 As you know, the Fed yesterday, as you probably know the Fed yesterday, increased its key interest rate by a 25 basis point, so a quarter of a percent. This was what the markets anticipated, although just two weeks ago the consensus was that the Fed would increase by 50 percent in order to fight inflation with the idea that the inflation numbers were still high and the interest rates need to go even higher. The economy slowed down even more so that inflation pressures would be mitigated. So in the battle with inflation, the consensus was at least two plus weeks ago that the Fed would increase by 50 basis points. As a consequence of the banking crisis and the problems with banks, some were speculating that the Fed might not increase interest rates at all and by doing so try to help the banks. At this point, banks are hurt with interest rates rising because that hurts their investment portfolio. But the Fed decided to split the baby to go half-half and take the 50 basis points and the zero, those are the two targets, and go 25 basis points right in the middle. If it seems stuff like it, then NASDAQ S&P are all up today, but banks don't like it. Bank stocks are being pounded again today and are down today quite a bit again. So a split in the market, although, you know, again, if you understand the economics and all of these things are connected, there's no way in which, there's no world in which banks doing really, really badly is good for the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. So this divergence is a little questionable, but clearly money is flowing out of investments and banks and into investments and pretty much anything else, and that is driving markets right now. Did the Fed do the right thing? As I've told you many, many, many times, there's no right answer to that. I don't know, you know, this kind of central planning is ultimately, it's impossible to do the right thing. If you do more damage, less damage, 25 basis points, you know, seems to be, they guess at less damage. If they'd gone to zero, the markets would have accused them of not taking inflation seriously. If they'd gone to 50 basis points, that would have been viewed as they're not caring at all about their situation of banks. They did indicate yesterday that it looks like they won't have to raise interest rates much more. They believe at this point that inflation is under control. We will see if that is true or not. And that may be another 25 basis points increase, but that might be it for the year. This is again a major change from what the Fed was saying just about a month ago when they were expecting significantly more increases and they expected inflation was a lot more stubborn than what they thought it was going to be. So things change and things change very quickly as data comes in from the world out there and as the implications for the route in banking to the, in a sense to the real economy once those are factored in. So the Fed is doing what the Fed does. It's trying to use whatever mathematical models to make the best estimate that it can and do the least damage possible. Of course, the cause of the entire banking crisis and the cause of inflation is the feds and the Trump and Biden administration. It's a response to COVID. It's the massive influx of money, massive increase in government debt. It's to some extent the monetization of that debt. If you were by the Federal Reserve, by buying all those bonds and facilitating massive liquidity during the financial crisis, these are the causes of inflation, the causes of the banking crisis, so the root cause of everything going on wrong in markets right now and in your cost of living right now and the fact that it's much more expensive to live in America today and in the world really. All of that is caused by government and we should never forget that. What the Fed is trying to do is undo the damage it has already done. The federal government doesn't seem to eager at all to undo the damage it's doing. No move whether by Democrats or Republicans is being taken to reduce the deficit, to reduce government spending, to signal a seriousness about deficit control, nothing. So what I want to emphasize, two things I always want to emphasize when talking about the Fed. One, nothing they do is right. It's just a question of how wrong are they. And second is the crisis that we're facing, the problems that we're facing, the challenges we're facing from an economic perspective are the result of government action. And the tragedy is, of course, that nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to act on it. Nobody seems to derive any conclusions from this about the role of government in our economy and what the role of the government should be. If anything, the cause are for more regulations, more controls, more government intervention. So if we're talking about the government causing problems, I think again it is really, really important that we look at the current banking crisis and try to identify at least some of the causes for it. And again, I think you will find that many of these causes, or all the causes, are basically government. We talked about the fact that government, because of deficit spending and printing of money, caused the inflation, which caused interest rates to rise, which has caused the investment portfolios, banks to decline and therefore the value of the assets to decline and the liquidity to decline. And that is basically a major source of the bank runs and a major source of the problems within banking. But that was well known before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. And that in and of itself does not explain what happened and it certainly doesn't explain what happened to, for example, the signature bank in New York. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com. 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