Kevin Drum 🕸

The Fed is fighting back. It's been criticized for not supervising Silicon Valley Bank properly, so now it's leaking the news that it did indeed supervise them: In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks....But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July ...continue reading "The Fed fights back . . . with leaks"

Brad DeLong comments this weekend on a couple of essays that lament the difficulty of living in an era where technological progress is improving exponentially: I read these, and I think: this is how it has been since the 1870s. Perhaps this is how it has been since the late 1830s. Well, yes. But there's ...continue reading "Exponential growth is messing with our minds"

The Washington Post has a story today about the demise of ER physicians. It used to be a coveted position for residencies, but now senior doctors are warning against it: They warn of burnout after covid and patients’ increasing suspicion of doctors. The pay is not as good, they say, especially as hospitals rely more ...continue reading "Emergency medicine is in the SOAP"

You're all probably tired of hearing me natter on about Silicon Valley Bank, but the conventional narrative continues to bug me. The most persistent part of the narrative is that SVB had a bond portfolio exposed to lots of interest rate risk and they were morons for not hedging this risk. But normally, you hedge ...continue reading "SVB didn’t collapse because of unhedged interest rate bets"

Tom Nichols is unimpressed with today's story about John Connally's 1980 mission to let the Iranians know they should wait a while before releasing the embassy hostages: Has it occurred to anyone that the Iranians hated Carter's guts because of the Shah and did what they did just to spite him? Of *course* they were ...continue reading "More on Ronald Reagan and the hostages"

As we all know, Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid against Ronald Reagan thanks in part to the long-running Iranian hostage drama. It's long been suspected that Reagan's team actively tried to persuade Iran not to release the hostages so that Carter wouldn't get a victory bump, but there's never been any firm proof. ...continue reading "Reagan team tried to sabotage hostage talks before the 1980 election"

With the release of ChatGPT, the chattering classes began to chatter about the safety of artificial intelligence. Partly this was about things ChatGPT could do right now (help kids cheat in school, for example) but mostly it was about the possibility of AI destroying humanity at some point in the future. But there's an odd ...continue reading "The real danger of artificial intelligence is natural intelligence"

If you want to project the state of the economy, one of the key metrics is personal saving. But this is harder to estimate than it seems. Here's one crack at it: The dashed line is the "normal" quarterly saving rate and the orange line is the actual saving rate. As you can see, it ...continue reading "Excess savings are all used up. Or are they?"

You should check out Kiera Butler's piece at Mother Jones about Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida (naturally). A couple of months ago the "medical freedom" movement suddenly decided to target them: With an unprecedented 300 people at the February meeting, attendees lit into Sarasota Hospital physicians, accusing them of killing Covid patients....That’s when things ...continue reading "The MAGA mob goes after a Florida hospital"

The stock market fell last week after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and it's been on a roller coaster this week as news about the banking system goes from good to bad and then back to good in the space of a few hours. And yet, here's what all the panic looked like by ...continue reading "Investors remain happy, happy, happy"

This is Charlie being bad. He knows he's not supposed to be on the other side of the fence, but he goes out there anyway. Luckily, a teenager or a dog or something always comes along pretty quickly, which scares him back into the yard. In fact, Charlie is an excellent outdoor cat. He sometimes ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 17 March 2023"

I've been trying to figure out exactly what warning signs regulators supposedly missed in the months before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, and I haven't come up with much. The $15 billion hole in SVB's bond portfolio was mildly concerning, but no more than that since it didn't affect SVB's books. The outflow of deposits seemed ...continue reading "Were FHLB loans a missed red flag before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed?"

Courtesy of the BLS, here's how much it costs to employ various types of workers: You can find more breakdowns here.

We have dates! My CAR-T treatment is scheduled for April 25. There are several days of pre-treatment, so I will be up at City of Hope starting on April 19. I'll return home whenever they think I'm ready, probably around the second week of May. And then we wait to see if it worked. Tick ...continue reading "Health update"

Israel is in tumult over an attempt by its current hard-right government to strip the Supreme Court of power. Former Likud prime minister Ehud Olmert, no one's idea of a dove, says Israel is facing an existential crisis: This moment, he says, is different from previous political crises that Israel has faced. “If you love ...continue reading "The future of Israel gets dimmer every day"

The Atlantic reports today that three researchers have performed a re-analysis of swabs taken at the Huanan Market in Wuhan early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The original analysis, done last year by a Chinese team, drew no conclusions about the origin of the virus, but the new analysis strongly suggests that the virus developed naturally ...continue reading "New DNA analysis adds strong evidence for natural origin of COVID-19 virus"

Why are teen girls so depressed these days. Jonathan Haidt thinks the answer is smartphones and social media, and I expressed some doubts about that a few weeks ago. Haidt is back today and, among other things, shows us this chart: You can see one of the reasons for my skepticism here: the starting point ...continue reading "Teens are depressed because they spent their childhood in a bubble, not because of smartphones"

I overslept today, so I asked GPT-4 to write a limerick about oversleeping: There once was a fellow who'd doze, He set his alarm but he chose, To hit snooze a few times, And waste precious chimes, Now his blog is a void and that blows. I modified the final line, but the rest is ...continue reading "Yet more poetry from GPT-4"

I've set this video from Microsoft to start at 7:54. Go ahead and watch about 30 seconds of it.  As a former high-tech marketing VP, I can confirm that marketing writing is generally pretty undistinguished. You don't have to be Shakespeare to put together a brochure or a PowerPoint presentation about a new product. ...continue reading "Marketing in the era of GPT-4 is a doomed profession"

This is a silhouette of a tree in Modjeska Canyon late in the day. And, um, that's about all I have to say about it.