InMarketing Today

Citi's chief executive, Dame Jane Fraser, told reporters today that "money votes with its feet", warning the government against further raising taxes on banks. London's effective bank tax rate sits around 48 per cent, she said, against 27 per cent in New York and 28 per cent in Dublin. Barclays and JP Morgan have issued similar warnings; JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon has threatened to abandon his bank's planned Canary Wharf headquarters.

Fraser's warning works as communications because it's built to be checked. She didn't say London was "too expensive" — she gave three comparable numbers a journalist could verify within minutes. That's the difference between a complaint and an argument: one asks to be believed, the other invites scrutiny and survives it.

Before your next public statement to government, media, or investors, replace every "concerning" or "challenging" with the number behind it. If you can't find one, the claim isn't ready to make.

Galaxy and BNY announced today that Galaxy's staking capability will be built into BNY's Digital Asset Custody platform, letting institutional clients earn rewards on eligible digital assets without leaving BNY's custody model. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's chief product and innovation officer, and Steve Kurz, Galaxy's global co-head of digital assets, both provided quotes; the staking service remains subject to regulatory review.

Strip out the adjectives and the announcement is genuinely useful: a large custodian is adding a real capability for a real client need. But the language chosen to sell it — "institutional-grade experience", "programmable rails", an offer to "define the era that follows" — carries no figure, no client count, no yield estimate. It reads well and proves nothing.

When a partnership announcement crosses your desk for approval, ask what number could replace the strongest adjective in it. One client count or projected yield would have made this a stronger story — for Galaxy and BNY, and for the trade press covering it.

City AM's Eliot Wilson marked the anniversary of a case that still shapes press freedom: on 5 August 1735, printer John Peter Zenger was acquitted of seditious libel after his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, argued that the criticisms Zenger had published were true. The jury took ten minutes to acquit him, against a judge who had told them the law didn't care whether the claims were accurate.

Hamilton's argument, as Wilson tells it, was blunt: "the falsehood makes the scandal, and both make the libel." Nearly three centuries on, that's still the test any public claim has to pass. A statement that's true and defensible survives contact with a hostile audience. One that isn't, doesn't — no matter how the case is dressed up.

Before a claim goes out under your organisation's name, ask Hamilton's question: is it true, and can you prove it? If the answer to either is no, the risk isn't just legal. It's reputational, and it travels faster than any correction.