
Why Extending Deposit Insurance Won’t Save The Banks

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The activities of the Federal Reserve are normally scheduled out years in advance, but on rare occasions, they have an emergency announcement. Well, “rare” unless you count the year 2020, when they were nearly constant. After a long hiatus, these things have sprung to life again (evidently every Sunday, just before the market opens, so they can save the asses of their buddies). I daresay there will be many, many more of these to come as the world plunges into the abyss in the months ahead.

As he does eight times a year, Jerome Powell will stroll in front of a podium on Wednesday afternoon and discuss the latest decision of the FOMC and answer softball questions from reporters. This is always an interesting event, but I daresay that the press conference this week will easily rank in the top five of the past decade in terms of importance and consequence.

When I was a lad, the Cold War was still humming along as it had been for decades. Even as a child, I had a strong sense of what was going on and what I felt was right and wrong. I perceived my native United States as a place of individual freedom and open choices. I perceived the USSR as an evil prison housing hundreds of millions of poor souls who were under the thumb of an oppressive government. When Reagan described them as “An Evil Empire”, I was in total agreement.
What was particularly nauseating to me was how the Soviet government would shameless and persistently lie to its own people. They would always offer assurances that everything was under control, everything was going to plan, and everything was going to be fine. They were able to sustain that lie from 1919 until 1989, but then it all came crashing down. At the time, it seemed the world had finally come to its senses.
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