Tag Archive for: interest rate

Keith Weiner’s Macroeconomic Equation

R > I Equation

Macroeconomists, it is said, have physics envy. Physicists measure how gasses behave as temperature, pressure, and mass of gas molecules are changed, and write an equation to describe the relationship between these variables: PV = nRT (P = pressure, V = volume, n = amount of gas, R = ideal gas constant, and T = […]

What Is Undermining the Banks? 

April Fools

April 1, 2023  First, it was the crypto-focused Silvergate Bank. Then it was Silicon Valley Bank. And immediately after, Signature Bank. Silvergate and Signature could be dismissed because, well, crypto. But Silicon Valley Bank is something entirely else. It was older, and much larger. And a mainstay of high-tech, venture-funded startups for many decades.  Then […]

Why Can’t Banks Raise Their Rates on Deposits?

Why Can’t Banks Raise Their Rates on Deposits?

As the Federal Reserve has hiked rates from 0% to over 4.75%, the average interest rate on bank deposits has remained low, around the FDIC’s national average for savings accounts of 0.37%. This has led many to ask the simple question.   Why aren’t banks raising the interest rate on deposits?   The Hotel California Banking System  […]

Did the Fed just Pivot?

Did the Fed just Pivot

Last week, we had this to say about the implications of SVB’s collapse…  Everyone in the market has to think about an unpleasant reality and come to grips with it. They have to consider the risks of things that previously they may have thought absolutely safe. Such as bank deposits, and Treasury bonds (and government-guaranteed […]

What Caused the Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank?

The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

You can listen to an audio summary of this article below. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was then seized by the California Department of Financial Protection on Friday, March 10. This came after a frenetic two days, when the bank announced a big loss, tried to raise capital, and then faced an accelerating run-on-the-bank. […]

Is Now a Good Time to Buy Gold? Market Report 16 March

We got hate mail after publishing Silver Backwardation Returns. It seems that someone thought backwardation means silver is a backward idea, or a bad bet. “You are a *&%#! idiot,” cursed he. “Silver is the most underpriced asset on the planet,” he offered as his sole supporting evidence. He doesn’t know that backwardation means scarcity, […]

Money and Prices Are a Dynamic System, Report 1 Dec

The basic idea behind the Quantity Theory of Money could be stated as: too much money supply is chasing too little goods supply, so prices rise. We have debunked this from several angles. For example, we can use a technique that every first year student in physics is expected to know. Dimensional analysis looks at […]

Raising Rates to Fight Inflation, Report 24 Nov

Physics students study mechanical systems in which pulleys are massless and frictionless. Economics students study monetary systems in which rising prices are everywhere and always caused by rising quantity of currency. There is a similarity between this pair of assumptions. Both are facile. They oversimplify reality, and if one is not careful they can lead […]

Dollar Supply Creates Dollar Demand, Report 2 June

We have been discussing the impossibility of China nuking the Treasury bond market. We covered a list of challenges China would face. Then last week we showed that there cannot be such a thing as a bond vigilante in an irredeemable currency. Now we want to explore a different path to the same conclusion that […]

What They Don’t Want You to Know about Prices

Last week, in part I of this essay, we discussed why a central planner cannot know the right interest rate. Central planner’s macroeconomic aggregate measures like GDP are blind to the problem of capital consumption, including especially capital consumption caused by the central plan itself. GDP has an intrinsic bias towards consumption, and makes no […]