Early summer is when the studios release their blockbusters and their flops, and in the summer of 2023 the Federal Reserve was to release its own: FedNow, a platform for the instant settlement of payments between banks, which the Fed had described as infrastructure and its critics described as the plumbing for a digital dollar.
Firms founded in a recession start smaller and stay smaller, and the research points at weak demand more than at credit. The track record a bank asks for is still the gap a young firm feels first, and some online services now look past it: in Poland, Wandoo Biznes does not ask a sole trader for years of trading.
The third page in this series on artificial intelligence, written in April 2023, was about a claim the builders of the technology had started making about their own work: that it was becoming, in their words, godlike, that it might be sentient, and that they did not understand how it reached its conclusions.
On Friday 17 March 2023, one week after Silicon Valley Bank became the second-largest bank failure in American history, the day’s events were these. Eleven of the largest banks in the country deposited 30 billion dollars in First Republic, a competitor, in an arrangement Reuters reported was orchestrated by the chief executive of JPMorgan with the Treasury Secretary and the Fed chair.
The Federal Reserve’s plan at the end of 2022 can be stated in one sentence, and the sentence is the argument against it. The Fed intended to loosen a tight labour market by raising rates until employers laid off workers who were already too few in number, in order to reduce production that was already lower than the year before, in order to bring down prices that were high because production was short.
The recession calls, year by year, and how each came out.
Any three of these would have made a bad year. In July 2022 they were all on the same page of the newspaper.
Quantitative easing, the yield curve, the balance sheet and the soft landing.
Two pilots tried to swap planes in mid-air over Arizona that weekend. One plane went into the ground. The Fed's flight plan was more ambitious.
Bank failures, bail-ins, the war on cash and the digital dollar.
A year earlier the claim got you called a conspiracy theorist. By November 2022 it was a panel title.
Prices, wages, the labour market, and how each is measured.
A recessional is the hymn sung while the congregation files out. In 2022 it was sung to make the recession leave the room.
Stocks, bonds, housing and retail.
Revenue looked fine, considering. Considering what, was the whole story.
Deficits, debt, and how the news about them is made.
Millions who left the workforce in the lockdown had not come back. The policy response was to remove more.
This site keeps one subject: the downturn that began in 2008 and the policy, argument and consequence that followed it. Essays sit at the addresses where the argument was first made, so an old link still reaches a page about the thing it was pointing at.
Where enough time has passed for an argument to have been tested, a note at the foot of the page says how it came out. That is the point of the ledger: a forecast without a check is an opinion.
