Bank Failure Quotes

The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Imagine there is a bank account that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to used during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course? Each of us has such a bank, it's name is time. Every morning, it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off at a lost, whatever of this you failed to invest to a good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against "tomorrow". You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and health. The clock is running. Make the most of today.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

Although the United States, with its unit banking laws, had thousands of bank failures, Canada, which permitted branch banking, didn't have a single failure during the Great Depression.

Few human inventions are more complex and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles

P.S. Success hits different when you spend more time clapping for yourself than looking down on your failures.

None of these things define you as a person: Your education The size of your bank account Your job title Your failures Your successes And sadly, we let so many of these things rule our lives. Obsession with crossing off the checkboxes of society's life plan leads to little other than therapy, midlife crises, and depression.

That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the stock market collapses, and then the banks, and then there is no food in the supermarkets, or the communications system goes down completely and inevitably, and previously amiable co-workers find themselves wrestling over the last remaining cookie that someone brought in before all the madness began.

The accepted version of history is that the Federal Reserve was created to stabilize our economy. One of the most widely-used textbooks on this subject says: "It sprang from the panic of 1907, with its alarming epidemic of bank failures: the country was fed up once and for all with the anarchy of unstable private banking."23 Even the most naive student must sense a grave contradiction between this cherished view and the System's actual performance. Since its inception, it has presided over the crashes of 1921 and 1929; the Great Depression of '29 to '39; recessions in '53, '57, '69, '75, and '81; a stock market "Black Monday" in '87; and a 1000% inflation which has destroyed 90% of the dollar's purchasing power.24

Sure, anything can make or break a market from the failure of a bank to the rumor that your second cousin's grandmother has a cold.

Excessive rural credit was one of the important causes of bank failure during the Great Depression.

On June 16, 1933, the Senate passed the Glass-Steagall Act whereby banks were forbidden from selling stocks and bonds. The Act also created the FDIC, which insures banks against failure.

I became convinced that the advanced industrial countries, through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, were not only not doing all that they could to help these [developing] countries but were sometimes making their life more difficult. IMF programs had clearly worsened the East Asian crisis, and the "shock therapy" they had pushed in the former Soviet Union and its satellites played an important role in the failure of the transition.

The determined attempt to discredit Robert Mueller, the FBI and the Justice Department is an endeavor to protect the fervent saber rattlers themselves. You see, all this commotion kicked into overdrive once the Special Counsel sought information from Deutsche Bank.

It is the author's opinion that the history of China and India, and their failure to catch up to the West during the twentieth century, is inextricably linked to this massive destruction of wealth and capital brought about by the demonetization of the monetary metal these countries utilized.

The Freedman’s Savings Bank serves as a cautionary tale for government support of banking for the poor when that support is just a façade. Draping a flag over a building and then installing private profit-motivated management inside is the most dangerous sort of government support. It induces trust in a vulnerable customer base that not only suffers from financial loss, but also loses all faith in public institutions. It poisons true government efforts to help. A similar phenomenon was at the heart of the failure of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the recent financial

We have each other. We lived apart from them; we understand now. Our failure to touch, to belong. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody is gone, and we will join them. We are born apart, driftwood on the banks of an endless dark ocean. And we will be carried away by the swell soon enough. But in between, in a single day of living… that dancing in a strip of sunlight, we can find what we miss. The love that makes us whole. The imminence. Everybody found their other. This pattern is mine...

Jesus did the job that you couldn’t do, and He is faithful to keep you. You didn’t save yourself, and you can’t keep yourself saved. You are a Son and not a slave. You don’t owe God anything; absolutely nothing. You never did. He was never banking on you to make up for your failures and faults. He took care of those long before you ever realized it.

There is a price to pay for success, there is also a price to pay for failure. The question is, what price are you willing to pay?

Failure to understand the context in which correlations are observed leads to false conclusions. The

Now, more than ever, the world needs a Permaculture Economy.

Success at job interview requires preparation. Failure doesn't.

Oh no,” Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit.

To live for one’s principles, at all costs, is a dangerous speculation; and the failure of an ideal, no matter how humane and noble, is harder for the world to forgive and forget than bank robbery or the grand swindles of corrupt politicians.

If more people understood how nice it is to have a sense of home that extends past our locked doors, past our neighbors' padlocks, to the local food co-op and library, the sidewalks busted up by old trees - if we all held home with longer arms - we'd live in a very different place... We wouldn't feel so alone, no matter the size of our houses or our bank accounts, no matter whether we had good health or congestive heart failure. We would begin to see that each moment presents an opportunity to relax, to notice that the wind has shifted and a storm is coming, or that our friend's toddler has decided to wear dinner instead of eating it. We would see that each minute counts for something timeless and, if we want, we all can find our way inside these big, tiny, moments.

Until well into the modern age, Christians had spread legends about Jews poisoning town wells, intentionally spreading the plague, and murdering Christian babies. Now, in the twentieth century, anti-Semites asserted that, wherever Jews were active, they stirred up popular unrest and sowed discord. This flexible stereotype could be used to interpret a variety of unsettling events—major conflicts of interest, market competition, bank failures, inflation, foreign and civil wars, and revolutions—as Jewish machinations.

I judge myself by the shiny, pretty people I see at parent-teacher meetings, or on Facebook, or Pinterest, who seem to totally have their shit together and never have unwashed hair. They never wait until Thursday night to help their kid with the entire week's homework. They don't have piles of dusty boxes in corners waiting to be opened from the move before last. They have pretty, pastel lives, and they are happy, and they own picnic baskets and napkins and know how to recycle, and they never run out of toilet paper or get their electricity turned off. And it's not even that I want to be one of those people. I fucking hate picnics. If God wanted us to eat on the ground He wouldn't have invented couches. I just don't want to feel like a failure because my biggest accomplishment of the day was going to the bank.

If you take steps to accomplish something, that action will have a result—either failure or success…. Trust is knowing that there will be a message. When you trust in those messages, the reflections of the phenomenal world, the world begins to seem like a bank, or reservoir, of richness.

Politicians have often declared that unbridled competition among financial intermediaries promotes failures that will harm the public. Although the evidence that competition does this is extremely weak, it has not stopped the state and federal governments from imposing many restrictive regulations.

Eli Willard just looked at her for a long moment, and then he announced, 'Lady of the Lake strikes iceberg in mid-Atlantic; 215 drown. New York City fire destroys 700 buildings. Japanese earthquake kills 12,000. Worldwide cholera epidemic kills millions. Wages rise, but prices rise faster. Financial crash occurs on Van Buren's 36th day in office. Nation begins first great depression. Bank failures and closings spread like plague. 200,000 are unemployed. Business bankrupt; only pawnbrokers prosper. Van Buren declares ten-hour days on all federal jobs. There. Does that make you feel any better?

But these things now belonged to the past, and he was flying toward the future. As they banked, Dr. Floyd could see below him a maze of buildings, then a great airstrip, then a broad, dead-straight scar across the flat Florida landscape—the multiple rails of a giant launching track. At its end, surrounded by vehicles and gantries, a spaceplane lay gleaming in a pool of light, being prepared for its leap to the stars. In a sudden failure of perspective, brought on by his swift changes of speed and height, it seemed to Floyd that he was looking down on a small silver moth, caught in the beam of a flashlight.

the general fund of vocabulary, nay, of discourse itself, so calamitous that the failure of the banks in 1929 seems paltry by comparison; so that we find verbal paupers all around us, tattered, emaciated, and reduced to the stark penury of such verbal resources as “It’s like wow” or using “interface” or “office” as verbs.

His geekiness was that bizarre failure to care about the one thing that everybody agreed really mattered: kudos, while his coolness came from the same source, because not caring about kudos—not obsessing about it, not chasing it down wherever it might be found, not constantly measuring one’s own coolness against that of one’s peers—was in itself kind of cool.

the first century of the US Federal Reserve’s existence has been a failure. Not only has there been incontinent inflation since 1913, the year the Fed came into existence (8 per cent in the preceding 120 years, 2,300 per cent in the succeeding hundred years), but there has been devastating deflation too, and more banking panics, more financial volatility, longer and deeper recessions.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.

He picked up the telephone on his desk. “Bring in the Cord loan agreement and the check.” “You will note,” he said, “that although the loan is for three hundred thousand dollars, we have extended your credit under this agreement to a maximum of five hundred thousand dollars.” He smiled at me. “One of my principles of banking, Mr. Cord. I don’t believe in budgeting my clients too closely. Sometimes a few dollars more make the difference between success and failure.” Suddenly

What remains of the labours of the ‘new philosophers’ who have been enlightening us – or, in other words, deadening our minds – for 30 years now? What really remains of the great ideological machinery of freedom, human rights, the West and its values? It all comes down to a simple negative statement that is as bald as it is flat and as naked as the day it was born: socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice. And that is why we now have to save the banks rather than confiscate them, hand out billions to the rich and give nothing to the poor, set nationals against workers of foreign origin whenever possible, and, in a word, keep tight controls on all forms of poverty in order to ensure the survival of the powerful. No choice, I tell you! As our ideologues admit, it is not as though relying on the greed of a few crooks and unbridled private property to run the state and the economy was the absolute Good. But it is the only possible way forward. In his anarchist vision, Stirner described man, or the personal agent of History, as ‘the Ego and his own’. Nowadays, it is ‘Property as ego’. Which

Cryptocurrency, which was supposedly created as a solution to the myriad failures of our regulated financial system laid bare during the subprime crisis, had effectively reproduced and even amplified the same dynamics, leading to a similar implosion. Thankfully for the broader public, it had all happened on a smaller scale and the real banks were not involved (despite the crypto industry’s efforts to the contrary). But once again, it was regular people who were left holding the bag.

The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into Europe that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great “What ifs” of history. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high watermark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.

the first century of the US Federal Reserve’s existence has been a failure. Not only has there been incontinent inflation since 1913, the year the Fed came into existence (8 per cent in the preceding 120 years, 2,300 per cent in the succeeding hundred years), but there has been devastating deflation too, and more banking panics, more financial volatility, longer and deeper recessions. Even the Fed’s response to the crisis of 2008 has come under severe criticism, as it effectively bailed out bad assets while doing little to help solvent institutions with needed liquidity

Past successes may be inspirational and encouraging, but they are not by themselves reliable indicators of or guides to future success. The most efficacious changes in any system are informed not by successes but by failures. The surest way for the designer of any system to achieve success is to recognize and correct the flaws of predecessor systems, whether they be in building codes or in banking policies or in bridges.25 The history of civilization itself has been one of rises and falls, of successes and failures. Some of these have been of empires, dynasties, families; others have been of nations, states, and cities. Common to all of them has been the human element, embodied in the ruler and the ruled alike. Given that the ultimate unit of civilization is the individual, we need look no further than within ourselves to gain insight into the world and its ways, including the failure of its institutions and its systems. And, just as those institutions and systems are made up of individual people and things, so ultimately must we look to ourselves and to how we interact with the world, both given and made, whenever something goes wrong.

Except fear, possibly. Because maybe you’ve been really frightened at some time, and so was the bank robber. Possibly because the bank robber had small children and had therefore had a lot of practice being afraid. Perhaps you, too, have children, in which case you’ll know that you’re frightened the whole time, frightened of not knowing everything and of not having the energy to do everything and of not coping with everything. In the end we actually get so used to the feeling of failure that every time we don’t disappoint our children it leaves us feeling secretly shocked.

Now, no creature who has any credit with a bank comes to me. The first step to my door means that a man is desperately hard up; that the news of his failure will soon come out: and, most of all, it means that he has been everywhere else first. The stag is always at bay when I see him, and a pack of creditors are hard upon his track. The Countess lived in the Rue du Helder, and my Fanny in the Rue Montmartre. How many conjectures I made as I set out this morning! If these two women were not able to pay, they would show me more respect than they would show their own fathers.

Perhaps because the bank was identified with the endeavors of the newly freed negro, wrote historians Kindsor and Sagarin, anyone who dared to raise a cry against the mismanagement was charged with being anti-negro. In as much as the enemies of the negro were not interested in the bank, and the friends were effectively silenced with the anti-negro charge, there was no exposure of the condition of the bank. The belief that the failures of black institutions could not be accurately studied because of the sensitivity of the race issue, whether accurate or not, would be a recurring theme through history.

Trust at the interpersonal level. Trustworthiness is the foundation of trust. Trust is the emotional bank account between two people that enables them to have a win-win performance agreement. If two people trust each other, based on the trustworthiness of each other, they can then enjoy clear communication, empathy, synergy, and productive interdependency. If one is incompetent, training and development can help. But if one has a character flaw, he or she must make and keep promises to increase internal security, improve skills, and rebuild relationships of trust. Trust—or the lack of it—is at the root of success or failure in relationships and in the bottom-line results of business, industry, education, and government.

People who learned Eric and I wanted to adopt a child often told us stories of adoptions gone wrong. The adopted child incapable of attachment. Who became a drug addict, a runaway, who drained bank accounts, ruined marriages. "I have a friend who adopted," these stories began. "It was a nightmare."... And their stories did make me afraid, convinced me I was the vulnerable one whose life was at risk. Listening, I'd forget the abandoned, the neglected, the children curled on the floor of some empty-cabinet kitchen or crying in some school bathroom stall or shaking in some crib. I'd forget that these children belong to all of us. If they wield knives in the dark or hit heads against walls or refuse to speak, they signal our failure, not theirs.

First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others. But when a market is widely regarded to be in a bad way, even if the problems are illusory, many investors get out. A good example of this was the crisis at the U.S. Farm Credit Corporation. It looked for a moment as if Farm Credit might go bankrupt. Investors stampeded out of Farm Credit bonds because having been warned of the possibility of accident, they couldn’t be seen in the vicinity without endangering their reputations. In an age when failure isn’t allowed, when the U.S. government had rescued firms as remote from the national interest as Chrysler and the Continental Illinois Bank, there was no chance the government would allow the Farm Credit bank to default. The thought of not bailing out an eighty-billion-dollar institution that lent money to America’s distressed farmers was absurd. Institutional investors knew this. That is the point. The people selling Farm Credit bonds for less than they were worth weren’t necessarily stupid. They simply could not be seen holding them. Since Alexander wasn’t constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were.

The problem wasn’t that the banks were, in and of themselves, critical to the success of the U.S. economy. The problem, he felt certain, was that some gargantuan, unknown dollar amount of credit default swaps had been bought and sold on every one of them. “There’s no limit to the risk in the market,” he said. “A bank with a market capitalization of one billion dollars might have one trillion dollars’ worth of credit default swaps outstanding. No one knows how many there are! And no one knows where they are!” The failure of, say, Citigroup might be economically tolerable. It would trigger losses to Citigroup’s shareholders, bondholders, and employees—but the sums involved were known to all. Citigroup’s failure, however, would also trigger the payoff of a massive bet of unknown dimensions: from people who had sold credit default swaps on Citigroup to those who had bought them.

By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.

If you experience feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, your poor self-image may keep you from exploring your social self and getting to know others. When fear causes inhibition, your chances of interactive success are severely diminished. Eventually, it will seem easier to avoid the anxiety of socializing than to go ahead and risk failure. The more you avoid these situations, the more you depend on family members for all your emotional support. In my treatment of individuals with social anxiety, these are the two personality profiles that inevitably surface. There is a direct connection between the two: If you avoid doing something that needs to be done, you probably depend on someone else to do it for you. For example, if you habitually avoid going to the bank, or making a phone call, how do these things get accomplished? Ask yourself: “When I avoid these things, who picks up the pieces?” You can’t have avoidance without an element of dependence. Now ask yourself: “If I did it myself, what would the outcome be?” And then: “If no one did it, what would the outcome be?

From reading his papers, it is clear to me that my father and his generation did not initially expect the Arab states’ treacheries and their betrayal of the Palestinian cause. This only gradually dawned on them. Nor did they expect that the Jews in Palestine would win so comprehensively. It came as a shock and led to decades of despair. They could not have imagined before the Nakba that the small Jewish community in Palestine would succeed in driving out most Palestinians from their homes and replacing them with Jews, or that the Nakba would be final and they would be unable to return home. In part, this was a failure of imagination due to the experiential gap that existed between the zealous Jewish fighters and the unsuspecting Palestinians. How similar all this is to what happened to us after 1967. And yet how can I be surprised by this failure on the previous generation’s part when I, who lived through the settlement-building project, never imagined that Israel would get away with this systematic illegal scheme and end up taking most of the land in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank?

The scheme began to unravel following the Panic of 1873 when railroad investments failed. The bank experienced several runs at the height of the panic. The panic would not have affected the bank if it had been a savings bank, but by 1866, the business of the bank had become…reckless speculation, over-capitalization, stock manipulation, intrigue and bribery, and downright plundering…. In a last ditch effort to save the bank, the Trustees appointed Frederick Douglas as Bank President in March of 1874. Douglass did not ask to be nominated and the Bank Board knew that Douglass had no experience in banking, but they felt that his reputation and popularity would restore confidence to fleeing depositors….Douglas lent the bank $10,000 of his own money to cover the bank’s illiquid assets….Douglass quickly discovered that the bank was full of dead men’s bones, rottenness and corruption. As soon as Douglass realized that the bank was headed towards certain failure, he imposed drastic spending cuts to limit depositors’ losses. He then relayed this information to Congress, underscoring the bank’s insolvency, and declaring that he could no longer ask his people to deposit their money in it. Despite the other Trustees’ attempts to convince Congress otherwise, Congress sided with Douglass, and on June 20, 1874, Congress amended the Charter to authorize the Trustees to end operations. Within a few weeks’ time, the bank’s doors were shut for good on June 29, 1874, leaving 61,131 depositors without access to nearly $3 million dollars in deposits. More than half of accumulated black wealth disappeared through the mismanagement of the Freedman’s Savings Bank. And what is most lamentable…is the fact that only a few of those who embezzled and defrauded the one-time liquid assets of this bank were ever prosecuted….Congress did appoint a commission led by John AJ Cresswell to look into the failure and to recover as much of the deposits as possible. In 1880, Henry Cook testified about the bank failure and said that bank’s depositors were victims of a widespread universal sweeping financial disaster. In other words, it was the Market’s fault, not his. The misdeeds of the bank’s management never came to light.

In November 1914, the British government issued the first war bond, aiming to raise £350 million from private investors at an interest rate of 4.1% and a maturity of ten years. Surprisingly, the bond issue was undersubscribed, and the British public purchased less than a third of the targeted sum. To avoid publicizing this failure, the Bank of England granted funds to its chief cashier and his deputy to purchase the bonds under their own names. The Financial Times, ever the bank’s faithful mouthpiece, published an article proclaiming the loan was oversubscribed. John Maynard Keynes worked at the Treasury at the time, and in a secret memo to the bank, he praised them for what he called their “masterly manipulation.” Keynes’s fondness for surreptitious monetary arrangements would go on to inspire thousands of economic textbooks published worldwide. The Bank of England had set the tone for a century of central bank and government collusion behind the public’s back. The Financial Times would only issue a correction 103 years later,7 when this matter was finally uncovered after some sleuthing in the bank’s archives by some enterprising staff members and published on the bank’s blog.8

Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

What’s an IPO, exactly? A company decides it wants to “float” part of its equity on the public markets, allowing employees and founders to sell private shares to pay them off for years of service, as well as sell shares out of the corporate treasury to have some money in the bank. Large investment banks (such as my former employer Goldman Sachs) form what’s called a “syndicate” (“mafia” might be a better term) wherein they offer to effectively buy those shares from Facebook, and then sell them into the capital markets, usually by pushing it via their sales force onto wealthy clients or institutional investors. That syndicate either guarantees a price (“firm commitment”) or promises to get the best price it can (“best effort”). In the former case, the bank is taking real execution risk, and stands to lose money if it doesn’t engineer a “pop” in the stock on opening day. To mitigate the risk, the bank convinces the offering company to expect a lower price, while simultaneously jacking up what real price the market will bear with a zealous sales pitch to the market’s deepest pockets. Thus, it is absolutely jejune to think that a stock’s rise on opening day is due to clamoring and unexpected interest. Similar to Captain Renault in Casablanca, Wall Street bankers are shocked—shocked!—that there should be such a large and positive price dislocation in the market they just rigged.

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

Shortly before our CFO’s pep talk, another high-level executive at the bank stopped me in the hall to give me what he considered some critical advice. “A lot of smart kids like you come through the bank, and they use it for a stepping stone,” he said. “They stay for a year or two and then they leave. I think that’s a huge mistake. Look at me: I’ve been here forever and I’m happier than anyone I know. This place rewards loyalty, and I’m good at my job because I’ve got my finger right on the pulse of the company. I know everything that’s going on.” A week later, I saw two workmen hauling boxes out of his office. He was a victim of the bank’s first-ever round of layoffs. I’m not trying to put this man down for his faith in the bank or make light of his unemployment. I want to use his story to make another point about failure in business. That chat reinforced something else I was beginning to learn: people in management positions, even very senior management positions, are often completely wrong about the fortunes of their own companies. More important, in making these misjudgments, they almost always err on the side of excessive optimism. They think their businesses are in much better shape than they actually are. Jerry’s rig utilization chart at Global Marine and our own CFO’s boasts about Joe DiMaggio only underscored this lesson for me at the time. And, three decades and over 1,400 meetings with other executives later, I can say this tendency is as pronounced as ever.

I have never been able to understand on what theory the original investment of money can be charged against a business. Those men in business who call themselves financiers say that money is "worth" 6 per cent, or 5 per cent, or some other per cent, and that if a business has one hundred thousand dollars invested in it, the man who made the investment is entitled to charge an interest payment on the money, because, if instead of putting that money into the business he had put it into a savings bank or into certain securities, he could have a certain fixed return. Therefore they say that a proper charge against the operating expenses of a business is the interest on this money. This idea is at the root of many business failures and most service failures. Money is not worth a particular amount. As money it is not worth anything, for it will do nothing of itself. The only use of money is to buy tools to work with or the product of tools. Therefore money is worth what it will help you to produce or buy and no more. If a man thinks that his money will earn 5 per cent, or 6 per cent, he ought to place it where he can get that return, but money placed in a business is not a charge on the business—or, rather, should not be. It ceases to be money and becomes, or should become, an engine of production, and it is therefore worth what it produces—and not a fixed sum according to some scale that has no bearing upon the particular business in which the money has been placed. Any return should come after it has produced, not before.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS AND STIMULUS Keynesian economics is based on the notion that unemployment arises when total or aggregate demand in an economy falls short of the economy’s ability to supply goods and services. When products go unsold, jobs are lost. Aggregate demand, in turn, comes from two sources: the private sector (which is the majority) and the government. At times, aggregate demand is too buoyant—goods fly off the shelves and labor is in great demand—and we get rising inflation. At other times, aggregate demand is inadequate—goods are hard to sell and jobs are hard to find. In those cases, Keynes argued in the 1930s, governments can boost employment by cutting interest rates (what we now call looser monetary policy), raising their own spending, or cutting people’s taxes (what we now call looser fiscal policy). By the same logic, when there is too much demand, governments can fight actual or incipient inflation by raising interest rates (tightening monetary policy), increasing taxes, or reducing its own spending (thus tightening fiscal policy). That’s part of standard Keynesian economics, too, although Keynes, writing during the Great Depression, did not emphasize it. Setting aside the underlying theory, the central Keynesian policy idea is that the government can—and, Keynes argued, should—act as a kind of balance wheel, stimulating aggregate demand when it’s too weak and restraining aggregate demand when it’s too strong. For decades, American economists took for granted that most of that job should and would be done by monetary policy. Fiscal policy, they thought, was too slow, too cumbersome, and too political. And in the months after the Lehman Brothers failure, the Federal Reserve did, indeed, pull out all the stops—while fiscal policy did nothing. But what happens when, as was more or less the case by December 2008, the central bank has done almost everything it can, and yet the economy is still sinking? That’s why eyes started turning toward Congress and the president—that is, toward fiscal stimulus—after the 2008 election.

The failure to measure unpaid household services is perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all. Estimates suggest that unpaid care work could account for up to 50% of GDP in high-income countries, and as much as 80% of GDP in low-income countries.2 If we factor this work into the equation, the UK’s GDP in 2016 was around $3.9 trillion3 (the World Bank’s official figure was $2.6 trillion4), and India’s 2016 GDP was around $3.7 trillion5 (compared to the World Bank’s figure of $2.3 trillion).

During the Second World War, just when Chinese were finally being granted the right to apply for naturalization, Japanese were subjected to one of the most spectacular violations of civil rights in living memory. Soon after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans living in the continental United States were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Here they were kept behind barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The property they left behind was either stolen or sold at a sharp loss. At the time of the evacuation, the Federal Reserve Bank estimated Japanese property losses at $400 million382—a figure that, today, would be many billions. This wholesale internment was far worse than anything done to blacks then or since. Many of the men, women, and children who were rounded up are still living today. If any group in America had wanted to give up, blame white society, and try to live off its victim status, the Japanese could have. Instead, when the war was over, they went back to what was left of their lives and started over. Twenty-five years after the war, they had long since caught up with white society and, as a group, had incomes 32 percent above the national average.383 Asian Americans have not tried to blame others for their troubles or shirk responsibility for their own success or failure. They have looked to their own resources to succeed. White America has clearly oppressed them in the past, just as it has blacks. Some people have argued that Asian immigrants have the advantage of starting out fresh when they get to America, whereas blacks must constantly drag the baggage of slavery and oppression behind them. This obviously does not apply to the descendants of Asians who came to America a century ago practically in bondage and who, in many cases, were treated as badly as blacks. If racism is such an obstacle to success in America, why have Asians overcome it while blacks have not?

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors. Furthermore, few students showed any interest in working for a company that actually makes products. . . . [C]ommunity service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service. . . . In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. . . . Furthermore . . . [a]round what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? . . . You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job. 110

Even Al Capone, the night before his sentencing, was perplexed over the intricacies of public policy. “I’m not complaining, but why don’t they go after all these bankers who took the savings of thousands of poor and lost them in bank failures? How about that? Isn’t it a lot worse to take the last few dollars some small family has saved—perhaps to live on while the head of the family is out of a job—than to sell a little beer?” It was too late to counter views such as Capone’s with the intricate points of preserving the gold standard or the nuances of the balance of payments—the verdict was on display at the soup kitchens for all to see. The men of the shantytowns named “Hoovervilles,” full of makeshift homes that assaulted the dignity of the once-proud workingman, father, and husband, understood this economy as well as any economist.

see, the corruption would reach all the way to the office of the vice president of the United States and soon contributed to a cascade of bank failures: 117 in Florida and Georgia in one ten-day period in late 1926. In fact, according to banking historian Raymond B. Vickers, 90 percent of the Florida banks that failed were guilty of self-dealing or outright fraud by insiders. Vickers, who studied bank records from the period that had been sealed for sixty-three years, concluded: “The sad story told by these records is that insiders looted the banks they pledged to protect. They tried to get rich by wildly speculating with depositors’ money, and when their schemes failed, so did their banks.” So, one didn’t need to belong to the Ashley gang to rob a Florida bank in the 1920s. There were white-collar methods of theft that were equally effective and far less likely to be detected or prosecuted.

(Dimon also apparently wasn’t a fan of supporting the Seattle Art Museum, at least initially. When one of his lieutenants suggested that he continue to donate to the museum because Kerry and Linda Killinger had a named wing, and Bill Gates, Jr.’s mom was involved, Dimon exclaimed: “Are you fucking stupid? Why the fuck would I do that? I will honor whatever we legally have to honor. Are you going to tell me that Bill Gates doesn’t have enough money to support the museum?

Sometimes our pride and success are going in two different directions. Not our morals and success. Not our respect and success. Not our faith and success, but our ego and success. We can’t be who we want to be and still become successful. Not who we need to be. We can’t be who we are tempted to be, and still become successful. Sometimes failure is success because it saved us from roads that we shouldn’t have been on in the first place.

the failure to cancel Allied debt meant that the House of Morgan had to take a tough line toward German reparations.

Should be a fun week. This is what separates good bankers from the posers.” The e-mail exchange grew heated. A manager in charge of WaMu’s deposits responded defensively: “No one is panicking, so long emails that sound preachy don’t help. We are not dumb, let us prepare.” Freilinger replied, “If you fire people up over weekends, you’re fanning flames, not ‘getting ready.’ ‘Getting ready’ takes place months, not hours before a firestorm, by increasing branch awareness through clear pricing signals and encouragement of building deposit excess balances while no obvious sparks around. I never called anyone dumb—but I’ll continue to dial back unnecessarily panicked executives wherever and whenever I find them.

I was no longer able to regard my tiny bank account as a horrible sign of my personal failure mixed with how much the world hated me. Instead, it was quite obvious to me that my low funds were a deliberate, entertaining, adorable choice of my own inmost soul—the inner divine wholeness that Jung called the Self with a capital “S.” A few months into this, I started bringing in $10,000 a month rather than $2000. As within, so without. My whole world and horizon of possibility changed.

(Leonard also noted that “Negative Amortization” would make a terrific name for a punk band.)

I noticed that they rarely mentioned that German and French banks were some of Greece’s biggest lenders, or that much of the Greeks’ accumulated debt had been racked up buying German and French exports—facts that might have made clear to voters why saving the Greeks from default amounted to saving their own banks and industries. Maybe they worried that such an admission would turn voter attention away from the failures of successive Greek governments and toward the failures of those German and French officials charged with supervising bank lending practices. Or maybe they feared that if their voters fully understood the underlying implications of European integration—the extent to which their economic fates, for good and for ill, had become bound up with those of people who were “not like us”—they might not find it entirely to their liking.

Recalling his research, Helicopter Ben was focused on a system-wide credit crunch, not the failure of individual firms. That frame gave him an idea. He would buy the toxic-sludge assets from the banks, taking them off their balance sheet. Then, the banks could use those fresh, clean dollars to lend—pumping capital into the system. Between 2008 and 2015, the Fed’s balance sheet soared from $900 billion of mostly high-quality Treasury notes to $4.5 trillion of largely risky assets. And it worked. The financial crisis was painful, but the system did not collapse. Bernanke’s framing, imbued with causal understanding, allowed him to see the economy in a way that others did not. Even amid market uncertainty, the system can be understood by human reason, predicted with human foresight, and controlled by human hand.

Every day brings me new evidence that women, by and large, do not like themselves very much: their ambition gaps, their orgasm gaps, their impostor syndromes, their poor body images, their endless variety of real or perceived failures, including their failures to feel good about who and what they are. Their trainwrecks, and their need for trainwrecks; the enduring, self-loathing need to find someone about whom they can say well, at least I’m not that girl. But, in the context of trainwreck media, a female self-confidence gap is not only predictable, it’s practically unavoidable. We can’t spend twelve hours a day mainlining ideas of sexual or emotional or aging or ill women as monsters, messes, and freaks, then expect to wake up feeling beautiful and confident in the morning. Every “ugly” photo of Amy Winehouse, every nasty word typed about Azealia Banks in a comment section, is going to come back the next time we’re vulnerable, and take yet another chunk out of our ability to believe that we can screw up and still be basically worthwhile.

I have seen people with smiling faces and feeling lonely desolate inside their hearts. I have seen people with public success and private failures in their life. I have seen most of us chasing small highs in their life rather than trying to achieve something concrete. I have seen big giants losing basic moral values for small profits in their materialistic pursuit. I have seen people dancing whole day to the tunes of life and crying alone at midnight. I have seen best of relationships breaking off with the test of time. I have seen young teenagers with broken hearts and old ones with cracked minds. And you know what this is not the end of the list. To put it simple, I just wish to say that, life is short. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself trying to overdo everything. Don’t hanker after all the things you see others doing or achieving. Have some good moral values in your life. Be with friends who possess golden hearts rather than gold in their pockets or lockers. Keep few but good relationships. Have absolute faith in God and yourself. And try to be simple yet Happy. In the end what matters is not the number of cars you drive or money you possess in your bank account but what matters most is how well you sail through the winds of life against all the storms and hurricanes past over you. Think what makes you – YOU.

What about accountability? Executives in industries as varied as hospitals and investment banks have asked me this question. Surely individuals must face consequences for failure to avoid an overly lax culture? If people aren’t blamed for failures, how can they be motivated to improve? This concern is based on a false dichotomy. In actuality, a culture that makes it safe to admit failure can (and in high-risk environments must) coexist with high performance standards. A blame culture primarily serves to ensure that people don’t speak up about problems in time to correct them, which obviously doesn’t help performance. This is why blameless reporting is so valuable. As you will see, uninhibited, rapid reporting of anomalies is vital for high performance in any dynamic context.

The failure ignited a full-blown Wall Street panic. For the first time since its formation, the New York Stock Exchange shut its doors for ten days. The corner outside the exchange became a wailing wall of ruined men.

but I have learned that financial wealth carries with it certain burdens. True wealth is not found in banks, but in the heart. Oh, sure, having financial wealth can make life better in some ways, but the burdens that come with it—the weight of responsibility, the necessity of constant effort to maintain that wealth—they drain the joy from life. As for power, the man who has it is as much its slave as its master. The use of that power imposes obligations upon the one who uses it, and failure to meet those obligations

There was a time when I did,” he said, “but I have learned that financial wealth carries with it certain burdens. True wealth is not found in banks, but in the heart. Oh, sure, having financial wealth can make life better in some ways, but the burdens that come with it—the weight of responsibility, the necessity of constant effort to maintain that wealth—they drain the joy from life. As for power, the man who has it is as much its slave as its master. The use of that power imposes obligations upon the one who uses it, and failure to meet those obligations will result in feelings of guilt and despair.

The fear of losing the grip of the financial CONTROL on the masses won't let the Central Banks give traditional banks the total freedom to develop and innovate using Blockchain technology. But, some of those banks will still find a way to circumvent it with time as failure not do so will draw customers away from them.

Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions. The system’s instability is a reflection of what is ultimately a political failure, that is, the failure to provide sufficient regulatory oversight both at a national and an international level.

First, try new things, expecting that some will fail. Second, make failure survivable: create safe spaces for failure or move forward in small steps. As we saw with banks and cities, the trick here is finding the right scale in which to experiment: significant enough to make a difference, but not such a gamble that you’re ruined if it fails. And third, make sure you know when you’ve failed, or you will never learn. As we shall see in the next chapter, this last one is especially difficult when it comes to adapting in our own lives.

common denominator among all of them is that they lack key skills that will help them make the leap from adolescence to adulthood. Skills like administrative responsibility (paying bills, making appointments, meeting deadlines) or the cultivation of interdependence (knowing how and when to constructively ask for help—like when you need to open a bank account, make a budget, or understand a lease) are key aspects of, as the kids call it these days, “adulting.

the Grand Cayman connection provided three big advantages to a firm like Lehman Brothers, which was trying desperately to compete with the biggest banks on Wall Street. The first was entering false profits from the “sale” onto the balance sheet. The second was receiving all the coupon payments from the derivatives they still held in the trusts. The third was that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) required them only to put aside 3 percent of capital, a tiny amount, to cover any losses in an offshore trust.

As bank failures accelerated throughout the state—there were twenty-two in the last three months of 1925 alone from several hundred banks statewide—South Dakota’s fund to compensate depositors was itself running low on money.77

TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES AGO, Amsterdam was the world’s commercial center, but many of its wealthy merchants were reeling from one of the world’s first financial crises. The shares of the British East India Company had collapsed, culminating in a series of bank failures, government bailouts, and ultimately nationalization, a debacle that rippled across the continent’s nascent markets. For a little-known Dutch merchant and stockbroker, it proved the inspiration for an idea ahead of its time. In 1774, Abraham von Ketwich set up a novel, pooled investment trust he called Eendragt Maakt Magt—Dutch for “Unity Creates Strength.” This would sell two thousand shares for five hundred guilders each to individual investors, and invest the proceeds into a diversified portfolio of fifty bonds. These were divided into ten different categories, from plantation loans, bonds backed by Spanish or Danish toll road payments, to an assortment of European government bonds. At the time, bonds were physical certificates written on paper or even goatskin, and these were stored in a solid iron chest with three locks, which could be opened only by Eendragt Maakt Magt’s board and an independent notary. The aim was to pay a 4 percent annual dividend, and disburse the final proceeds only after twenty-five years, hoping that the diversity of the portfolio would protect investors.1 As it turns out, a subsequent Anglo-Dutch war in 1780 and Napoleon’s occupation of Holland in 1795 wreaked havoc on Eendragt Maakt Magt. The annual payments never materialized, and investors didn’t receive their money back until 1824, albeit then receiving 561 guilders a share. Nonetheless, Eendragt Maakt Magt was a brilliant invention that would go on to inspire the birth of investment trusts in Great Britain and eventually the mutual fund we know today. It is also arguably the ultimate intellectual forefather of today’s index funds, given its minimal trading, diversified approach, and low fees, charging a mere 0.2 percent a year.

Like millions of panicking Americans whose self-preserving actions only worsened the crisis, Hoover instructed Rickard that he “better anticipate by drawing out $10,000 in bills for possible emergency use [by] his family and mine.” Hoover did not think he should act in his capacity as president to prevent bank failures, but he did think he should act quietly, as a private citizen, to ensure access to his own money.29

acronym CAMELS stands for Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management quality, Earnings, Liquidity, and Sensitivity to market risk. Under this system, banks are ranked on a 1 to 5 scale,

Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.

the Birmingham campaign was a repeat of SCLC’s 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia, which turned out a complete failure. King was banking on being able to fill up the jails and still have recruits willing to engage in civil disobedience, shutting the system down, but the authorities simply made their jails “bottomless” by shipping detainees elsewhere. A couple years later, black residents of Albany rioted, suggesting what they thought about their experience with nonviolence (these riots are not mentioned in most chronologies of the movement).

o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1

there was times ,every year,days and nights .looked towards people who could be real supports . they did not show up . may be circumstances ,did not allow them . in deep water knowledge without swimming ,I tried to cross as possible at safe place on river bank . came up alone ,unknown events, accidents ,obligations, social dirt and here I am . is it wrong if I take a side seat not to face them as they want to feel good if I am around ? is it wrong _ if I do not want to know about them at all ? simply _no . as they reminds me ,their suggestion could be great help and I could continue the best ,which I messed up trying to learn swimming in river of life. I want to stay away . but those parts want to be with me now everyday .silly . if I give them place to seats ,it will be their place ,if I don't allow that would be my extra more energy to learn swimming further successfully. past never leaves ,when you are doing well at present .what you must ensure_ your own peace of present .

It may sound a bit didactic but in banking, sometimes, it is not only what one has done but what one has not done that can make a difference between failure and success.

You see it in the 36 percent increase between 2004 and 2007 in lawsuits against attorneys for legal mistakes—the most common being simple administrative errors, like missed calendar dates and clerical screwups, as well as errors in applying the law. You see it in flawed software design, in foreign intelligence failures, in our tottering banks—in fact, in almost any endeavor requiring mastery of complexity and of large amounts of knowledge. Such