The Idiot Index

Applied to banks, insurers, asset managers, and exchanges. The standard Markup formulas (Revenue/COGS) are not meaningful here — banks have no Cost of Goods Sold; their economics run on interest spreads, premiums, and fees. The Shareholder Extraction ratio (which divides by R&D) is also not meaningful — financial firms typically report no R&D. The load-bearing indicators in this sector are Labor Share, Executive Extraction, and Capital Extraction (the universal share-of-net-income returned to shareholders). Markup-family rows are intentionally not computed for this sector; future methodology versions may add Net Interest Margin Inversion and Combined Ratio variants designed for bank and insurance economics.

Required disclosure under Dodd-Frank Section 953(b) since 2018. Filed in DEF 14A proxy statements. The dashboard aggregates the disclosure across the top 50 and ranks.

Source data: CEO total compensation and median employee compensation, both as filed in the company's most recent DEF 14A. When the ratio is XBRL-tagged we use the tagged value; otherwise the narrative disclosure is parsed (~99% accuracy).