 Hello, I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute, and this is Minor Issues. Today I'd like to talk about the bank failures and bailouts that have happened this week. As most people will know, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank had to close their doors or face a run on the bank by depositors. The Fed and the FDIC came in and bailed out those two institutions. Just as some background, SVB Bank had a lot of big customers in the technology industry of Silicon Valley and the green energy industry as well. Signature Bank, their clients were more from the crypto, currency, market space, and real estate. So both of those banks were sort of on the cutting edge of the economy, and both of them grew very rapidly, especially in the last few years. So they expanded deposits, they expanded their assets, and the amount of loans that they made. But that happened during the Fed's 0% interest rate policy regime, and the new regime of rising rates not only increased rates to fight price inflation, but it also meant that those businesses in crypto and technology, green energy, real estate, they all had to start more or less withdrawing money from their accounts because their businesses weren't so great. That meant that those banks had to sell some assets to meet deposits, but those assets had lost a lot of value. So if they sold them, it was trouble for those two banks in particular. Even though both SVB Bank and Signature Bank are large regional banks, the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation bailout of the banks is relatively small. Most of the bailout comes from the Fed in the form of changing the rules that were supposed to prevent these types of problems, protecting the bank's assets, and guaranteeing unlimited liquidity. And that's a good thing in the sense that the FDIC Insurance Fund is actually smaller than both of these banks. So the FDIC Insurance Fund is relatively small. It can't protect us or the entire banking industry from the inherent instability that it has. So this could be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of banking problems. This is the Fed's and the FDIC's attempt to prevent the problems from getting out of control, but ultimately there's no costless means of trying to unwind the problems that the Fed's monetary policy guaranteed would happen.