If this rule goes through it will be a major success for smart, surgical, bipartisan reform

Last year’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is fueling a rethink of the discount window, which dates to the 1913 founding of the Fed & is its primary channel for lending directly to banks. Banks are desperate to avoid using it for fear of looking weak.
wsj.com/finance/regula…

I loved this from Nate Oman

Some real SBF what might have been energy for this one.

If you are a recent MA, JD, or PhD grad with expertise and interests at the intersection of history and economics searching for a postdoc, ping me. I have a lead on a great one

The Bernanke review of the Bank of England is very interesting, but I think Andy Haldane's take is the right one: economic forecasting at central banks is remarkably performative.

ft.com/content/475e1f…

'The 1,996 banks with pledged collateral at the discount window is less than half the 4,824 total, the data show. A total of 3,900 banks are signed up, leaving as many as 900 banks without any access at all.'
reuters.com/business/finan…

I watched The Sound of Metal this weekend and can’t remember the last time I loved a movie so much (hint: it wasn’t Barbenheimer)

Is there any effort to assess the quality of industry group outputs? Some in my experience are just expressions of raw political power and are intellectually unserious. Some actually produce real insight. Anything systematic out there to separate the sheep from the goats?

Counterpoint: I wrote one of the first academic treatments of FedNow and was very bullish on it at the time (in 2019). I’m much more skeptical now given how little penetration we see especially relative to RTP uptake rates abroad.

Today I learned that John Stuart Mill was Bertrand Russell’s godfather.

Do those who support the Credit Card Competition Act have different substantive analyses from CRS (link below)?

crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF…

Why are credit unions, regardless of size, represented by a single lobby? The median credit union is some $50 million in assets; the mean is $485 million. The bigs are just not in the same business as the littles.

Hive mind doesn’t disappoint except that now I’m rethinking everything and am wondering about the Duesenberg Starplayer (which I have never played unlike Gretsch and all things Gibson)

The next guitar on my list is a toss-up at present between a Gretsch Falcon center block and a Gibson ES 335. They scratch the same itch and I’ve played the junior versions of each. I lean Gretsch. What says the hive mind?

I learned a ton from Dan Rohde's presentation on the Bank of Canada, its mandates, and the evolution of its independence (including the changing perceptions of what that independence was supposed to be).

Having a great time here in Madison. I only quoted Wittgenstein three times in my keynote. I can’t help myself - that dude messed me up.

Learning right now about some fascinating history of Abenomics and Japanese central bank independence

The best way to know whether a payment rail is successful is to know either number of transactions or dollar value per day processed (preferably both). Fedwire is a huge success; is FedNow?

Yuck. I have no expert views on partisan politics or on student loan forgiveness but I will say this effort to stigmatize bipartisan fiscal responses to global crisis is bad policy.

Am I the only one who thinks the Swiss were much closer to the post GFC resolution system than we were in the US in 2023? Seems to me we need to go to Switzerland and ask for advice rather than give it