Maybe. Or they're telling the truth.
Well, First Republic is putting on brave face, saying they have $60 billion of liquidity, and that they will be honoring all the wires of the people fleeing the bank tomorrow.
Maybe that's women entering the work force? While the prior generation mostly had single providers, more and more women entering the work force often part time resulted in statistical work hour reductions as in your chart.
https://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_snapshots_07072004/
I would just suggest you're working really hard to engage in narrative-fitting, here.
I was talking in regards to your comments about the BRICs.
Average hours worked is also not up. Where are you getting your information from when you say things? 
Was there ever a time in history where we had great levels of accountability?
I think about this stuff all the time, and very carefully. The world does not work in these narrow economic ways. Culture and politics play outsized roles.
That’s not what you said though. You said people were working more hours to get less. And it’s not clear to me it’s believable that the whole world could be literally 100 times wealthier than we are right now.
Yeah. The whole world just can’t wait to trust the Chinese Communist Party to have control of their currency, and the legal system in the PRC to adjudicate their disputes in regards to it.
That people think that a banking crisis would be a boon for bitcoin is really just a sentiment I so strongly disagree with. Bitcoiners thought the US sanctions on Russia last year was going to be the final nail in the coffin of the Dollar and there was going to be a giant global exit from the dollar in 2022.
The reality is, bitcoin is just not treated as a safe haven asset by the broader market. Which doesn’t mean it won’t come to be seen as one, eventually. I happen to think it will.
But bitcoins value is *highly* dependent right now speculative investment in that future. It’s why bitcoin is more correlated with the NASDAQ than almost anything else.
To wit, a lot of bitcoin’s utility is completely dependent on it having deep exchange markets that bridge into the legacy banking system. Should this break down, it will be a headwind on bitcoin in the short term. I think a lot of the people who think bitcoin would go “the the moon” in that scenario are going to find themselves dumbfounded when the absolute opposite happens.
The rise of bitcoin is a real trend I believe in. My timescale for it is on the longer side of the equation than many. It’s why I don’t pay attention to the price and focus just on building utility around bitcoin. Because that’s how it will become a unit of account unto itself. Which it’s nowhere close to being today.
This is just about being realistic.
It’s not true that we are working more hours to afford the same things as our parents, though. When you look at people’s buying power from the perspective of prices of things, at the average industrial wage, the average person only works about 20 minutes per day to pay for the daily food intake. In the 1950s, it was about 3 hours.
Some things are more expensive, like real estate. But I would strongly argue that land-use policy and anti-development policies at the local level have artificially restricted the ability to build housing and play an outsized role.
Here’s a video by a libertarian, Austrian economist, who disagrees with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8SLIt7xZxU
You’ve conducted a survey and found a majority of people think banks have “zero risk”?
I am arguing for the FDIC to address an irrational market psychology before it turns into systemic risk, yes. And I don’t think it would cost taxpayers or anyone a dime to stop it. Because FRB *has* enough assets to cover liabilities. The issue is going to be a duration/maturity mis-match. I am really bored of the conversation about the immorality of that system, though. I get it. And I don’t need anyone to recommend the “Mystery of Banking” by Murray Rothbard to me to get people’s point. Not that you are. But I’m sure someone will. Which I’ve already read.
All systems will eventually fail. That’s true of everything. And probably bitcoin on a long enough timescale. But in the here and now, nearly 100% of society is dependent on the current system, and that system has to be managed in place. I’m working on trying to build a better system. But I am not, like a crazy person, wishing for that system’s imminent collapse, which will impose untold suffering on regular people.
This is a completely anodyne point. I don’t know anybody of average intelligence that doesn’t understand that there is some form of risk in the banking system connected to how banks make loans or invest in assets. You don’t think the people who lived through the 2008 Financial Crisis understand that?
There is nothing particularly new happening right here. That’s just a narrative coming from people who take moral and ethical stances on the immorality of fractional reserve banking. 100% of banks in the Western world would collapse if they had a run on them. This isn’t a mystery. Everyone understands this. Both people who are pro-FRB and anti-FRB. It’s not like some mind-blowing wisdom.
Banks take deposits and they make loans or buy assets with those deposits. That’s what they do. There’s nothing new about that. The same was true when we were on the gold standard. And honestly, I have made the argument that even in a hyperbitcoinized world, that would STILL be true.
I think the argument that bitcoin will bring an end to fraction reserve models — which are fundamentally about adjusting time preference to maximize capital efficiency — will continue to happen!
What is particularly risky about FRB's balance sheet that set it apart from literally 100% of all other banks in the US? Other than the fact their customers are in a coordinated panic based on some rumors they read on the internet that we're amplified by SVB's collapse?
FRB hasn't engaged in any specifically risky behavior. There are many institutions that are worse capitalized than them. The only reason they're facing a run on the bank is due to market psychology. This is a tragedy of the commons problem.