Well, everybody is freaking out about a so-called crisis in the banking system. The extraordinary increase in fiscal flows is a powerful buttress to the economy and the financial system.

from Peter Radford The circumstances of Silicon Valley Bank are well rehearsed by now.   The bank sat at the epicenter of the tech-bro start-up ecosystem and played a pivotal role in the collection and disbursement of all the cash that flows through that system.  It was an extremely odd bank.  Unlike the everyday banks most of us deal with it had very few deposits that originated from regular customers.  Most of its deposit base consisted of the chunky piles of cash belonging to start-ups...

Does randomization control for ‘lack of balance’? Mike Clarke, the Director of the Cochrane Centre in the UK, for example, states on the Centre’s Web site: ‘In a randomized trial, the only difference between the two groups being compared is that of most interest: the intervention under investigation’. This seems clearly to constitute a categorical assertion that by randomizing, all other factors — both known and unknown — are equalized between the...

Nice figure of speech “injected!”… wow…They are referring to the $2T of reserve balances currently in the RRP… why are they in that Fed account and not in Depository accounts where they could be utilized to settle unanticipated withdrawals without requiring sales of other HQLA at current reduced prices due to the dumb monetarists rate increases?Why did the dumb Art degree people at the Fed reduce the RRR from 10% to 0% in the first place?What is bad about requiring Depositories to maintain a...

by Joseph Joyce The IMF’s Position in a Fragmented Global Economy Ten years ago Cambridge University Press published my book, The IMF and Global Financial crises: Phoenix Rising? I had written a series of journal papers on the IMF and used the format of a book to summarize what I had learned about the Fund. I also made some evaluations and projections about the IMF and its reputation; a decade later, how has the IMF done? The book reviewed...

Peter Dorman’s critical review of “The Guest Lecture.” His review was first posted at Econospeak. Economic Insomnia? A Review of “The Guest Lecture” by Martin Riker. It’s a rare day when an economist plays the key role in a novel, and even rarer when one of the supporting players is John Maynard Keynes himself.  So, spurred on by enthusiastic reviews, I sailed through Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture this week, a novel in which a woman, just...

A different viewpoint by the Physicians for a National Health Program. Mainly speaking as advocates for a universal national health program which would be as cost-effective as possible. They are proposing the plan could be constructed as an improved form of Traditional Medicare. They do too find similar issues as what Gilfillan and Berwick extensively discussed in the commentary Medicare ‘Money Machine, Part One and Part Two. Comments on CY 2024...

Forecast: real manufacturing and trade sales are likely to set a new record for January  – by New Deal democrat One of the four monthly series of coincident indicators most relied upon by the NBER in determining whether the economy is in expansion or recession is Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales. A significant problem with it is that reporting of the data seriously lags. For example, the result for January will only be reported more than two...

Gov't is about to pump over $8T into the economy via interest income transfers, and the Fed will be GIVING banks $300 bln/yr in new capital. Is this really panic worthy? Trade and invest using the concepts of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.mmteconomics.com/ Mike Norman Twitter https://twitter.com/mikenorman Mike Norman Economics: https://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/ Understanding the Daily Treasury Statement video course....