The banking crisis could be just the beginning

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Matthew Lynn

Spain will regret its 100 per cent expat property tax

You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in the café car. So the train is always full of strivers, working their mobile phones. On Tuesday morning, the phone chitchat was anxious. Even in Washington, where analysts and economists had been working all weekend to contain the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the reeling of the financial system when markets opened on Monday caught people by surprise.

It shouldn’t have. The last time bankers ran off with the savings of their compatriots was only 15 years ago. A lot of people at the time asked: ‘How could we have been so gullible?’ But really, Americans, Englishmen and other finance-dependent peoples had reason to be trusting.