Hello and welcome to Slate Money, our weekly podcast guiding you through the important business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Sam and a fusion coming to you this week from London for this very special transatlantic episode.

This week we'll talk about big banks and the billions of

dollars that they're both making and coughing up to the feds. We'll talk about big tobacco,

getting bigger or smaller, depending on how you look at it, with the merger of Reynolds and

Laurelard. And then we'll turn to the saga of the Joint Strike Fighter,

the most expensive fighter plane the world has ever seen.

And last but not least, we'll wrap up with our lightning round of numbers

that caught our attention this week.

But first, let me introduce a very special guest,

the one the only, John Gapper, the business commentator, FT, editor and general all-around awesome person at the Financial Times.

We're here in the Financial Times studio in London.

John, welcome.

Thank you.

And tell us what your number is this week.

My number is 100 billion.

100 billion.

That could be the largest number we've ever had on the podcast.

That's an awesomely big number.

And joining us from New York is regular guest Kathy O'Neill, the head of the lead program for data journalism at Columbia University.

What's your number this week, Kathy?

My number is 3.2. Hi, John. Hi, Kathy. And as for me, my number is 12,500. So we have a large

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