What is weighing on CEOs’ minds this earnings season?

Schumpeter likes to write—and receive—handwritten letters. When he got out his pen last year and wrote to Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, he explained to the passive-investing billionaire that he was doing so because he believed they shared a mutual interest: letter-writing. Your columnist went so far as to use a John Donne quote, “letters mingle souls”, to elicit a response. Evidently soul-mingling, whatever its merits in Elizabethan England, is not the done thing in Hudson Yards. Mr Fink agreed to an interview but not, sadly, to an exchange of correspondence.

The personal touch is not quite dead, though. You can see that in Mr Fink’s latest letter to shareholders, as well as those of Warren Buffett, America’s most celebrated investor, and Jamie Dimon, Wall Street’s top banker. Mr Fink, to explain the importance of retirement savings, tells an uplifting story about his late mum and dad. Mr Buffett writes of his sensible (and now very rich) sister, Bertie. Mr Dimon, though hardly heart-on-sleeve, sounds like he carries the cares of the world on his shoulders. The least personal is Amazon’s Andy Jassy, who in a shareholder letter on April 11th came across as an Amazonian to the marrow of his bones. No matter. The day the letter was published his firm’s stockmarket value soared by $30bn to a record high of almost $2trn. That is an ROI—return on ink—of $6m a word. For shareholders, pure poetry.