Money and Banks

The current banking crises have deep roots in US financial history. Monetary authorities have engaged in inflationary behavior for more than a hundred years.

The combination of higher rates and declining optimism about the economy, plus slumps in equity, private investments, and bond valuations, is going to inevitably lead to a massive crunch in access to credit and financing.

If the Fed is serious about bringing down price inflation, it's difficult to see how the Fed can do that while also guaranteeing more liquidity to an obviously fragile banking system.

Walter Bagehot, as Jim Grant writes, believed that bankers and central bankers should exhibit financial discipline. He would not recognize today's banking world.

Even when currency is backed by gold, governments have many political reasons to pursue national, territorial currencies. Now there are hundreds of national currencies. It didn't have to be this way. 

While the Fed and the Biden administration try to assure Americans that their banks are safe and secure, the numbers tell a different story.

The dollar became the dominant global currency not so much because of its own merits, but because of the self-destruction of the pound sterling caused by the British state and central bank.

Despite all of the supposed safeguards to prevent bank failures, banks still fail. Perhaps the so-called safeguards are causing much of the trouble.

As markets settle down after the last set of bank failures, political elites claim the crisis is behind us. But it is not over, not by a long shot.

Contrary to Krugman, DeSantis and others warning about a CBDC aren’t being paranoid: they are simply drawing the obvious conclusions from history.