If you average the monthly consumer price index during all of 2023, and compare this to the average during all of 2022, consumer inflation was 4.1% during 2023. That was the third highest annual price increase of the past 30 years, the most inflation except for 2022 (8.0%) and 2021 (4.7%). The price increases of the past three years were the ( Read more... )

I don't want to wear myself out, so I won't stay up too late, but I'm squeezing in a popup toy night. Worked until 6pm, making the progress on things that I need to, but I'm expecting I'll have to work a bunch on Sunday. I can chill after work tomorrow, and into Saturday, but I'll have to treat Sunday like a telework day. Unfortunately the ( Read more... )

The Federal Reserve Board meets eight regularly scheduled times per year to vote on monetary policy and other financial regulations. Yesterday they concluded their most recent meeting by not changing short-term interest rates, but they included a warning that they are likely to increase rates again later this year ( Read more... )

Not much of a surprise to those who follow the financial headlines, but First Republic Bank failed over the weekend, with the FDIC rescuing $229 billion in assets, the second-largest bank failure in US history -- bigger than the failure of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year. Once again all depositors were rescued, even those with deposits ( Read more... )

We don't have good GDP figures for the 1920s, but we do have good industrial production figures starting with 1919. We also have good figures for the money supply in the 1920s ( Read more... )

Yep, the Fed has definitely resumed its tightening of the money supply after those three US banks failed last month.

It seems the financial mini-panic of March 2023 has passed, the Federal Reserve was comfortable returning to shrinking the money supply last week, by $28 billion, after it had increased the money supply by almost $400 billion during the previous two weeks ( Read more... )

Ben will be waking to walk the dogs in a few minutes. I slept well through the night, falling back into slumber after each of my old-man pee breaks. We had so much fun at the concert! I danced so much I could barely walk afterward! Good thing I skipped the running ( Read more... )

All signs point to First Republic Bank as the next US bank to fail, but it continues to limp along even after losing about half of its customer deposits over the past couple weeks ( Read more... )

Credit Suisse was, until yesterday, a large and historic Swiss bank with around 500 billion USD in assets (I'm converting all values in this post from Swiss Francs to USD).  Yesterday Swiss regulators effectively forced Credit Suisse into bankruptcy, wiping out 17 billion USD of its bonds and forcing its shareholders to take a 90% haircut (from ( Read more... )