Kevin Drum 🕸

The New York Times reports that people who work at home are taking off lots of time in the afternoon. Golf has boomed: A new study from Stanford shines a light on the rise of afternoon leisure. Using geolocation data near golf courses in the United States, the study found there was 278 percent more ...continue reading "Working from home? How about a round of 3 pm golf?"

This is insane: It's insane that maternal mortality has gone up 3x since 1990. It's insane that it increased 40% in 2021 according to the latest data from the CDC. 40%! It's insane that Black women have a maternal mortality rate 170% higher than white women. Something seriously doesn't make sense about these numbers. Why ...continue reading "Maternal mortality exploded in 2021"

This whole mifepristone business is just infuriating: The federal judge who could upend access to a key abortion medication seemed open on Wednesday to the argument that the drug had not been properly vetted and could be unsafe — claims the Food and Drug Administration and leading health organizations strongly contest. While the antiabortion group ...continue reading "Texas judge is close to banning medication-induced abortion"

The latest hotness in inflation studies is to focus on inflation in the services sector. Why? Because that's what's highest right now, so it allows you to make a plausible argument that inflation is still a big problem and we need a nice, big recession to finally get it under control. For some reason this ...continue reading "A look at services inflation in February"

Over the past few days, a million pundits have become instant experts on the finances of Silicon Valley Bank. They are outraged that no one before now noticed the bleeding obvious: SVB was a reckless and fragile bank, a literal time bomb on the edge of collapsing thanks to foolish business practices. Now, 20/20 hindsight ...continue reading "Silicon Valley Bank was fine. It’s Silicon Valley that’s broken."

This is the altar of the Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, a few minutes walk from our apartment in Paris last year. The building was begun as a church; interrupted by the French Revolution; redesignated as a monument to the Grande Armée by Napoleon; and eventually finished as a church. It was designed in the neoclassical style ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here's an odd thing. I asked GPT-4 to write a poem about the Ides of March and it produced one with rhyming couplets. I asked it to try again without rhymes, but it just produced a poem with different rhymes. So I asked it a third time, and then a fourth: I apologize for the ...continue reading "GPT-4 is a little too good at rhyming"

Bethany Mandel, a conservative writer, had a bit of brain freeze on live TV yesterday and was unable to define woke for her interviewer. This gave us lefties a chance to laugh at her, and fair enough. That's life in the arena. I really don't understand why movement conservatives haven't yet figured out a simple, ...continue reading "What is woke?"

Here's a chart that must be driving all the ex-managers of Silicon Valley Bank nuts: One of SVB's problems was a portfolio of long-dated Treasury bonds that was $15 billion underwater. But 10-year Treasurys have fallen by more than 50 basis points since Peter Thiel's run on deposits put SVB into receivership. Their portfolio has ...continue reading "It was necessary to destroy the bank in order to save the bank"

We have good news and bad news today. The good news is that producer-level inflation was negative in February: This doesn't tell us anything about inflation in services, so it's limited good news. Still, good is good. The bad news is that retail sales fell for the sixth straight month: Of course, this is good ...continue reading "Today’s economic news in two handy charts"

It is the Ides of March. If you happen to have any friends named Brutus—or anything else vaguely Latinesque—you might want to stay home today.

It's time for some serious geekery. This post will (once again) address the question of whether the 2018 bank deregulation law had any effect on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Yesterday I looked at SVB's capital ratios and concluded that they were higher than required either with or without the law. If deregulation had ...continue reading "Silicon Valley Bank would have passed every test for liquidity"

It's hummingbird season again, and I have several who buzz around my window these days. The top picture is (I think) a mature Allen's hummingbird, while the bottom picture is a young 'un. I realize that I posted a picture of a hummingbird just about a month ago, but what can I say? I like ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Well, how about this? Our long national nightmare is finally over.

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that CPI moved sort of sideways in February: Headline CPI dropped from January's high reading, but core CPI moved up a bit. This makes three months in a row that core CPI has been creeping upward. (In case you care—which you shouldn't—the year-over year rate that news ...continue reading "CPI in February ticks up, but supercore is still in good shape"

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.