The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.
“Gold is unique among assets, in that it is not issued by any government or central bank, which means that its value is not influenced by political decisions or the solvency of one institution or another.” ~ Salvatore Rossi, Chief of the Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013
“SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] has a host of problems associated with its specialty: The startup scene that is now facing a mass-extinction event. Other banks don’t have that kind of exposure to startups.
What rattled folks today was that SVB lost $1.8 billion on the sale of $21 billion of “available-for-sale” securities. It sold them because it needed to raise liquidity and to “reposition” its balance sheet.
Its depositors are startups that once had a huge amount of cash on deposit at the bank that they’d obtained from venture capital investors. But those startups are burning cash like there is no tomorrow, and they aren’t getting new funding, and so they’re draining their deposits from the bank. And the bank has to fund those cash withdrawals.” ~ Wolf Richter, Between a Rock and a Hard Place as Banks Run Out Free Money, March 9, 2023 Continue reading
Archaeologists have discovered wooden defenses surrounding an ancient Roman military base for the first time in Bad Ems, western Germany. The fence, which is topped with sharpened wooden stakes similar to barbed wire, is the type of fortification mentioned in ancient writings, including by Caesar, but no surviving examples had previously been discovered. 
The America First Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to fight executive overreach, filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Tuesday claiming that an executive order President Biden signed last week encourages the IRS to alter its algorithms to audit more white and Asian taxpayers — and fewer black taxpayers.
“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history. . . But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even worse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer — our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.” ~ Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties. When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man’s lips, but ideas of true beauty in very few men’s souls; when the business-sharper is the greatest man in the city, and lords it even in the law courts; when class-magistrates, bidding for high office, deal out justice according to the rank of the criminal; when exchanges are turned into great gambling-houses, and senators and men of title are the chief gamblers; when, in short, ‘corruption is universal, when there is increasing audacity, increasing greed, increasing fraud, increasing impurity, and these are fed by increasing indulgence and ostentation; when a considerable number of trials in the courts of law bring out the fact that the country in general is now regarded as a prey, upon which any number of vultures, scenting it from afar, may safely light and securely gorge themselves; when the foul tribe is amply replenished by its congeners at home, and foreign invaders find any number of men, bearing good names, ready to assist them in robberies far more cruel and sweeping than those of the footpad or burglar’—when such is the tone of society, and such the idols before which it bends, a nation must be fast going down hill.
We grew up poor. I was the first son of married teenagers who lived in a three-room apartment in New York. My brother and I shared the bedroom and bunk beds until I was 12 and he was 9.
