Friday, Mar 24, 2023

Banks, Fridays, Coinbase and what "safety" even means these days

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” – Douglas Adams  ||

Hello everyone! On the one hand, yay, it’s Friday! On the other hand, uh oh, it’s Friday. I don’t know about you, but a nice, peaceful weekend with no systemic banking issues would be much appreciated.

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UPDATE

You might notice some changes to the format in the premium daily and the free weekly emails.

1.  In coming weeks, I’ll be introducing some sponsors to help me be able to continue producing these emails. If you’re interested in sponsoring, do reach out to me at noelleacheson@substack.com.

2. You will sometime see a guest poster in the weekly edition. Starting with this Saturday, I’m excited to share a column by Arca Funds CIO Jeff Dorman, in my opinion one of the most insightful writers in our industry.

3. There are some content structure changes as well, I detailed these in a previous post.

MARKET

Banks again/still

Stock markets are still nervous about bank failures, and today could see steep drops spread as the risk of holding bank shares over a weekend has recently become painfully apparent. The latest bank to grace headlines is Deutsche Bank, whose shares yesterday dropped around 15%, the steepest decline since the early pandemic crash of March 2020. Other European bank stocks also dropped sharply, and even Asian banks felt the concern. Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel said at a conference earlier today (edited, sorry for the timing error!) that the ECB “stands ready” to deal with any crisis, which for some reason seems to have made investors even more nervous.