The Institutional Risk Analyst

One of the largest single acts of government expropriation of wealth in human history occurred in 1933 under the Democrats led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The gold taken from American citizens and the member banks of the Fed at the behest of FDR sits today in Ft Knox, KY, the biggest gold hoard in the world. President Herbert Hoover famously remarked: “We have gold because we cannot trust governments.”

The first point to make is that neither of these banks is a particularly good financial performer. WAFD is a bottom quartile performer vs Peer Group One and has reported a lot of noise of late in areas like securities losses. WAFD makes its way in life as a small regional bank by keeping low expenses. When we visited the bank years ago during our time leading bank ratings at KBRA, the CEO talked about his predecessor turning off every other lightbulb in the bank’s Seattle of

The big story nobody is discussing is the fact that large banks led by JPM, BAC and TFC continue to sell off briskly

We all dodged a bullet in Q2 2023 because the repricing of assets and deposits slowed from the crazy levels seen at the end of March.