Kevin Drum 🕸

Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear chemist who is currently acting as servant to a pair of adorable cats, wants to know why I think artificial intelligence is so great: I keep asking that question and getting no answers. There’s a lot of activity going on in what is called artificial intelligence, but it is more ...continue reading "What’s the point of artificial intelligence?"

Was Silicon Valley Bank in good shape before it was put out of business by a bank run? As of Tuesday, March 7, here's what the rating agencies said about them: These ratings hadn't changed in over a year. Here's what the major stock analysts had to say: Buy! Overweight! Outperform! The analysts who followed ...continue reading "Here’s what everyone thought about Silicon Valley Bank on Tuesday, March 7"

Earlier today I asked if the 2018 bank deregulation bill had any effect on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The consensus in comments was that deregulation allowed SVB to avoid Fed stress tests that might have uncovered its liquidity problems. (As a brief aside, it's common to say that SVB bet on interest rates ...continue reading "SVB and the 2018 bank deregulation: An answer, sort of"

I'm already tired of Silicon Valley Bank, but I have a question: If the 2018 deregulation bill hadn't passed, how precisely would this have affected SVB? And I do mean precisely. Would they have been required to diversify their deposit base? Would they have been required to hold more capital? Would they have been forbidden ...continue reading "A quick question about the 2018 deregulation bill"

A starry-skied memorial for Brad on Highway 62 about 50 miles east of Twentynine Palms.

The Fed and the Treasury Department have announced a plan to make sure that all depositors at Silicon Valley Bank are made whole. Whatever the ultimate cost turns out to be, it will be funded by a levy on banks. Thus, there's no cost to taxpayers. There's a little more to the plan, mostly to ...continue reading "Fed and Treasury announce a plan to save SVB’s depositors"

This is from a recent report written by the Bureau of Justice Statistics: All of this is appalling, but why is crime against bisexual people so astronomically high? Why, for example, are bisexual people 8.7x times more likely to be robbed than straight people? Can someone school me?

The Wall Street Journal explains today how panic about Silicon Valley Bank spread throughout Silicon Valley last week: On Wednesday, the bank announced it had sold a chunk of its holdings at a loss and would sell a slug of stock to raise cash....Slack and WhatsApp groups lit up across the startup scene. ....“For startups, ...continue reading "The chaos agent behind the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is . . . Slack?"

A lot of people are becoming instant experts this weekend on the subject of deposit insurance, including the question of what to do if you have cash in excess of the $250,000 FDIC limit. There are ways to deal with this, including (obviously) opening multiple bank accounts. But that's not really the answer. The real ...continue reading "FFS, calm down about Silicon Valley Bank"

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been on a roller coaster for the past four decades. Relations were bad after the Iranian Revolution but improved during the Gulf War. They soured again when Iran began pursuing a nuclear program and then again after an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US ...continue reading "Why did China broker the new agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia?"

I don't mind saying that I'm a little confused about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Here's some basic financial history: After a huge runup during the tech boom of 2020-21, deposits slowly fell back to earth in 2022, reaching $169 billion in February 2023. Since the start of 2022, SVB has seen withdrawals of ...continue reading "Was SVB management incompetent or just unlucky?"

Sid Pandiya, a 22-year-old student at UCLA, has discovered that remote work "can get really isolating and boring.” His answer: Pandiya came up with Kona, a software application aimed at making Slack more than a chatroom focused on tasks and deadlines. Kona greets its users every day with a pop-up that asks a simple yet ...continue reading "Slack now officially the worst app ever"

Let's give the furballs a break this week and instead bring in a foreign star to gawk at. I found this little guy in a tiny little park in Les Andelys, France, where he was puttering around and begging for attention. He allowed me to provide that attention, but eventually got bored and curled up ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 10 March 2023"

Hey, remember that Cochrane meta-study showing that masks don't work? The Cochrane folks have apologized and explained what the study really showed: Interventions to increase mask wearing may or may not work. The evidence is inconclusive. The study doesn't even address the question of whether mask wearing itself helps to reduce the spread of respiratory ...continue reading "Cochrane: We didn’t even study whether masks work"

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed today in the second-biggest bank failure in US history. Why? Because it put a ton of money into long-dated government and mortgage bonds. This would normally be pretty safe: When the Federal Reserve began raising rates last year, however, those holdings became less attractive because newer government bonds paid more in ...continue reading "Second-biggest US bank failure in history hits Silicon Valley"

Today I learned about a new fad on Instagram: pantry porn. But it's not what you think, so get your minds out of the gutter for just one second, you filthy perverts. Ahem. Anyway, pantry porn is the name given to carefully curated photos of lovingly stocked and organized pantries. And Jenna Drenten, a marketing ...continue reading "Pantry porn is the story of America"

Another Scandinavian country has weighed in on gender-affirming care in children and teens. This time it's Norway: Ukom recommends that puberty delaying treatment (puberty blockers) and hormonal and surgical gender confirmation treatment for children and young people are defined as experimental treatment. This is particularly important for teenagers with gender dysphoria. (Ukom is the Norwegian ...continue reading "Norway suggests slowing down on gender affirming care for teens"

The American economy gained 311,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 221,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 3.6%. This jobs report is weaker than it looks at first glance. The number of unemployed people jumped ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in February"

From the New York Times: Saudi Arabia is seeking security guarantees from the United States, help with developing a civilian nuclear program and fewer restrictions on U.S. arms sales as its price for normalizing relations with Israel, people familiar with the exchanges say. Why in the everlasting fuck should the United States be on the ...continue reading "Saudi Arabia asks us to please bribe them"

A couple of days ago I asked what lessons we should have learned from the COVID pandemic. Today the Washington Post tells us what lessons we did learn from the pandemic: At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority....Health officials and governors in ...continue reading "What we learned from the pandemic"