Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Big banks are reporting their quarterly earnings this week and broadly they're doing pretty well.

Belt tightening earlier in the year seems to have staved off disaster.

Now many banks are sitting on piles of cash.

Question is, save it or spend it.

And road works abound in Egypt.

There are highways cutting through leafy chiro neighborhoods and skirting the edges of the great pyramids.

Many seem poorly built.

Some are out and out dangerous.

And mostly they look like political pandering.

But first...

A video of a man apparently being killed by police goes viral.

Protests break out, grow and spread even internationally.

Calls for police reform get louder and louder.

The police react violently.

Protesters are killed.

It's too familiar a story.

And this time it's happening across Nigeria.

The focus of the protesters fury is a group called the specialist anti-robbery squad or SARS.

A secretive outfit with a long-running reputation for brutality.

...