Resolving some hostage crises – as when Putin grabs American basketball players and Wall Street Journal reporters – can require making difficult trade-offs with thugs. But the refusal of Congressional Republicans to lift the debt ceiling is not one of them. The U.S. Constitution is clear that no law, of any kind, trumps the mandate […]

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Silicon Valley Bank (aka SVB) collapsed on March 10, followed by Signature Bank two days later. Fearing mass panic, the FDIC decided to make whole all deposits at both banks, even though they were insured only up to $250,000. On March 16, First Republic Bank was saved from bankruptcy when several large banks lent it […]

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Online propagandists and populist candidates have set their sights on a new enemy: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). These currencies differ from private-sector cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in that they are state-sanctioned and operated. Newly-expressed concerns over CBDCs augment long-running populist disdain for the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Opponents of CBDCs cite the potential […]

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It is an article of faith among conservatives that government programs are wasteful expenditures. This is the standard line of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and the Republican Party. Going further, Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, argued that expanding welfare programs during the 1970s increased poverty in the United States […]

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The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank demonstrated in clear terms that financial reality is a shared hallucination. And financial reality, a useful social construct, goes a long way to shaping our physical reality. For the businesses threatened by a potential meltdown of the bank, a cashflow freeze meant the difference between real people getting […]

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