The Martin Hutchinson Place
The collapses of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, all within six weeks, are a drastic failure of both bank regulation and Fed monetary policy. This column has written incessantly about the idiocies of Fed monetary policy and its GOSPLAN approach to interest rate setting; I would now like to focus on […]
The coronation of King Charles III next Saturday is planned to be on a smaller scale than that of his mother Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. That is appropriate; Elizabeth’s coronation may have taken place in a relatively poor country still living under the effects of postwar rationing, but it was graced with an immensely […]
Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton is currently the world’s richest man, worth around $239 billion; he is notable in coming neither from the United States nor from the tech sector. His wealth is a product of globalization, which has produced demand for Western fashion brands among a substantial fraction of 8 billion […]
Saudi Arabia recently signed a contract with China to sell oil with payment in yuan (China’s currency, sometimes known as renminbi, for inscrutable Chinese reasons). Argentina and Brazil are proposing to use a common currency, the sur, for trade between them. India and Russia are undertaking trade in rupees and rubles. This is a gathering […]
Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 “Leviathan” described life in a state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short.” Fortunately, shortly after Leviathan was published, the Tory architects of the English Restoration Settlement brought several protections into the British and later American Constitutions that revolutionized our fates: they were property rights, Habeas Corpus and the First […]
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) this week announced the winner of its auction for the loans and deposits of the failed Silicon Valley Bank: First Citizens BancShares (Nasdaq:FCNCA), a North Carolina outfit with no obvious synergy with SVB’s customer base or tech know-how. Given First Citizens’ capital base of only $14.1 billion ($9.7 billion […]
Since the time of Sir Robert Peel (Prime Minister 1834-35, 1841-46) the British Conservative party has been notorious for its inability to conserve anything worthwhile, let alone to restore anything that its opponents had dismantled. For a few years in the 1980s, it appeared that Margaret Thatcher, while imperfect on several issues, had reversed this […]
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was at first sight a splendid 21st century replica of the 18th century Country Banks that fueled the Industrial Revolution – it was local to Silicon Valley, supremely attuned to the major industry in its locality, and easy for that industry to deal with. So why did it fail? The answer […]
The Federal Trade Commission under its fearless leftist chair Lina Khan is proposing to ban non-compete agreements, which prevent employees from working for a competitor for an often lengthy period after their departure and are applied to some 30 million U.S. employees. The usual Chamber of Commerce types and “conservative” journalists have squawked, arguing that […]
The reputations of past Presidents are continually being re-evaluated. Woodrow Wilson, a demi-god at the time of the 1944 film “Wilson,” has now been sharply downgraded by both left (for his racism) and right (for his rigid Progressivism and his share in the disastrous Versailles Treaty). Conversely, Harry Truman and Calvin Coolidge have been rehabilitated […]