This is Current Yield, Grant's interest rate observer of the air.

And I'm Jim Grant, and with me, as always, is Evan Lorenz, the great deputy editor of grants,

Henry French at the control panel.

And today, we have William D. Cohen, the offer of the latest

power failure, rise and fall of an American icon that would be General Electric. But before we get

into this truly wonderful book and talk to Bill, I would like to observe to Evan that we finally find a central bank that is going

broke and is willing to admit it, which I think is a step forward in monetary history.

Well, not only willing to admit it, but might actually have to go to, it's a Congress and actually

ask for more money.

Is this the Fed?

No.

The Fed's broke, but it likes to hide it.

This is the Ricks Bank, the Central Bank of

Sweden. I think it's the oldest one of the kind. Yeah, the first two institute a negative

nominal interest rate, a policy rate, I think it was back in 2015, maybe. And I guess it's not

whatever negative policy interest rates have achieved. It's not

the profitability of the instituting central bank. We could observe that. No. And in fact, even though

the Fed didn't go negative, it is remarkably broke. In the third quarter, in the back of its

footnotes to its financial reports, it said that it had a marked market loss of $1.125 billion,

or $1.25 trillion against capital of about $42 billion.

That's more like it.

I was going to say billion.

...