RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-ghost-of-ancient-rome-haunts-america/

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands of cities have been built. And yet, as Rome’s greatest chronicler Edward Gibbon warned in 1776, a similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times‘s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

Yet even before the current downturn, the data defied the bravado. For decades, the ultra-tall towers that once symbolised urban greatness have been as anachronistic as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, along with the construction of new space. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.

More serious still has been the movement of people. Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-biden-bank-failures-silicon-valley-bank-signature-bank-markets-white-house-fdic-deposit-insurance-fund-a5538900?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden tried to reassure Americans early Monday morning that the banking system is safe and not to worry about the failures of Silicon Valley (SVB) and Signature banks. Markets didn’t believe him because bank stocks took another plunge, with some down 60% or more.

Perhaps investors don’t believe the Administration’s Sunday interventions solve the problems. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says it couldn’t find a private buyer for SVB, though a source tells us Treasury and the Federal Reserve favored one. FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg nixed it owing to hostility to bank mergers.

Instead the regulators offered solutions that bail out even uninsured bank depositors and other banks at unknown costs that Mr. Biden isn’t acknowledging. Take Mr. Biden’s pledge that “no losses will be borne by the taxpayers.” He said “the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund.”

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That’s not nearly the full story. The FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund normally guarantees up to $250,000 in deposits, which protects small retail customers including mom-and-pop businesses. Banks pay for this guarantee with insurance premiums, but the insurance fund isn’t intended to backstop deposits of bigger customers with more capacity to weather losses if a bank goes under.

Yet after venture capitalists (Democratic donors) and Silicon Valley politicians howled, the FDIC on Sunday announced it would cover uninsured deposits at SVB and Signature Bank under its “systemic risk” exception. Apparently, Silicon Valley investors and startups are too big to lose money when they take risks. They benefited enormously from the Fed’s pandemic liquidity hose, which caused SVB’s deposits to double between 2020 and 2021. SVB paid interest of up to 5.28% on large deposits, which it used to fund loans to startups.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/13/as-banks-headed-for-crisis-team-biden-focused-on-prescribing-wokery/

The failure of three banks in the last two weeks, including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank just this weekend, is a saga of utter government incompetence.

Call these bank collapses Biden’s Banking Busts. The administration has been obsessing on woke causes while banks teeter toward insolvency.

Three days before Silicon Valley Bank’s Friday failure, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen cautioned that climate change puts the banking industry at risk.

Yellen was in la-la-land, speculating that future storms and tornadoes could diminish the value of banks’ assets.

Weather is a risk, but she was oblivious to the much more immediate problem facing banks — the plummeting value of the bonds they own. 

She was heedless to the impending downfall of SVB and possibly several other small banks that had purchased long-term bonds when interest rates were near zero.

After doing nothing to tame inflation the previous year, the Federal Reserve hiked rates repeatedly in 2022 to make up for its inaction.

Those rapid rate hikes, the most drastic in decades, made the banks’ bonds lose value.

A week before Yellen’s climate-change harangue, Moody’s Investors Service already had delivered SVB the bad news that it was about to be downgraded several notches because its bond inventory was not worth enough to repay depositors.

The day before Yellen’s loony speech, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg also warned that the diminishing value of banks’ bond holdings meant a $620 billion problem ahead.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19476/stanford-student-disrupters

The real victims of this censorship were the students who were denied the opportunity to hear Judge Duncan’s full presentation. As the late Justice Thurgood Marshall once observed, “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; They are two sides of the same coin.”

To be sure, protesting, picketing and even brief heckling of speakers is also protected free speech, but shouting speakers down with the intent to silence them is not. It is explicitly prohibited by Stanford’s rules. Yet that is exactly what occurred without apparent consequences to the disrupters.

The disrupters also attempted to shame the sponsors of the speech by disclosing their names and subjecting them to harassment. This suggests a possible response to the disrupters. Following the Yale disruptions, some judges have announced that they will no longer hire law clerks from Yale… In my view, that amounts to collective punishment of the innocent along with guilty. Many law students from these schools do not agree with disrupting speakers, and they should not be denied clerkships. Instead, the names of the disrupters might be published and made available to potential employers, so they can decide whether they want to hire graduates with such intolerance for diversity of viewpoints.

As one who well remembers McCarthyite “blacklists,” I’m uncomfortable about publishing the names of student censors. But if they are proud of their very public efforts to silence speakers with whom they disagree, they should be proud to have their names published so that potential employers can have relevant information before they make hiring decisions. That would be far better than judges and other employers refusing to hire ANY students from the offending schools.

Law schools are supposed to teach advocacy skills and a commitment to the rule of law. They should have and enforce vigorous free speech policies. They should not have deans, like Steinbach, who are part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Stanford should apologize to Judge Duncan for the dean’s actions and inactions…. It should discipline any students who violated its speech policies. Most importantly, it should foster values of diversity of viewpoints, rather than merely diversity of race and ethnicity. Perhaps the law school should appoint a new dean of “diversity of opinions, tolerance for other views and free speech”.

Once again, a conservative speaker had been shouted down by censorial law students who didn’t want him to speak. This time it was Stanford, last time it was Yale. Then it was Georgetown.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/12/the-march-madness-of-the-president/

Another couple of weeks, another bout of madness from Joe Biden and his team. Of recent Biden delusions, consider:

Biden went off in one of his impromptu Corn Pop, or “beat-up-Trump-behind-the-bleachers” fables. These often slurred and nearly unintelligible tales characteristically virtue signal Biden’s own victimhood and “courage.” 

They are interspersed with his bizarre propensity for eerie female contact. So we see or hear of his long record of blowing into the ears and hair, or squeezing the necks of young girls. He hugs, for far too long, mature women. He can call out among a crowd an anonymous attractive teen stranger. Or, recently he relates an incoherent but quasi-sexual vignette. 

So Joe recalled his patient days in his usual off-topic “no lie/not kidding/no joke” manner (i.e., tip offs that he’s lying). He told us that a noble nurse once would “come in and do things that I don’t think you learn in medical school—in nursing school.” The president got a nervous laugh from the apparent quasi-pornographic reference (but then again Joe is excused because he is a “feminist”), before he detailed her technique:  

She’d whisper in my ear.  I didn’t—couldn’t understand her, but she’d whisper, and she’d lean down. She’d actually breathe on me to make sure that I was—there was a connection, a human connection.

A woman leaning over to blow into a prone man’s ear certainly constitutes a “human connection.” Yet all of Joe’s fables have different Homeric-style retellings. Two years ago he claimed that the same nurse in question actually blew into his nostrils. What a strange air-pressure technique that must have entailed for a person recovering from brain surgery. But perhaps it was consistent with biblical references to God blowing the spirit of life into the nose of man.

About a week later, referencing that hospital stay, Biden added that doctors “had to take the top of my head off a couple times, see if I had a brain”—a reference that did not reassure the nation he is not enfeebled. 

No one in the media had much of a reaction because Joe Biden’s political utility and near senility serve as exemptions for his often sexist, racist, and creepy riffs.