Benjamin Studebaker

Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things

Tag: Interest Rate

May 15, 2023

Biden Edges Toward Repeating Obama’s Worst Mistake

President Biden is negotiating with congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling, and there are reports that progress is being made on a deal that involves “cutting spending.” There has been talk that Biden might try to avoid a deal by minting the coin or invoking the 14th amendment. But Biden has always emphasized that he values consensus and compromise. The conservative Supreme Court might not go along with an attempt to use the 14th amendment, and shoving the coin down his opponents’ throats has never really been Biden’s style. It all reminds me of the debate from a decade ago. This blog was young back then, and I wrote a lot about Obama’s negotiations. Let’s revisit that period, shall we?

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March 22, 2023

The Reaction to the Fall of Silicon Valley Bank

The fall of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) generated several different media narratives. All seem to agree that SVB failed because it was dependent on low-yield long-term US treasury bonds. These bonds were safe in the years following the global financial crisis of 2008, but they lost value when interest rates increased in 2022. The disagreements are over what this fact means.

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August 26, 2015

The Stock Market Crash: What China and the US are Doing Wrong

Stock markets have been stumbling this week. To some degree, this is happening because corrections are needed, but one of the key reasons these corrections are happening right now is China. China’s stock market has been in a tailspin lately, and the Chinese government has taken a series of measures to prop up its stock market, all of which are only succeeding in making the situation much worse. Right wing commentators in the west are pointing at China and claiming that government intervention in the economy doesn’t work. This is a simplistic and reductive response–the problem is not that China is taking action, but that the specific actions that China is taking are the wrong actions.

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June 1, 2015

The 3 Ways Governments Raise Money Part III: Printing

This is the conclusion of my three-part series on how governments finance themselves. The aim is to clear up the popular misconception that the state’s budget is similar to that of a corporation or a household, that government borrowing is always necessarily a bad thing. Previously we talked about taxation and borrowing–today is all about printing. Read the rest of this entry »

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June 24, 2014

Hillary Clinton’s Problems Go Far Beyond Being “Out of Touch”

Hillary Clinton has been getting reamed for being “out of touch” for comments she made regarding the Clinton family’s wealth.  The Clintons earned $109 million during their first 7 years out of office (for an average annual income of $15.5 million), but she nonetheless claimed that the Clinton family was “dead broke”and in debt when it left the White House in 2001, and that the Clintons are not truly “well off“. While Clinton badly misses the mark here, what’s far more disturbing is the role her husband’s administration played in enriching people like them at the eventual expense of the wider population.

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