Category: Business Columnists

Dueling US-China Economies

Commentary China’s arbitrary imprisonment of top business leaders is a self-defeating weakness that can be exploited by the United States and our allies globally. This strategic failure by Beijing, and all communist societies, is replicated by its allies, including Russia and Venezuela. It could be a fleeting and lucrative window of opportunity for democracies in…


The Bank Meltdown Has Just Begun

Commentary Elite overseers of the U.S. banking system spent the better part of the week assuring us that all is well with it. You just have to trust them. They know. And we all know how much we can trust our overlords to tell us the truth, right? Such a wonderful track record of at…


US Needs to Support Blanket Deposit Insurance

Commentary After Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the U.S. Senate on March 22 that federal bank regulators were not considering “guarantee of all deposits,” the stock market—and bank stocks more specifically—fell precipitously. The very next day, Yellen seemed to have walked back her comments. In a speech to the U.S. House, Yellen said that regarding…


US Needs to Support Comprehensive Deposit Insurance

Commentary After Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the U.S. Senate on March 22 that federal bank regulators were not considering “guarantee of all deposits,” the stock market—and bank stocks more specifically—fell precipitously. The very next day, Yellen seemed to have walked back her comments. In a speech to the U.S. House, Yellen said that regarding…


Banking Crisis Is How It Starts, Recession Is How It Ends

Commentary As the Fed tightens monetary policy, a banking crisis is historically the first evidence that something is breaking. As noted recently in “Not QE,” Last week, amid a rash of bank insolvencies, government agencies took action to stem a potential banking crisis. The FDIC, the Treasury, and the Fed issued a Bank Term Lending…


Deficits Forever and Ever

Commentary President Joe Biden’s budget predictably has sparked intense debate. Opinions on overall spending, taxes, equity, and deficits fill financial columns. To see what is happening to the nation’s finances, it helps to step away from these politically motivated criticisms and praise of the president’s proposals and instead look at the basic structure of government…


Don’t Let Them Eat Cake

Commentary Sugar, of all things, may not seem a very apt symbol of liberty under siege, but who imagined what another commodity, tea, would come to mean to the American colonists in 1773? We read in grammar school how the Sons of Liberty dressed as Indians and hid themselves on board three ships carrying tea…


Treasury Holdings by China Is More an Economic Decision Than Political

Commentary One of the recent news warnings about the status of the U.S. dollar was the continuing slash of U.S. Treasury securities holdings by mainland China. It’s latest holding in January was US$859.4 billion, a year-over-year drop of 17 percent compared with that of US$1,033.8 billion in January 2022. Seventeen percent is undoubtedly a significant…


When One Zombie Eats Another: Why UBS’s Rescue of Credit Suisse Changes Nothing

Commentary What happens when one zombie eats another? All the disgusting and fetid zombie parts of the consumed simply move to the consumer. The same is true of zombie banks. When one zombie bank—full of death and corruption but better at hiding it due to superior cosmetics—eats its more visibly ill and compatriot zombie bank,…


The Fed Is Running Two Policies at Once

Commentary Last week was a grim reminder that the economic chaos of the lockdown period is far from over. Markets discovered that several major banks, which hardly anyone truly suspected were in trouble, faced closure and quick rescue for fear of contagion. The trouble was the same in each case: too many assets held in…