Banking
Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse, 2023
Fig. 1. “The monument sign in front of the parking lot of the Silicon Valley Bank headquarters at 3003 West Tasman Drive, Santa Clara, California.” Photograph by Minh Nguyen, March 13, 2023, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
At some point you just have to say, money just doesn’t fucking work. When a social construction[1] is broken, it’s time, in this case, past time, to replace it with something else.
Central banks therefore face not just a dilemma but a trilemma. Owing to recent negative aggregate supply shocks — including the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine — achieving price stability through interest-rate hikes was bound to raise the risk of a hard landing (a recession and higher unemployment). But, as I have been arguing for over a year, this vexing tradeoff also features the additional risk of severe financial instability.[2]
And what has broken it is a notion that some human beings are worth more than other human beings, even to a point of depriving the latter of the necessities of life. We live in service to the social construction rather than the social construction living in service to us.[3]
Nouriel Roubini, “‘Most U.S. banks are technically near insolvency, and hundreds are already fully insolvent,’ Roubini says,” MarketWatch, April 1, 2023, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-u-s-banks-are-technically-near-insolvency-and-hundreds-are-already-fully-insolvent-roubini-says-18b89f92
Illiberalism
Fig. 1. Photograph by Joachim F. Thurn, August 1991, Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F089030-0003, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Michael Bachner, “Ministers approve Ben Gvir-led national guard, major budget cuts to fund it,” Times of Israel, April 2, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ministers-approve-major-budget-cut-to-pave-way-for-forming-ben-gvirs-national-guard/
- [1]David Benfell, “Cats are smarter than we are. Really,” Not Housebroken, April 5, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/10/30/cats-are-smarter-than-we-are-really/↩
- [2]Nouriel Roubini, “‘Most U.S. banks are technically near insolvency, and hundreds are already fully insolvent,’ Roubini says,” MarketWatch, April 1, 2023, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-u-s-banks-are-technically-near-insolvency-and-hundreds-are-already-fully-insolvent-roubini-says-18b89f92↩
- [3]David Benfell, “Cats are smarter than we are. Really,” Not Housebroken, April 5, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/10/30/cats-are-smarter-than-we-are-really/; David Benfell, “The Silicon Valley Bank collapse exposes our system for what it is: neo-feudalism,” Not Housebroken, March 30, 2023, https://disunitedstates.org/2023/03/19/the-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-exposes-our-system-for-what-it-is-neo-feudalism/↩