If you’re wondering why Silicon Valley Bank, one of the biggest lenders to tech start-ups, had to be taken over Friday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one good place to look is the Federal Reserve. The Fed has raised interest rates extremely rapidly over the past year to squelch…

The news that consumer prices fell in December from November — yes, monthly inflation was negative — was not as wonderful for the Federal Reserve as you might expect. Fed officials are trying to persuade the financial markets and the public that the fight against high inflation is far from over,…

Attendance at the world’s biggest conference of economists was down by half this year, and that had some attendees worrying that the annual conclave was at risk of unraveling like a knitted sweater. People who were disappointed not to see their friends at this year’s Allied Social Science…

The clearest signal that the US economy is likely to fall into a recession in the next year is coming from interest rates. One of the first people to establish the signaling value of interest rates was Arturo Estrella, then an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I interviewed him…

Apple is the world’s most valuable company. Is it also a monopolist? To answer that question to your own satisfaction, I suggest that you watch a gripping reality show on YouTube. It’s an hour-and-a-quarter courtroom hearing from Nov. 14 in the case of Epic Games v. Apple. It features brilliant…

Updated with data released on Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a chart shows that the US personal saving rate dropped in October to 2.3 percent. How low is that? Since 1959 there has been only one month when the saving rate was that low or lower. (That was July 2005, when the housing…

There are well over 100 currencies, from the Angolan kwanza and the Bhutan ngultrum to the Uzbekistan sum and the Vanuatu vatu. Is that the right number for the global economy? Not really. A multiplicity of unpredictably fluctuating currencies discourages trade and investment by injecting…

For Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, the demise of Friendster is a cautionary tale. Friendster, a social network founded in 2002, gained millions of users soon after it started but lost them almost as quickly, later metamorphosing into an online gaming site based in Malaysia before closing down…

Inflation too hot for you? How about a nice, refreshing COLA? This time, not just for Social Security recipients, who found out about their 2023 cost-of-living adjustments on Thursday. We’ve come to expect that certain people will be protected from inflation by cost-of-living adjustments and…