, increased internal capital markets, and diversification. Commercial firms could also enjoy a significant reduction in funding costs if affiliation with a bank extended the federal safety net for banks to cover the commercial firms' liabilities. But some benefits are already available without common ownership. Moreover, common ownership may also result in some disadvantages, such as significant diseconomies of scale and scope. Actual experience provides better insight than theory can about the relative magnitudes of the benefits and costs of cross-industry combinations. U.S. experience with limited openings between banking and nonbank activities suggests that the most common combinations were banks with nonbank financial firms, relationships that were authorized by a 1999 reform act. Foreign experience and U.S. conglomerates of nonbank firms in different industries fail to provide compelling evidence for large-scale combinations of banking and commercial firms

The Final Frontier: The Integration of Banking and Commerce. Part 2: Risk and Return Using Efficient Portfolio Analysis

In the first part (in the previous issue of Economic Review) of this two-part study, the authors identified a number of possible benefits from combining banking and commerce, including portfolio diversification, the creation of internal capital markets, and economies of scale and scope. This second part of the study analyzes the one source of possible gainsportfolio diversificationthat can be estimated with existing data. Using methodologies from previous studies, the authors combine ten financial and nonfinancial industries into hypothetical portfolios using industry-level profitability data calculated from corporate tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service between 1994 and 2004. The analysis demonstrates that pairwise combinations of banks with construction firms or with retail firms would have produced substantially higher returns on equity with less risk during the sample period. Efficient portfolios combining banks with several other industries showed even higher levels of returns relative to risk, although banks were not necessarily a dominant part of some combinations. These findings suggest that portfolio diversification could be an important benefit from combining banks with some types of nonbank firms. The authors stress that bank management contemplating diversification into the commercial sector must be selective about which specific industries they choose, while corporate management interested in moving into banking might need to settle for somewhat lower returns to achieve a substantial reduction in risk

Fine‐needle aspiration cytology of metastatic spindle cell follicular thyroid carcinoma: A case report

Follicular thyroid carcinoma, spindle cell variant is extremely rare. The tumor is predominantly composed of spindle cells with a fusiform appearance that are arranged in intersecting fascicles. Fine‐needle aspiration biopsy of this entity has not been previously described. We report a case of a 58‐year‐old woman who presented with metastasis to a left neck lymph node 15 years after the original diagnosis. Fine‐needle aspiration cytology showed numerous bland, spindled to epithelioid cells with thin, elongated, and plump nuclei with finely granular chromatin and inconspicuous nucleoli. The tumor cells had a moderate amount of cytoplasm with occasional elongated cytoplasmic tails. The cells were arranged in irregular aggregates with a fascicular pattern or singly dispersed. The tumor cells demonstrated positive staining for pan‐keratin, PAX8, thyroid transcription factor‐1, and thyroglobulin, which confirmed thyroid primary origin

Library Assessment and Data Analytics in the Big Data Era: Practice and Policies

Emerging technologies have offered libraries and librarians new ways and methods to collect and analyze data in the era of accountability to justify their value and contributions. For example, Gallagher, Bauer and Dollar (2005) analyzed the paper and online journal usage from all possible data sources and discovered that users at the Yale Medical Library preferred the electronic format of articles to the print version. After this discovery, they were able to take necessary steps to adjust their journal subscriptions. Many library professionals advocate such data-driven library management to strengthen and specify library budget proposals