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
Prices will always increase, some small banks will fail, and the Fed was asleep at the switch when the run on Silicon Valley Bank occurred. Fed chair Jerome Powell admitted those three things in response to Scott Pelley’s questions on 60 Minutes . “But the overall price level doesn’t come down. It will fluctuate. And some . . . goods and services
Back when I was a construction lender, I thought the perfect construction loan would pay off after one day, just long enough to collect the loan fee. After all, time is your enemy in construction lending. Any of a myriad of unknowns can keep construction from being completed: the market may evaporate for what is being built, interest rates may
Bank CEOs always have their heads in the clouds. First, pessimists never earn a seat in the corner office. Plus, it takes a good-sized ego to climb to the top of a bank bureaucracy. A person running a bank believes they can sail the ship through any stormy economic weather. Take John Allison. He’s the chairman of a bank holding company, Home
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Here in the U.S. the financial markets are focusing on Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s herky-jerky monetary messages while politically the news is Trump’s two picks for the central bank board have taken themselves out of the running. Herman “9-9-9” Cain and Stephen Moore couldn’t take the heat
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.