The political and financial class breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The bill suspends the debt ceiling for two years, thus avoiding the establishment’s nightmare of a government default on its debt. Rather, it allows the government to continue adding trillions of dollars of debt that will be monetized by the Federal Reserve.

In 2016 India’s Hindu fundamentalist Modi government abruptly banned the use of 500 and 1000 rupees notes to curb corruption, black money, counterfeit currency, and to combat terrorism. Within a month’s time the government realized their demonetization policy had failed so they very conveniently changed the objective to a cashless digital economy.

As a banker and economist, I am riveted by the expeditious demise of Silicon Valley Bank and other institutions. Were these crashes due to bank mismanagement, as many pundits as well as regulators have posited? Were they due to not managing risk, not hedging, and unfettered exposure to sectors of concern? Or maybe something else is afoot, a movement that may have begun a decade ago.

It’s been nearly three months since the Federal Reserve provided a modest multi-billion-dollar bailout to a few struggling banks. Despite the ongoing process of reducing government debt and mortgage securities in its portfolio, the Fed’s balance sheet increased by $400 billion in March, to bring the total up to $8.7 trillion by March 22.