5 Comments
founding

Oh, the ‘bailout mentality’, of course. And that’s not what industry capitalization was supposed to be about, so shame on Wall Street for perverting the foundations of capitalism. Those guys do NOT deserve the money they ‘earn’!

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Jan 2Liked by Peter Nayland Kust

Amazing that the laws of supply and demand will still work with or without the Fed! Lol!

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author

Markets work in spite of government, not because of it.

Which just happened to be Adam Smith’s salient observation in Wealth of Nations.

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founding

Something that puzzles me: you have said, today and previously, that yield “inversions have historically been taken as recession warnings”. Most of the Wall Street top dogs must surely be aware of this historic recession warning, yet they apparently no longer worry about such things. Is it a quick-buck mentality, that says rake in the dough today and worry about recession a few months from now, or is there a better explanation?

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author

Ultimately, it's the age old question of "moral hazard".

Wall Street knows full well that their actions and the Fed's monetary policies will invariably lead to a liquidity crisis. It happened last spring in a small way, and it happened in 2008 in a big way.

However, Wall Street fully believes that once that crisis hits, the government will step in with a bail out because Wall Street banks are "systemically important". Thus they keep gambling even when the bets are reckless because they're playing with taxpayer dollars more so than their own. Heads they win, tails the taxpayers lose.

Unfortunately, as we saw with SVB and First Republic last spring, Wall Street has a rather accurate read on the situation. When the crash comes Wall Street will almost certainly be bailed out to keep "the system" from collapsing.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

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