Some Traders Do Well in a Crisis
Also cruise offerings, bridge loans and ETF trades.
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Thursday.
On the whole, it is not a great time to be a bank right now. I mean, it’s not a great time to be anything right now, and you could do a lot worse than a bank; it’s a much worse time to be, say, a cruise line or a restaurant or a supermarket worker. Banking is less directly affected by the coronavirus than a lot of other businesses, and the Federal Reserve has been a lot faster and more generous in propping up the banking system than the government has been in propping up other industries. But the basic business of banking is that you lend people money and expect them to pay it back out of their income, and if their income disappears then a lot of those loans won’t get paid back and you will lose a lot of money.