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zenmacroon U.S. bank lending slumps by most on record in final weeks of March

The largest nominal drop on record. Is it also the largest percentage-wise drop?

zenmacroon Anxiety Strikes $8T Mortgage-Debt Market After SVB Collapse

> Now that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has taken over SVB, investors expect the bonds to be sold off in coming months, adding supply to the weakened market and pushing prices lower.

Do the rules say that FDIC has to sell these right away? I imagine they have discretion on timing the sales so that it doesn't dislocate the market. The FDIC is all about stability, after all...

zenmacroon First Republic Bank files 8-K – Tech only 4% of total deposits; no sector >9%

It's trippy to see my own tiny contribution to tidal waves like this:

> First Republic’s funding relies in large part on wealthy individuals who increasingly have a range of options to seek higher yields on their cash at other financial institutions as interest rates have risen.

Over the last year I kept my FRC checking account at 100 (not the real number). A month back or so I dropped it down to 50 and moved the other 50 into T-Bills.

zenmacroon First Republic Bank files 8-K – Tech only 4% of total deposits; no sector >9%

I have a mortgage with FRC. What happens to that mortgage if FRC goes under?

zenmacroon FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

Wow, the government acted incredibly swiftly and decisively to crush the possibility of a general bank panic. The current US banking system is very different from the 2008 system.

zenmacroon Bank run on Silicon Valley Bank

Something seems wrong with the entire banking sector. I don't know if SIVB triggered it or is just the first domino to fall.

Two of the largest bank ETFs are down around ~8% today. SIVB is only 2% of the holdings of KBE and 3% of KBWB.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/KBE:NYSEARCA

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/KBWB:NASDAQ

A former Bridgewater guy who I respect very much is saying that the panic is totally uncalled for: https://mobile.twitter.com/BobEUnlimited/status/163395659942...

zenmacroon Google stock tumbles 8% after its Bard AI ad shows inaccurate answer

Price action of Big Tech companies today:

AMZN: -2.2%

AAPL: -1.9%

META: -3.42%

MSFT: +0.45%

GOOGL: -8.21%

zenmacroon U.S. credit card debt jumps 18.5% and hits a record $930.6B

> Yes, yes, the sky is falling

I agree that we shouldn't buy into the media's perpetual gloom & doom machine but I also caution against the knee-jerk contrarian "everything is fine" impulse.

The percentage rate of change is often the best signal in these kinds of indicators. We're around 20% YoY. The last two years (2004 & 2008) we hit that kind of level weren't strong economies.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ZAtQ

The Dec '22 FOMC Minutes also hinted that the FOMC is also watching credit card levels. Interest rates have exploded higher yet consumers are increasing their credit card debt.

zenmacroon The Shit Show

Are there any guides, tools, apps, etc to try out ActivityPub?

zenmacroon Berkeley Lab scientists develop a new method of refrigeration

If I recall correctly, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from refrigerants is one of the top opportunities highlighted in Drawdown [1].

[1] https://drawdown.org/the-book

zenmacroon Globalization is dead and no one is listening

Two thoughts.

> Globalization is Dead and No One is Listening

We're talking about it on HN page 1. And I hear a lot of talk among the macro and policy people I follow about friendshoring.

The author makes an argument that the fact that TSMC had to send US engineers to Taiwan for training was a sign of a talent shortage. But earlier the author said this:

> TSMC is arguably the one company that most epitomizes all the forces of globalization – free trade, hyper specialization...

Hyperspecialization to me implies that you need to go to HQ to understand how everything works and it will take a while to understand it all. So the earlier argument about a shortage of talent in the US seems tenuous to me.

zenmacroon Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

Central Banking 101 by Joseph Wang does a great of explaining the repo and reverse repo markets.

https://books.google.com/books?id=wPs_EAAAQBAJ

zenmacroon Ask HN: In-depth sites for various industries' news?

Uptime Wind Energy Podcast: https://weatherguardwind.com/wind-turbine-podcast/

zenmacroon SEC awards more than $20M to whistleblower at unnamed company

Are we conjecturing that the unnamed company is FTX?

zenmacroon Ask HN: How do you upskill your teams technical writing?

This and https://diataxis.fr are about all the training you need. Beyond that you just need to organizationally commit to improving your docs. You yourself need to be the leader to keep reminding and explaining to stakeholders why it's important. Or else entropy will get you just like anything else in life.

A good concrete milestone is to create a spreadsheet of doc coverage. The rows are your key use cases and the columns are "tutorial", "guide", "explanation", "reference" (see Diataxis). Take a snapshot of your starting state. And then take a snapshot of your ending state (hopefully with more doc coverage for all your key use cases. It's a nice and clear story to tell to stakeholders. Explain the 4 Diataxis doc types to your stakeholders (basically just repeat the message on the Diataxis homepage). Most people intuitively get it and agree right away. And then you show them the before and after. "We started here and now our docs are much more comprehensive and here's a detailed breakdown to help convince."

I am a professional technical writer (edit: removed my current role because this is supposed to be my anon macro investing account... facepalm)