There’s nothing like a bank failure to get people thinking about the banking system. And though it appears the Fed has bought the nation’s banks some time, the pair of bank runs on Friday and Sunday again exposed the fragility of the nation’s banks.

Political correctness in Western societies fosters polarization and a toxic culture of ignorance. Although people are rightly outraged by the cancellation of prominent figures, the most glaring consequence of political correctness is the proliferation of ignorance. When speakers are cancelled for contradicting sacrosanct opinions, this leads to an environment where people never arrive at the truth because ideas are not disputed in the public domain.

As the war in Ukraine drags on into its second year, protest demonstrations have been taking place in major European cities. They express the growing sentiment that the people are tired of the protracted conflict and fearful of what could come should the war continue even longer.

The war in Ukraine has become a bloody grind — and there’s no end in sight.

Welcome to Whose Economy Is It, Anyway?, where the rules are made up and the dollars don’t matter. Or at least that seems to be the view of the Yellen regime.

As Doug French noted last week, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was the canary in the coal mine. Over the weekend, Signature Bank became the third-largest bank failure in modern history, just weeks after both firms were given a stamp of approval by KPMG, one of the Big Four auditing firms.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed on Friday and was shut down by regulators. It was the second-largest failure in US history and the first since the global financial crisis. Almost immediately, the calls for bailouts started to come in. (Since Friday, First Republic Bank has failed, and many other banks are facing collapse.)

What a weekend! On Sunday morning Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CBS there would be no bailouts. Later that day the Fed declared Quantitative Easing to infinity and beyond.

What’s going on?

For those who have followed the background noise of US activities in the Middle East over the past year, since it was last seriously in the news following the disastrous execution by the Biden administration of the long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan, they will recall a vague haze of reported drone strikes, arms sales, and Israeli assassinations; more recently, they will recall resistance to attempts to end the U.S. military roles in Syria and Yemen, the death of the Iran nuclear deal, and the blocking of earthquake relief.