Happy Pi day.
Happy birthday to Albert Einstein born on this day in 1879.
We’re serving up ten eleven skinnylichious nuggets that in theory would make Einstein proud. 
It’s all relative.
- Warren Buffett has famously said, “you have to wait until the tide goes out to see who is swimming naked.”
- Well it looks like a couple of regional banks (no longer) were skinny dipping and we’re guessing a handful more are desperately looking for their trunks today.
- Not to worry, the Biden Administration jumped into action and will make everyone whole. Actions used to have consequences. The FDIC insurance only covers the first 250k that anyone or any entity had under one roof. No more. No more, that is, until yesterday. So was it a bailout?
- “Investors in the banks will not be protected,” Mr. Biden said. “They knowingly took a risk, and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money. That’s how capitalism works.” So, no it wasn’t.
- “The Fed has basically just written insurance on interest-rate risk for the whole banking system,” said Steven Kelly, senior research associate at Yale’s program on financial stability. “I’ll call it a bailout of the system.” So, yes it was.
- “During the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in an interview with “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “And the reforms that have been put in place mean that we’re not going to do that again.” So, no it wasn’t.
- Who has been worse at their job? Is it Pete Buttigieg? Or, is it Janet Yellen? Or….. If you answered Joe Biden, you’d be with the 84% of Americans polled last week that do not want him to run for a second term.
- Yellen told us 15 months ago that this inflation was transitory. She didn’t tell us exactly how long this transition would take, however. Yellen is the poster senior citizen for white hair privilege. Is her salon Hair by Einstein? Pete’s tenure as Secretary of Transportation, paternity leave aside, has been one train wreck after another.
- Those reforms didn’t stop Donald Trump from getting blamed for this in Biden’s opening remarks yesterday about the crisis. When in doubt, blame Trump. “During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks, including the Dodd-Frank Law, to make sure the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again. Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements.”
- There is only so much time in a day’s work for Biden to reverse Turmp’s evil doings in the first 2 plus years of office. This is especially true when Biden has spent nearly 40% of his time in office actually not in his office. Official documentation shows that he has been either on vacation, at his beach house in Delaware, his main house in Delaware, or at Camp David, or biking, or skiing, or….
- President Biden’s former press secretary Jen Psaki said her ex-boss’s Monday morning speech on the stability of the US banking system demonstrates how important the issue is to him since he normally “does nothing at 9 a.m.” Amen.
If you wish, go ahead and splurge with a good old slice of cherry pie to celebrate the day.