Several years ago, I wrote an op ed and a policy brief to make the point that political discourse sometimes focuses on the “record profits” in banking, when from an economic point of view, nominal dollar values lose their meaning if you don’t account for inflation and you may want to scale by firm equity or assets. Once you adjust for inflation or firm assets, the numbers can tell a very different story, and the notion of “record profits” loses its meaning. The same principle applies in the context of recent bank failures.