Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania. JOHN BINDER
First Republic Bank Shares Crash Despite $30 Billion Rescue
First Republic Bank’s stock price crumbled on Friday despite big banks’ injection of $30 billion in uninsured deposits into the institution, suggesting the “rescue” did not inspire confidence as intended.
Not only did First Republic’s stock price crash — it was down around 25 percent at noon eastern time Friday — but several of the big banks that rescued the bank have experienced a drop in stock price. Shares of Wells Fargo were down by 4.2 percent, shares of Citigroup fell 3.6 percent, shares of Bank of America dropped four percent, and shares of J.P. Morgan Chase declined by 3.3 percent.
On Thursday, the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said the rescue was a reflection of the big banks’ “confidence in the country’s banking system.”
“Together, we are deploying our financial strength and liquidity into the larger system, where it is needed the most,” the agencies said.
The banks that came to the “rescue” were Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan Chase, which contributed about $5 billion apiece. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley deposited about $2.5 billion, according to the banks’ press release. Truist, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, State Street, and Bank of New York Mellon deposited about $1 billion each.
The massive deposits are obligated to remain in First Republic for at least 120 days, according to CNBC.
First Republic had suffered a downturn in the stock price in recent days, fueled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank over the weekend. An underlying factor causing the initial Silicon Valley Bank run was the FED’s interest rate hikes due to the Biden administration’s soaring inflation.
Due to the interest rate hikes to tamp inflation, borrowing money became more expensive for businesses, causing business depositors to access their savings at the institution.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality
Kevin McCarthy: Biden’s ‘Failed’ Fiscal Policies, Rising Interest Rates Led to Silicon Valley Bank Crisis (more below)
SVB Went Woke, Then Broke, Then Got a Bailout
Americans can’t afford food, but leftist and Chinese companies get bailed out.
Silicon Valley Bank spent billions on green energy, millions on Black Lives Matter and other leftist causes, until it finally ran out of ‘other people’s money’.
That’s when the Biden administration decided to bail out its depositors.
At a dinner hosted by Peter Orszag, Obama’s former budget director, Wally Adeyemo, Obama’s Nigerian assistant treasury secretary and Biden’s deputy treasury secretary, chatted with Blair Effron, an influential Biden donor, serving on Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board, who had been hired as an advisor by SVB to deal with its financial crisis. The outcome was inevitable.
“Because of the actions that our regulators have already taken, every American should feel confident that their deposits will be there if and when they need them,” Biden lied.
The deposits of ordinary Americans were already protected up to $250,000.
But unlike banks that serve ordinary customers, the vast majority of SVB’s clients held over $250,000 and were not protected by FDIC insurance. Rather than risk its political donors and allies having to take a 10% loss on their funds, the Biden administration illegally bailed them out while unilaterally transforming FDIC insurance into a protection plan for its political allies.
The Biden bailout was not there to protect Americans, but leftist and even Chinese interests.
SVB was the embodiment of Environmental, Social, and Governance or ESG investing which prioritizes leftist politics over profitability. The Biden administration recently announced that it would allow 401(k) pension plans to be put into ESG instead of reliable investments potentially endangering the retirements of tens of millions of Americans which might also get ‘SVB’d.’
While SVB focused on “climate change” and “diversity”, it ignored rising interest rates. The woke bank was too busy with its politics to deal with the math. SVB had no risk officer for 8 crucial months, but its risk officer for Europe, Africa and the Middle East focused on sharing her “experiences as a lesbian of color” and “moderating SVB’s EMEA Pride townhall.”
CEO Greg Becker led quarterly diversity, equity and inclusion town halls instead of figuring out that startups squeezed by rising interest rates would need money that the bank didn’t have.
Silicon Valley Bank directed over $73 million to Black Lives Matter and other causes. It put millions into, among others, the Accion Opportunity Fund which describes its mission as advancing “racial, gender and economic justice”. It focused on “building a culture of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and advancing the “transition to a low-carbon world.”
SVB’s mission was to force 100% of its employees to participate in DEI indoctrination.
Newsweek named SVB one of “America’s Most Responsible Companies”: not because the woke bank managed its money well, but because it had the right politics.
Now one of “America’s Most Responsible Companies” is responsible for economic devastation.
SVB mastered wokeness, but failed economics 101. And that was by design. Its real business was politics. By financing leftist causes, SVB had become politically too big to fail. While its own finances are wrecked, the Biden administration quickly stepped in to protect its woke depositors.
The SVB bailout was an announcement that the Biden administration would stand behind woke financial institutions and instruments, socializing the pain by spreading it to more stable financial systems, no matter how irresponsibly they put funds at risk in the pursuit of their politics.
SVB’s clients included California Gov. Newsom’s wine companies as well as assorted politically connected figures, and “1,550 climate tech and sustainability” companies and churned out billions in loans for the woke companies pitching government-subsidized ‘green’ tech.
The woke bank hoovered up subsidies and tax breaks to worthless wind and solar programs and its collapse will leave a “hole” in the green industry. The intersection between the Biden administration’s special interests and SVB was made clear in the Washington Post’s headline, “Biden Boosted Clean Tech. How Much Will SVB Set It Back?”
Last year, Pink Energy, a solar company, shut down after multiple complaints about lying to customers about how much money they would save by switching to worthless solar. The Ohio Attorney General finally issued an injunction against Pink. And Pink’s financing came through Sunlight Financial Holdings which kept the majority of its money in an SVB account.
That’s the sort of junk ‘green’ businesses that the Biden bailout was meant to reward.
SVB was a key element in a woke economy that moved money to political causes with no fiscal responsibility. Its board of directors was short on banking officials, but included major Democrat donors, including a Pelosi neighbor, as well as Janet Yellen’s protege: Mary J. Miller, who had implemented the Dodd-Frank reform package and also chaired the San Francisco Fed’s Diversity and Inclusion Council. Meanwhile, SVB CEO Greg Becker sat on the Fed’s board.
The San Francisco Fed should have monitored SVB’s books and spotted the trouble, but instead it focused instead on fighting “systemic racism” and making banking more “inclusive”.
Going out of business is inclusive.
Not satisfied with bailing out their own supporters, the Biden administration also set out to bail out our enemies.
One of SVB’s major client bases was in China. Chinese companies were able to open an account in a week while “mainstream traditional banks, such as Standard Chartered, HSBC, Citi have strict compliance and it takes a long time to start a bank account with them.”
It’s unclear how many of these Chinese businesses, some likely linked to the Communist Party, Biden has chosen to bail out at the expense of bank customers and while further feeding the inflation that is destroying American families and wiping out the remains of the middle class.
Silicon Valley Bank also maintained a joint venture with China’s Communist state owned
Shanghai Pudong Development Bank which has been under investigation for aiding North Korea’s nuclear program meant to kill millions of Americans. That venture however does not appear to be affected by SVB’s collapse or the illegal Biden bailout of woke capital.
Like SVB, Signature Bank, the second ESG bank that failed, had social impact reports and provided climate disclosures. Its boss led a seminar on gender neutral pronouns and former Rep. Barney Frank (half of Dodd-Frank’s regulatory regime) served on its board. Meanwhile, the DOJ was conducting a criminal investigation involving money laundering by its clients.
ESG is a disaster causing the third largest bank failure in America in just two days.
But ESG is too big to fail because it is at the heart of the leftist scheme to divert money into its causes and to fund its activism. The SVB disaster revealed how fiscally unsound these economic schemes are and how the Democrats will abuse their power to protect them anyway.
Even as the Fed pushes interest rates higher to slow down the economy and inflation, the Democrats have plenty of money on tap for their political allies. American families may not be able to afford to buy eggs, but the cash keeps on flowing for woke capital.
Go woke, go broke and if you support him, Biden will still bail you out.
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There Will Be No Soft Landing
Column: The high price of years of low interest rates
To recap: On March 8, Silicon Valley Bank of Santa Clara, California, announced that its balance sheet was weak. The bank held around $175 billion in deposits. They needed to raise capital, but its management had parked too much money in long-term government bonds. At the time of purchase, in a low-interest rate environment, those bonds had seemed safe. Then inflation arrived. Rates went up. Silicon Valley Bank was forced to sell the treasuries at a $1.8 billion loss.
The next day, March 9, panic began to spread. Ratings agencies downgraded Silicon Valley Bank’s credit. Its stock plunged. A run on the bank—with depositors demanding their money back—took off. On March 10, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.
Silicon Valley Bank is the largest financial institution to go under since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Its sudden demise shocked investors into reexamining the financial sector. The largest banks may rest on firm capital cushions. What about regional banks? Fear of instability caused depositors to flee these midsized firms. Shareholders did too. Signature Bank of New York was caught in the whirlpool. It drowned.
To stop the contagion from spreading further, on Sunday, March 12, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Martin Gruenberg of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell made the following announcement: The federal government would guarantee deposits at Signature and Silicon Valley Bank. Until last weekend, the FDIC insured deposits up to $250,000. No longer. The ceiling was blown away in a cyclone of panic.
President Joe Biden was quick to assert that the backstop is different from the Troubled Assets Recovery Program, or TARP, the controversial bank bailout of 2008. The new Federal Reserve facility won’t support creditors or shareholders or executives, just depositors. And tax revenue won’t pay for the guarantee directly, an FDIC fee will—a fee levied on banks and passed on to consumers, who also happen to be taxpayers.
Biden and Yellen won’t say it’s a bailout. Of course it’s a bailout. In some ways this bailout is worse than in 2008. After all, Congress passed TARP. Congress is a bystander here. And TARP set economy-wide rules and qualifications. Biden’s intervention is discretionary and selective. When she appeared before Congress on March 16, Yellen admitted that the unlimited deposit guarantee doesn’t apply to every bank. It applies to systemically important banks. Who decides which bank is systemically important? She does. As circumstances dictate.
Yellen tried to sooth Congress. She tried to project strength. "I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system is sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them," she told Senate Finance. "This week’s actions demonstrate our resolute commitment to ensure that our financial system remains strong and depositors’ savings remain safe."
Feel better?
Authorities have struck similar notes of confidence during previous emergencies—the pandemic, the crash of 2008, the first hours of September 11, 2001. Subsequent events proved them wrong. Yellen and Biden may end up looking just as foolish. They are playing Whack-A-Mole, concentrating on financial varmints as they pop up. They should be addressing underlying causes.
The chaos in the banking system is the result of decades of low to zero interest rates and $6 trillion in fiscal stimulus since 2020. That flood of money and credit produced the worst inflation in four decades. In 2022 the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to restore price stability. The Fed should have acted sooner. It waited because it assumed that inflation would be temporary.
That assumption was false. The Fed’s complacency made the situation worse. By the time it started raising rates, inflation expectations were fixed. The past year of Fed hikes may have slowed inflation. What they haven’t done is kill it.
Biden, Yellen, and the Federal Reserve want a "soft landing." They are after a magic formula that will quell inflation and avoid a recession. They will be disappointed. No one likes inflation: It lowers the standard of living. But the Federal Reserve’s solution—a contraction of the money supply through higher interest rates—is nasty too. High interest rates can cause a recession. Or something worse.
Now Biden and the Fed are caught in a stimulus trap: Higher interest rates increase the likelihood of financial instability, while keeping rates pat—or cutting them—will prolong the inflation. Doing nothing will perpetuate the current mix of declining standards of living amidst periodic chaos.
Biden has ruled out other options. Supply-side measures such as deregulating energy and reducing means-tested income transfers are off the table. Legal immigration won't be made easier. Trade barriers won’t be reduced.
Biden, Yellen, and Powell have gifted America with another "emergency" measure that will last long after the crisis subsides. Republicans are eager for a piece of the action—why do Gavin Newsom and Silicon Valley tech giants get this guarantee, while midsized banks in rural areas do not?
Rather than limit and sunset the deposit backstop, enforce market discipline, and reassert the Fed’s commitment to price stability, the same team that brought America the worst inflation in a generation is entangling itself further in a key sector of the economy. It would be foolish to trust in their judgment. Look at the record. Practical wisdom is scarce in an administration populated by academics and partisan fixers.
Soft landing? Afraid not. Brace for impact.
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Giant Retailers Panic Confirming 2023 Recession Coming | Economic Collapse
Speaking from the heart....Our country is doomed but there is a way to have peace in the turmoil.
BERNIE SANDERS:
The bank who begged for deregulation is the same one who begged for a bailout.
Failed bank's board revealed to be packed with Democrats
AREN'T THEY ALL?
Dangerous moment' for U.S. banking system; once a small bank fails there are systemic consequences
The Banking System Is Collapsing Right Before Our Eyes – These Banks Could Fall Next!
Kevin O'Leary: Janet Yellen is facing a moral crisis
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a ten percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Bidens don't seem to 'cover their tracks' in alleged China money web: Curley
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
My colleague Peter Schweizer’s runaway bestseller, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, first revealed that the Biden family received some $31 million from the highest levels of Chinese intelligence at the same time Hunter was paying the vice president’s bills. Schweizer believes that there is a slam dunk case to indict Hunter Biden.
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
My colleague Peter Schweizer’s runaway bestseller, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, first revealed that the Biden family received some $31 million from the highest levels of Chinese intelligence at the same time Hunter was paying the vice president’s bills. Schweizer believes that there is a slam dunk case to indict Hunter Biden.
Janet Yellen: Chinese Depositors to Silicon Valley Bank to Be Made Whole
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday that Chinese depositors will be made whole while community banks will have to pay higher fees.
Yellen spoke before the Finance Committee to discuss President Joe Biden’s budget proposal, but given the increasing concern over the instability in the banking sector, most questions revolved around the federal government’s response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and others.
Lankford asked Yellen if Chinese investors, including those with affiliations with the Chinese Communist Party, would be made whole through the government’s efforts to stave off a financial crisis.
He asked:
It has been reported publicly that SVB had a large number of Chinese investors, including some that are directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party. Will those companies, entities, and investors that are Chinese investors be made whole based on assessments in my banks in Oklahoma? So, what I’m asking is, will my banks in Oklahoma pay a special assessment to be able to make Chinese investors whole from Silicon Valley Bank?
Yellen responded, “Uninsured investors will be made whole in that bank and I suppose that could include foreign depositors, but I don’t believe there is any legal basis to discriminate among the uninsured.”
Part of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) moves to stave off a banking crisis will include a special assessment on banks, or a fee, to replenish the Deposit Insurance Fund.
Lankford decried that community banks will have to pay an additional fee to make Chinese investors whole.
The Treasury secretary responded, saying that they are doing what they can to fight off a worsening economic situation.
Yellen said, “If we have a collapse of the banking system and its economic consequences, that will have very severe effects on the banks in Oklahoma.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Failed bank's board revealed to be packed with Democrats
AREN'T THEY ALL?
Waters: SVB Depositors Deserved Help, But Maybe Those Who Say They ‘Got Special Treatment Have Some Arguments’
On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) stated that while the uninsured depositors at Silicon Valley Bank deserved to be helped, maybe those “who are thinking that they got special treatment have some arguments too.”
Host Chris Hayes asked, “I want to ask you a question about the decision-making process for the Fed and Treasury to take extraordinary actions to shore up and backstop some of the uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank. Now I think, on the merits, there [are] arguments for it, but the process that produced it, I want to read you this reporting from The New York Times, there was a lot of lobbying behind the scenes and a lot of high-up people, including many prominent Democrats. Here’s an example: ‘Peter Orszag, former President Barack Obama’s first budget director…now chief executive of financial advisory at the bank Lazard, hosted a previously scheduled dinner at the bank’s offices in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Among those in attendance were…a pair of influential Senators: [Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho, and] Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Both were sponsors of [a] 2018 law that rolled back [regulation] on smaller banks…Blair Effron, a large Democratic donor whose firm…had just been hired by Silicon Valley Bank to advise it on [its] liquidity crunch, was also there.’ What do you say to people who say, they got special treatment because they were wired and connected to upper-echelon Democratic Party members?”
Waters responded, “I’ve heard that there are some allegations such as what you just described, but one of the things we have to think about, we have to think about the entire system and whether or not we are at a point or at a time where we could basically cause what happened in 2008 when we discovered that, not only had Lehman Brothers failed, but it was contagious. And so, the first thing we have to think about is who’s involved and who’s getting harmed. Those depositors deserved to be helped. And while we have rules that the FDIC only protects those at about 250,000 or less, we had this bank with about 90% that [were] uninsured. These were start-up companies for the most part. And so, we could either say, well, we’re not worried about the jobs that are being lost. We don’t care about the payrolls that are not going to be met, but we didn’t do that. As a matter of fact, I think you’re correct when you say that maybe they deserved to be helped, but maybe some who are thinking that they got special treatment have some arguments too. Well, the fact of the matter is, I basically agree that we helped out the families, we helped out the start-ups, we helped out the workers, and we got those payrolls going. But that doesn’t say that we’re not going to go deep into the investigation just about how this bank operated. We know it was a go-to bank for start-ups. They could not get loans in the traditional bank[s]. And so, he basically concentrated on this group of start-ups that were coming to him from all over the country to this bank. But we need to know what we’re going to do in the future about those who are not insured…what role did these uninsureds play in the downfall of the bank.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Dem Rep. Harder: ‘Genie Is out’ after SVB and We’ll Need to Raise Amount of Deposits Protected ‘Pretty Dramatically’ Above $250K
On Wednesday’s broadcast of NBC’s “MTP Daily,” Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA) argued that covering deposits above the $250,000 limit in the case of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) means “the genie is out of the bottle” and the limit on deposits covered by the FDIC has “implicitly been raised, but we need to make it explicit” and raise the limit “pretty dramatically.”
Harder said, “I think we’re going to need to raise those insurance limits pretty dramatically. And we’re going to have to have banks paying those insurance premiums, because they’re the ones that were at fault here. They deserve to have a lot more skin in the game. I don’t want to be a nation where we have two or three banks that dominate financial services all across the country. We have to have a position for regional banks to continue to thrive. They’re the ones that understand local conditions in rural districts like mine the best. And if you look at Silicon Valley Bank’s customers, they were working to cure cancer, working to develop semiconductor chips, they were a fountain of innovation and entrepreneurship. So, even as we make sure that there’s regulation and scrutiny that has to be higher going forward, I want to keep that vibrant spirit in these regional banks alive.”
He later added, “I think that the genie is out of the bottle and I think that we’re going to have to change the system going forward. We’re going to have to raise those insurance caps. You’re right that they’ve already implicitly been raised, but we need to make it explicit. And we need to make sure, as I said before, that banks that have the most skin in the game are the ones that are responsible for paying those premiums and ensuring that they have the strongest incentive to continue to make sure that this mismanagement doesn’t happen in the future.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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Failed bank's board revealed to be packed with Democrats
AREN'T THEY ALL?
Biden Is Now Resurrecting One of Obama’s Most Treacherous Initiatives
The following content is sponsored by InvestorPlace.
If you think your money is safe in your bank account, Biden has other plans.
A former bank insider is going public with a warning. He’s uncovered how Biden plans to take control of American bank accounts.
In his controversial message, this insider holds nothing back:
“I believe [Biden’s new program is] now designed to target ALL American citizens who dare disagree with the Dems’ progressive agenda.”
Perhaps most disturbing of all is how this program was the original brainchild of Obama.
For decades, this insider has helped the financial elite avoid some of the worst financial bloodbaths in American history – including the Black Monday crash in 1987, the dot-com crash in 2000, and even the 2008 financial crisis.
His name is Louis Navellier, and he manages over $1 billion in private client money.
These days, when he delivers an urgent warning, he gets attention.
Even though he frequently appears on national news to deliver his expertise, Mr. Navellier’s exposé on Biden is far too controversial for the mainstream media. He chose to release his findings on his website.
This disturbing move by Biden could send an earthquake through our country’s entire financial system. Mr. Navellier’s message reveals the immediate steps you need to take.
If you’re concerned about what’s happening to this country, you’re going to want to see what Mr. Navellier has to say. (His message is available here for a limited time.)
Within the first 30-45 seconds, you’ll see how Biden plans to target certain Americans.
We can’t promise that viewing this will be easy. But it could help you stay safe.
To see Louis Navellier’s warning, click here right now.
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