agwrestler said:
Forgive my ignorance. I only took a single class on west campus. Is there a post that summarizes this situation in layman terms? ....and who are we upset with?
Pretty much the collusion of big finance and the government. The fed is trying to raise the interest rates to bring the economy back to reality after the sugar high of coronabucks and to fight against inflation.
When interest rates rise they put a damper on economic activity because money actually costs something to get, AND banks securities lose value because risk-free bonds offer a higher interest rate than the securities they had locked in at previous lower rates.
This came to the forefront when SVB, who had made lots of investments in start-ups was burning through cash as their customers could no longer access easy capital and started making more withdrawals than deposits. To secure liquidity SVB had to sell some of those securities but took a 1.8 billion dollar haircut doing so since the securities were unattractive given their lower interest rates. This caused a domino effect of bank runs after people realized "oh no these securities aren't worth much and banks might not have as much liquidity as we think".