Failed banks' executives are not blameless. Obviously, some banks did better than others. But there are a lot of banks that are hurting. And were it not for the understanding that the federal government seems to be effectively ensuring all bank deposits, many more banks would be failing.

There is a pattern here, but it is not limited to defective management. There is still no mention from Senator Warren of the damage to banks' balance sheets from inflation. (See e.g. .)…

The determination of who/what is at fault for the bank failures is a matter of significance for both financial policy and politics. Expect to see at the hearing Senator Warren continue her of attack on "the culture of corruption at the Fed," including her specific criticism of FRB Chair Powell, and her condemnations of the regulators for refusing to produce documentation.

The questions posed in Form PF are so badly structured that the information collected is almost entirely useless. This has been a central complaint since the adoption of the Form more than a decade ago. (See, e.g., , Dec. 6, 2012). Rather than admitting that the Form and its questions are fundamentally flawed, which would require that Form PF either be abandoned or redone from scratch, the SEC chose, instead, to collect even more information that will be of little use to anyone. Garbage…

It is a pretty quick transition from "everything is fine, nothing to see here" to "the bank deposit insurance system no longer works and we could have major bank runs that wreak havoc on the economy at any time, so we better revamp the whole system." The end result of this may be a fixed income market in which investors can either (i) buy the rapidly increasing supply of government debt securities or (ii) deposit their funds in a bank and obtain a government guarantee paid for by deposit…