Thursday, June 14, 2012

Willie Sutton Was Wrong, That's not where the Money Is

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One

From the Wall Street Journal's Jason Zweig:
When someone asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he famously replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

That might have been true in the 1930s, but it no longer seems to apply.

A new study of data on bank robberies, published in the June 2012 issue of the statistical journal Significance, finds that bank robbers don’t get much swag when they pull off a heist. In the U.K., the average haul is just £12,707 per person (roughly $19,767), or less than six months of the average wage for full-time workers there.

That take is so small, note the researchers who conducted the analysis, that it is no longer even “worth the banks’ while to spend as little as £4500 per cashier position” on special barriers that would deter future robberies....MORE
Here's the tune we put on during Hank Paulson's 2009 Congressional testimony on AIG: