Every decade or so bank failures and the subsequent bailout response via central bank intervention appear. The latest jangling of depositor nerves involved US regional banks and a certain Swiss bank of great systemic importance. As James Grant writes in his book Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian , “In economics, the most
If you watched the Fed Chair Jerome Powell testify before the senate and the House, you heard over and over that banks are well capitalized. The non-sequitur should inspire the Shakespearean quote “Methinks you protest too much.” The very next day after the hearings, shares of SVB Financial Group, parent of Silicon Valley Bank, fell 60 percent
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Banks and accounting trickery go together. Last year, as I remember back to my banking days, financial institutions followed the advice once proffered by one of our board members, “If we’re going to the dump, let’s take a full load.” When the pandemic struck, banks dumped plenty in their
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. May is on its way, and the old investment saw, “Sell in May and go away,” will be tested once again. Jared Blikre, writing for Yahoo Finance , provides the history behind what may or may not be good advice. “The full axiom was originally, ‘Sell in May and go away, and come on back on St.
This spring Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked Fed chair Jerome Powell, “And you believe the system, because of the oversight of the Fed, has the wherewithal to stand a significant shock to the markets?” After pointing out that the markets survived a 25 percent drop in GDP and the loss of 30 million jobs last covid spring, Powell admitted
The Fed announced the reportedly hawkish news that the central bank may raise rates, not this year, not next year, but by fifty basis points sometime in 2023. This tapering would slow the Fed’s buying of $120 billion of debt securities a month with money created from the ether to some lesser amount. People forget the central bank “kept its
Back to 2020, the federal government’s covid-mandated shutdown of meat production plants hobbled the nation’s meat production capabilities , leaving farmers with nowhere to send their beef. This resulted in them having to cull cattle and other livestock. The uncertainty caused farmers to scale back their production at the time, which Arun Sundaram
Fannie Mae announced last week that it provided nearly $70 billion in multifamily financing last year. The government lender crowed about $9.6 billion of the total being for affordable housing projects and $13.5 billion financing projects deemed “green and sustainable” units. This helped Fannie “grow its Multifamily Green MBS (mortgage backed
Presented by Douglas E. French at “Recovery or Stagnation?,” the Mises Circle in San Francisco; sponsored by Mark L. Hart, III, and hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Recorded Saturday, August 29th,
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