Doug French | The Libertarian Institute

Is the Silicon Valley Bank’s Failure the First Domino?

by Doug French | Mar 13, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles

If you watched the Fed Chair Jerome Powell testify before the senate and the House, you heard over and over that banks are well capitalized. The non-sequitur should inspire the Shakespearean quote “Methinks you protest too much.” The very next day after the hearings, shares of SVB Financial Group, parent of Silicon Valley Bank, fell 60 percent (and another 30 percent in afterhours trading at this writing) after a Wall Street Journal article revealed, the bank “had sold large portions of its securities portfolio and would raise fresh capital, highlighting a broader problem for U.S. lenders...

What High Interest Rates Mean for a Debtor Nation

by Doug French | Apr 5, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

If there is anything Wall Street banks crave is relief. Primarily relief from the potential for failure and, next, relief from holding much, if any, equity capital. These banks like their capital tiny and their profits huge. Losses should be socialized. After all, we want the ATMs to keep spitting out cash. The SLR will be allowed to expire at the end of this month before most of us knew what it was—"supplementary leverage ratio." When covid hit the fan last March, as the WSJ explains, “The ratio measures capital—funds that banks raise from investors, earn through profits and use to absorb...

Silver Lining to the Lockdowns?

by Doug French | Jan 16, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

Something good is coming out of the covid lockdowns. Economist David Rosenberg released a special report via the eponymous Rosenberg Research, concluding “the pre-COVID-19 ‘norm’ of a 7% personal savings rate will morph into a post-COVID-19 norm of 10%.” Rosenberg makes frequent TV appearances after he was chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch in New York from 2002 to 2009, when he was consistently included in the Institutional Investor All-Star analyst rankings. From there he spent ten years as chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff. Rosenberg doesn’t portray his...

The Flexner Report and the Cartelization of Modern Medicine

by Doug French | Jun 11, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

Although we’ve been given a brief respite from COVID-19 pandemic news, it’s likely that the killer of over one hundred thousand so far in America will leap back to the front page and that continuous calls to flatten the curve will return to top of the mind. As a friend and fellow ex-University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Rothbard student reminded me, flattening the curve essentially means to socialize medicine: to ration healthcare, giving preference to COVID sufferers at the expense of non-COVID emergency medical care and elective procedures. If the US healthcare system is the cowboy...

White Collar Welfare: What It’s Like to Work for the Federal Government

by Doug French | Aug 18, 2019 | Featured Articles, Politics

Shannon O’Toole, according to the author's biography on Amazon, “worked extensively to identify fraud in multiple government programs. She received countless accolades and honors for her achievements and finally the prestigious HUD Secretary’s Award for her work.” The talented Ms. O’Toole was a single mother needing a job when she showed up at the FDIC, which she describes as a “disorganized, flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants atmosphere that seemed to permeate the place.” While she bore the brunt of untangling complicated real estate assets and readying them for sales, O’Toole was reminded...