Perspectives

Imagine there are 100 miles between you and a goal. A place you want to get to.

But the land in between is chock full of canyons, crevasses, and crumbling cliffs.

You have two choices of how you could get there.

You could find a way on foot, sliding into ravines and trudging up switchbacks.

Up every cliff and down. Mile after mile.

Or...

You could float above it in a hot air balloon. Letting the wind carry you across.

Financial Clutter? Spring is Here!

Where do you keep your most important financial records and documents? Do you know exactly where everything is?

Those may sound like silly or simple questions, but the reality is it can be challenging for any of us to keep track of everything in our financial lives.

And it can be really easy for clutter to build up — especially if we’re ignoring it.

Banks & Recessions?

Let’s talk about what’s going on in markets and the economy after the recent bank failures.

Quick recap: Over the last few weeks, several banks have collapsed under the pressure of bad management, high interest rates, portfolio losses, and a run of depositor withdrawals.

Since then, regulators, governments, and other major financial institutions have stepped in to take over troubled banks and guarantee deposits. ¹ ²

It has also emerged that Silicon Valley Bank (the first to fall) had already been under regulatory review by the Federal Reserve for more than a year about the very issues that triggered its collapse. ³

One of the possible silver linings of these failures is that other small institutions with similar problems are probably looking very hard at their books and reassessing their strategies to avoid a similar fate.