Free Republic

The Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced on Sunday that they will guarantee all deposits that were still held at the ill-fated Silicon Valley Bank when it collapsed last Friday. This is probably a good thing. SVB was the sixteenth-largest bank in the United States, with tens of billions in holdings still trapped behind its crumbling walls. Vaporizing that much money might have had dire implications for other parts of the American financial system—and for thousands of innocent customers who believed their money to be safe within SVB’s coffers. The actions these government entities have...

Several journalists erroneously tweeted that Stephen K. Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in federal court in Washington, DC, on Thursday afternoon — before closing arguments in the trial. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell tweeted: “BANNON GUILTY.” His colleague Chris Hayes tweeted “Bannon found guilty,” citing a tweet by CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who was covering a different case. Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace warned others that they were getting the facts wrong: So, too, did Bannon biographer Joshua Green: O’Donnell apologized for spreading the misinformation about the verdict, as did Hayes, taking down their mistaken tweets: Others also apologized:...

A funny thing happened in New York City last week: Cops stopped arresting people. Not altogether, of course—that would be anarchy. But since last Monday, the number of arrests in America's largest city plummeted by two-thirds compared to the previous year. The decline is a conscious slowdown by New York's police force to protest City Hall's perceived lack of support for law enforcement. NYPD officers and union leaders have been at odds with Mayor Bill de Blasio in the wake of the Eric Garner case and the killings of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos this month. In their latest...