Category: News Wire

The repercussions of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse last week are still coming. And not just in the financial sector. With this latest bank run, everyone’s drawn parallels to the financial crisis of 2008. Last week, Mike Carr made it clear that SVB was having a “Bear Stearns” moment, and not a “Lehman Brothers” moment like most people thought. So on today’s podcast, Mike and I take a look at the bigger picture — from the failing and bailing out of regional banks, a future shakeout in the tech sector and why there’s been an overall tremor of volatility in the[…]

The Federal Reserve meets next Wednesday to decide its next move on interest rates.In that meeting, it will quickly become clear how stuck “between a rock and a hard place” they are…And the damaging impact it will have on the portfolios of millions of investors.What’s even worse… The bank crisis of the last week didn’t cause this.This was brewing well before the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history … though those events are now making the Fed’s no-win proposition even tougher.However, just because the Fed is screwed, doesn’t mean you have to be.Today, I’ll show you the simplest[…]

Mark Twain is often credited with saying: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This week feels like the second, incomplete line of a poem: First Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both went under, Then SVB and ____ tore investors asunder. Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) failure rhymes with the 2008 financial crisis. Just not in the way everyone thinks it does. This isn’t the famous “Lehman Brothers moment” when markets plunged into full-blown crisis. This is the “Bear Stearns moment” from six months before, when everyone shrugged and whistled Hakuna Matata as they walked past the graveyard … ignorant[…]

You’ve just witnessed a 21st century bank run … and the panic hasn’t passed. It started with mismanagement and social media panic. It was facilitated by apps on smartphones, which saw $42 billion in deposits leave the bank in one day. By the time it was over, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) became the second-largest bank failure in history. Following SVB’s failure, bank stocks had their worst day since the financial crisis of 2008. But the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank, another bank taken over by the FDIC, are completely different from 2008. Mr. Market still braced for the worst[…]

Amber Lancaster and I even discussed it in our Market Insights video. (If you’re curious how to get access to our relaunched duo video, click here.) I’ve been keeping an eye on it, mostly because it reminds me of my old days back on Wall Street… You might not know this about me, but I first got started in finance by working in the banking industry. I did fixed-income trading first at Salomon Brothers, and later at Citigroup. I’m telling you this to give you a little bit of context for where I was in 2008. I’m sure most of[…]

The biggest news in finance this week is the spectacular failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Once the 16th largest bank in America, it’s now the second largest bank failure in U.S. history. SVB was a favorite lender in the tech word, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. But now, every major news headline is calling its collapse a textbook repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. On today’s podcast, Adam O’Dell and I explain exactly what happened with SVB — and why the FDIC swooped in to take it over. It’s a complex issue, with bad investments and PR[…]

On June 6, 2022, President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to “accelerate domestic production of clean energy technologies, including solar panel parts.” The government is getting behind renewable energy in such a big way, Biden used a presidential power typically reserved for emergencies. If you saw this as a signal to go all-in on renewable energy stocks, you probably weren’t the only one. While it may one day prove to be the right call, right now everyone’s missing a far bigger and immediate opportunity. Honestly, this move by Biden only serves as a distraction to the real energy story[…]

Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a finance professor. They’re allowed to, even encouraged to, have poor theories about investing. Then, when some piece of data contradicts the theory, they call it an anomaly and no one bats an eye. From a practical perspective, we might think a theory with anomalies is wrong. It doesn’t make a difference to finance professors, because investing isn’t where they make their money. But most of us aren’t Ph.D.s at business schools. We’re investors. We have to make money in the markets, not from book sales. So, we must recognize and[…]

謝謝拜登總統 (Thank You, President Biden) (Translation) Beijing, 08 March 2023  The Honorable Joseph R. Biden President of the United States The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear Mr. President: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) expresses its deepest gratitude to your presidential administration… By waging your war on fossil fuels, you are giving the PRC a new monopoly on green energy. As reported by The Financial Times, China makes: 75% of the world’s batteries. 83% of offshore windmill blades. 96% of the wafers used in solar panels. So when you set strict clean energy mandates, you[…]

Last week, I ventured out to Denver, Colorado, for the annual ETHDenver conference. This is the largest gathering of Ethereum developers, entrepreneurs, investors and enthusiasts in North America, if not the world. Crypto is in the middle of a multiyear bear market, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the 20,000 attendees at this year’s main event. One morning on my way to the event, I struck up a conversation with my Uber driver. He was not happy about crypto. He got burned going “all-in” at the height of the mania. He told me how much he lost (which I[…]