More banks will merge this year as their costs rise, operating margins shrink, and other institutions offer higher interest rates to depositors, U.S. treasury secretary Janet Yellen said at last week’s conference in Paris on global debt and climate issues.
Tag: jun 27 2023
HARD TIMES AHEAD FOR PRIVATE LENDERS, MOODY’S WARNS
The private credit industry—lenders other than banks, such as private equity firms—is confronting its “first serious challenge” as tens of billions of dollars in loans made at the height of a booming economy are coming due amid slumping global business activity, Moody’s Analytics said.
EVICTIONS SKYROCKET AFTER COVID-ERA PROTECTIONS EXPIRE
Since the federal ban on COVID-era evictions ended on 21 October, 2021, evictions have shot up across the U.S. and by as much as 50 percent in some cities.
THE AMERICAN DREAM TURNING INTO A NIGHTMARE
A key component of the traditional “American Dream” is the ideal that anyone can climb from poverty to prosperity by their own hard work.
FED PROBABLY WILL HIKE RATES MORE SLOWLY, POWELL SAYS
After raising interest rates 10 times in as many meetings, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee is likely to move rates higher less often, Fed chair Jerome Powell told the House financial services committee on 21 June.
U.S. BOND MARKET BETS ON RECESSION
Investors in treasury bonds are raising their bets that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s steady stream of interest rate increases will tip the economy into recession this year, even though the stock prices stay high and a growing number of economists doubt the economy will shrink, the Financial Times reported.
PUTIN SHOOTS HIMSELF IN THE HEAD
Putin’s latest speech is one that should never have been made. With his ill-considered speech, Putin has lent his weight to U.S. neoconservative propaganda that he is in a weakened and challenged position and that the U.S. can win in Ukraine. With the Ukrainian forces essentially defeated, the fake news “mutiny” is precisely what the neoconservatives needed to keep the conflict alive, which is why Scott Ritter thinks Victoria Nuland might have instigated the “coup.”
BLOCKCHAIN BATTLES
On the surface, it has seemed a (sort of) positive development: the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, one of the largest U.S. based banks, Bank of New York-Mellon, and the largest U.S. crypto exchange, Coinbase, all working together to gain the greenlight for a Bitcoin Spot ETF.
IMF SOFTENS CRYPTO STANCE…FOR THE MOMENT
A new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has moderated previous calls for outright bans of cryptocurrencies.
THIS WEEK IN SURVEILLANCE
Using deep-learning neural net AI to mine public (and certainly other) data, and report on travelers to government agents?