“There’s an internal adage, at least among the bankers that I used to hang out with: if you don’t want to answer the direction directly, just drown them in bullshit,” says Horacio Mendez, a former banker and Federal Reserve staffer who heads the nonprofit Woodstock Institute. “Just flood them with data and see whether or not they can find it. Because the industry doesn’t want to make it too easy to connect the dots.”