Dead Banks Walking, Part 1
2024-06-06
More than half a trillion dollars in losses. A trillion is a thousand billion. The latest from the nation’s deposit insurer, the FDIC, is “Unrealized losses on available-for-sale and held-to-maturity securities increased by $39 billion to $517 billion in the first quarter.”The Federal Reserve’s higher for longer policy is making bank balance sheets weaker and weaker. Bond values decrease when interest rates increase. Thus, “Higher unrealized losses on residential mortgage-backed securities, resulting from higher mortgage rates in the first quarter, drove the overall increase. This is the ninth straight quarter of unusually high unrealized losses since the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates in the first quarter of 2022.“The number of banks on the problem list rose in this year’s
It Began with Carl Menger: The Austrian Intellectual Triumph
2024-01-08
Near the end of the nineteenth century, the European intellectual scene witnessed a remarkable theoretical contest known as the “battle of methods,” or in German, Methodenstreit. This intellectual clash stood out due to the confrontation between the precepts of methodological and subjective individualization, equipped with a subjectivist and individualizing worldview of the method. It was represented by figures such as Carl Menger (considered the founder of the Austrian School and its theoretical bases) and the German Historical School, and it was guided by the collectivist and historicist assertions of economic science, whose exponents included Gustav von Schmoller and Lujo Brentano.
The conflict, prevalent in the 1880s and 1890s, was driven by fundamental differences regarding the