Banking

Archive for Banking

Thank Goodness the Government Insures Our Checking Accounts

I’m going to write up a longer discussion later, but for right now take a look at this snapshot from page 116 the 2013 FDIC Annual Report: Notice that in 2009 and 2010, the FDIC fund was negative, meaning it had to borrow money from the Treasury just to make whole the depositors of failed […]

Fed Announces (Tentative) End to Bond Purchases in October

The recently released Fed minutes contain the following information on their plans to fully complete the so-called taper: [P]articipants generally agreed that if incoming information continued to support its expectation of improvement in labor market conditions and a return of inflation toward its longer-run objective, it would be appropriate to complete asset purchases with a […]

Using More Government Intervention to Undo Effects of Previous Round

In their conversation regarding income inequality, investing, Austrian economics, and other sundry topics, former business partners Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel had this good exchange: Nassim Taleb: Mark, your book [The Dao of Capital–RPM] is the only place that understands crashes as natural equalizers. In the context of today’s raging debates on inequality, do you […]

Challenging Landsburg on HFT

You guys thought I was nuts reading my analysis of the Bundy standoff? Well now I’m publicly accusing Steve Landsburg of a basic math mistake. But I have a lot of life insurance, remember. An excerpt of the part where we’re still chums: Reading guys like Paul Krugman rail against the socially useless financial sector, […]

Austrian Business Cycle Theory Surprisingly Useful Even Among Its Critics

The theory of business cycles advanced by Ludwig von Mises (and refined by Friedrich Hayek, who won the Nobel partially for this work) explains the typical recession as the inevitable result from a preceding, and unsustainable, boom period. The cause of the boom is artificially low interest rates, which in turn are caused by the […]

Financial Sector “Suicides” Mounting

Yet another JP Morgan employee has apparently committed suicide: A third JP Morgan employee has died under mysterious circumstances in a matter of few weeks. A still unidentified “Chinese male in is thirties” jumped from the roof of Charter House, the 30 floor Hong Kong headquarters of JPM. An eyewitness told the South China Morning […]

The Fed and Conspiracies

One of the quickest ways to assess a person’s worldview is to ask, “How do you feel about conspiracy theories?” Murray Rothbard considered the very term to be loaded, used to discredit what were often sober and factual analyses of why certain government policies were actually implemented. In a recent post, Austrian economist Steve Horwitz […]

Christianity, Money, and Interest

I met Wayne Walton at the Music City Liberty Fest a few years ago. He is a great guy who has committed himself to educating people about the evils in our current monetary and banking systems, and promoting practical ideas for immediate improvements. Wayne is also an outspoken Christian and so we have that in […]