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Recession LedgerThe long downturn, dated and checked

Subject

Banks and money

Bank failures, bail-ins, the war on cash and the digital dollar.

Two subjects that turn out to be one. The essays on bank crises, from Austria and Italy in 2016 to Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, sit beside the essays on the cashless society and central bank digital currency, because every crisis in the first set was used as an argument for the second.

The record here runs from 2016 to 2023 and is, on the digital-money side, the most complete on the site.

Rows of stacked gold bars

2026

  1. Born in a downturn: why firms started in a recession stay small

    A recession is counted in the year it happens. The firms founded during it carry it for decades, and the reason lies mostly with their customers, not their bank.

2023

  1. What a day: the 'non-systemic' collapse deepened systemically as the Fed's balance sheet jumped with 'not-QE'

    Either the eleven largest banks in America are unusually kind, or they saw what the word 'systemic' was being used to deny.

2022

  1. Cashless-society talk goes mainstream in a hurry, and should be trusted about as far as the NSA

    A year earlier the claim got you called a conspiracy theorist. By November 2022 it was a panel title.

  2. The money of the apocalypse: the New York Fed's digital-dollar pilot, announced the week FTX collapsed

    Central bank digital currency had been a paper subject for years. In one week it acquired a pilot, a list of banks and a crisis to justify it.

2020

  1. Cashless society 2020: how the coronavirus swung the public toward touch-free money, digital ID and a digital dollar

    People who would never have voted for a cashless society will accept one to avoid touching a stranger's money. That was the lesson of the spring.

  2. Digital ID, vaccination certificates and the cashless argument: what was actually proposed in 2020

    Three real things and the story that was built from them. The certificates were real, the research was real, the cashless preference was real. The tattoo that let you into a stadium was not.

2016

  1. What was going on with banks in April 2016: emergency meetings, a bail-in and the worst quarter since 2009

    Two closed-door Fed meetings, a presidential visit, a G-20, an Austrian bail-in and an Italian rescue fund, all inside seven days. What each of them meant, and what they added up to.

  2. The cashless-society war intensifies: the record of 2015 and 2016, country by country

    The prediction was that a global crisis would deliver a global cashless money. The crisis came in instalments; the cashless part came without one.