President Biden has of late attempted to convince Americans to ignore the financial realities of their day-to-day lives by insisting that his stewardship of the economy has been a success. Inevitably, the corporate media have been all too willing to…
Central planning, never out of fashion on the left, is now more popular than ever on the right thanks to the GOP’s populist takeover. This is why a recurring effort to intervene in the credit-card processing market is finding more…
On April 28, both the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued self-assessments of their regulatory oversight leading up to the closings of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. At the time of their failures, Silicon Valley Bank…
We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years By Stephen D. King (Yale University Press, 230 pages, $28) The current inflation rate in the USA is 5 percent, significantly down from its June 2022…
Perfect storms occur in batches. It’s never a single event, a single wave. Bank executives, like ship captains, earn their keep during times of upheaval. The good ones anticipate events, examine cause and effect, assess risk, and chart the best…
I have heard some people say that the Federal Reserve has a credibility problem. The agency missed the biggest inflation spike since the 1980s, was slow to start rolling back pandemic policies, and failed to spot the risks that some…
Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis By Jeanna Smialek Alfred A. Knopf, 374 pages, $30 The Federal Reserve System, the United States central banking system, was established in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Act, which…
Moral hazard occurs when an agreement that people make to act in concert for their mutual benefit results in an incentive for one of them to act immorally. The classic case is insurance. When an insurance company contracts with a…
The nation needs the Congressional investigations, but they are, I caution again, predictably un-strategic, even awkward. Republicans stupidly sold the hearings as conclusive (thus inorganic), accordingly seen as partisan payback, not transparent good government. Lacking choreography, they appeal mainly to…
