The bank collapsed last Friday and was taken over by federal regulators in order to protect the assets of its depositors. This small bank lent to tech startups and venture-backed healthcare companies--in other words, it was lending to riskier businesses.
In the last days of 2022, Congress passed something called the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which authorizes roughly a year of federal spending ($1.7 trillion worth), and also included the SECURE Act 2.0, which has a number of provisions I think many will appreciate, or at minimum find interesting. Below is a list of the highlights.
I realized these predictions were not much better than a weather forecast. The forecasts I’ve collected from years back and the ones for 2023 all have the following: an extremely intelligent author with several advanced degrees, employed by a firm with substantial resources and a competent and convincing argument as to why they think they’re correct. But clear gaps emerge between forecasts and what actually happened.
Stocks are taking a terrible beating these days. From the way the market is behaving, one might think some of the world’s largest and most profitable companies are suddenly becoming dramatically less valuable. Are they all laying off workers, slashing prices, closing factories, and declaring bankruptcy?
There is nothing pleasant about a bear market—not the anxieties they cause, not the paper losses, not the relentless drip, drip, drip of reports in the media about this or that daily downturn. The gut instinct is to stem the losses by selling before the market goes down further, but locking in losses after the fact has, historically, almost always been the wrong move.
The “money illusion” refers to how we view our buying power today versus in the future. Are you falling victim to this potentially dangerous ideology?