Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote:
>>What the hell is "banking productivity" anyway?
>
>Good question. No one really has any idea.
>
>Doug
No, really, there is such a thing. Like if this year it only takes a call centre and a smart system to run a credit card operation, whereas last year it took 500 account managers. It is even possible to measure banking productivity changes through "stochastic frontier analysis" if you can specify the outputs (loans, deposits) and inputs (people, computers). The actual specifics of doing so, however, are pretty damn boring.
"If you really want to know" where the Fed's getting this particular bit of snake-oil from, I seem to remember that the Wharton School website has some adventurously dull working papers by Allen Berger :
http://fic.wharton.upenn.edu/fic/wfic/papers/97/p9704.html
cheers from the world's most tedious man
dd
___________________________________________________________________________ _____
---------------------------------------------------------
This email is confidential to the ordinary user of the
e-mail address to which it was addressed. If you are not
the intended recipient, please notify the sender
IMMEDIATELY on (44) 171 638 5858 and delete the message
from all locations in your computer. You should not copy
this email or use it for any purpose, or disclose its
contents to any person : to do so may be unlawful.
Email is an informal method of communication and is
subject to possible data corruption, either accidentally
or on purpose. Flemings is unable to exercise control
over the content of information contained in
transmissions made via the Internet. For these reasons
it will normally be inappropriate to rely on information
contained on email without obtaining written confirmation
of it.
----------------------------------------------------------