Saturday, March 11, 2023

CRONY OF INSIDE TRADERS NANCY PELOSI AND DIANNE FEINSTEIN??? - Silicon Valley Bank CEO Sold $3.57 Million of Stock Two Weeks Before Bank Collapsed

NOW WATCH 'CREDIT CARD' JOE BIDEN BAIL THEM OUT AND NO PRISON TIME!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl-ZawiAghE


Silicon Valley Bank CEO Sold $3.57 Million of Stock Two Weeks Before Bank Collapsed

CEO Greg Becker of Silicon Valley Bank speaks during a panel discussion at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group annual luncheon at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group) (Photo by MediaNews Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images)
MediaNews Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images
2:35

The CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) sold $3.57 million of company stock just two weeks before the technology sector’s primary financial institution collapsed on Friday, according to federal filings.

SVB CEO and President Greg Becker on February 27 sold 12,451 shares of common stock at an average price of $287.42, or $3,578,652.31 in total.

Becker’s sale came two weeks before the stock plunged to $39.49 in the premarket Friday before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized the bank’s assets. The bank had $209 billion in total assets at the time of failure, according to the FDIC. 

Becker also purchased the same number of shares using stock options priced $105.18 each, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings show. 

“The options, which allow you to buy a company’s stock at a set price, were due to expire May 2,” the Daily Mail reported.

However, these transactions were pre-planned and made through a trust Becker controls. The trust executed a trading plan he reportedly set up on January 26.

SVB CFO Daniel Beck similarly sold $575,180 on the same February day as Becker. Beck sold 2,000 shares at $287.59 per share in a pre-planned sell-off as part of his trading plan set up on January 24. 

“Company insiders often use such plans to execute trades when certain conditions are met, such as price and volume. This serves to remove any potential that they may use their knowledge to beat the market,” the Daily Mail explained.

On Friday morning, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation appointed the FDIC to take control of SVB after a bank run began Thursday following the bank’s announcement of a plan to raise more than $2 billion in capital, alarming many venture capitalists and start-ups who hold money in the institution. 

Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.

Conservatives Point to ‘Bidenflation’ as Cause of Silicon Valley Bank Closure; Gaetz Vows to Stand Against Bailout

People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters on March 10, 2023 in Santa Clara, California. INSET: Congressman Matt Gaetz
Justin Sullivan/Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
2:55

Prominent conservatives throughout politics and media reacted to the sudden closure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is already standing firm against bailouts for the bank, and many are pointing to “Bidenflation” as a driver of the implosion.

Gaetz appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room where Bannon asserted that the closure was “100 percent because of Biden’s policies.”

He predicted the federal government would be pressured for a bailout next week and asked Gaetz how he would respond.

“If there is an effort to use taxpayer money to bail out Silicon Valley Bank, the American people can count on the fact that I will be there leading the fight against such a bailout,” he said. “The financial arm of Silicon Valley has just been severed before our very eyes.”

SVB played a critical role in the San Francisco start-up company economy, Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carney noted.

Journalist Jack Pososbiec is also calling for the federal government not to bail out SVB.

Hold them accountable – NO BAILOUTS FOR SILICON VALLEY,” he tweeted. “GO BROKE STAY BROKE.”

Greg Price, the communications director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, laid the blame directly on “Bidenflation,” tweeting:

The biggest reason Silicon Valley Bank collapsed is they invested their customer deposits in treasury bonds, which are very sensitive to interest rates, which have been hiked up massively over the last year due to inflation. Bideninflation=the largest bank collapse since 2008.

Steve Cortes tweeted that “very few in Corporate Media will cite the key driver of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank: massive Bond market losses due to Biden’s Inflation.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, an anti-woke Republican entrepreneur who is running for president, shared his belief that SVB used progressive Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors in credit scoring.

“Since one else has yet, I’ll ask the obvious: were ‘ESG factors’ part of Silicon Valley Bank’s credit score calculations? I have a funny feeling the answer is yes,” he tweeted Friday night. “I suggest Senate & House Republicans take a serious look.”

He then tagged a number of lawmakers, calling for them to “get to the bottom of it.” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) retweeted the presidential candidate.

Turning Point USA Founder and President Charlie Kirk and conservative author and filmmaker Dines D’Souza shared similar sentiments. They both tweeted an image that purportedly shows SVB’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

“It is a mystery why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed,” quipped Kirk. 


Exclusive – Vivek Ramaswamy: I’m Against Tax-Payer Funded Bailout for ESG ‘Evangelist’ Silicon Valley Bank

Vivek Ramaswamy delivers remarks at the 2022 AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 19, 2022. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
4:40

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday and declared he is firmly against a bailout for Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which he called “one of the biggest evangelists of DEI and ESG.”

Ramaswamy, who told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the 2008 financial crisis informed much of his economic policy, rejected the idea of a taxpayer-funded bailout after customers withdrew $42 billion in a massive run this week.

“I want to be early because you’re gonna hear the calls for bailouts coming real soon here. I’m against a government bailout,” said the 37-year-old entrepreneur who has founded multiple biotech start-up companies worth multi-billion dollars. “And you know what, we don’t learn the lessons we should have learned, then you keep making the same mistakes all over again.”

“The Federal Reserve, for 15 years, has been raining money from on high like manna from heaven,” Ramaswamy told Boyle while speaking via phone before a live audience in southwest Ohio. “We’ve been skiing on artificial snow. Now the snow machine turns off, and within less than a year, you’re seeing the banks fail because they don’t know how to ski on anything other than artificial snow. I’m talking about money being pumped into the system.”

“Capitalism, [Joseph] Schumpeter said it well, it’s based on creative destruction,” he continued. “So you know what, someone’s got to have the things to pay for the sins. That’s great. That’s part of how capitalism works. We can’t interfere… with this short-termism of bailing out this bank. It’s a mistake. And by the way, Republicans made this mistake in 2008. It’s crony capitalism. Hank Paulson, under George Bush – I think it was a mistake – bailed out Goldman Sachs and others like them… It’s crony capitalism because Hank Paulson was most recently the CEO of Goldman Sachs before bailing them out. But I think that we should resist the siren song with the Silicon Valley Bank catastrophe.”

LISTEN: 

Ramaswamy then highlighted SVB’s embrace of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and asserted the bank pushed Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing factors.

“Silicon Valley Bank is one of the biggest evangelists of DEI and ESG – environmental and social factors,” he said. “In fact, just January of last year, barely over a year ago… they made a $5 billion commitment to sustainable finance to actually make for what they call a climate-ready, healthier planet. Well, guess what? That $5 billion would have served their balance sheet – how about a healthier balance sheet instead? And that’s something that actually, it’s a lesson that everyone else ought to learn by example. The lesson they ought to learn is not when you waste your money and burn it in a financial trash fire that… the taxpayers of this country are there to save you. No! It actually ought to be a lesson for everybody else that a healthy balance sheet is the responsibility of a bank, not… what they call a healthy planet.”

“But I think that that’s actually the lesson we’ve got to learn,” continued the presidential candidate. “And you know what, that was the 2008 lesson, too…The reason we had the 2008 financial crisis … is because we had a social policy for allocating capital in this country. Back then, it was homeownership. Under the Clinton administration, it was a goal to say that every American should own a home. Well, I liked that as much as the next guy, but if you can’t afford a home, that means you probably shouldn’t be borrowing to buy one. And so, yet, they still forced people effectively into doing it. Then you have the bubble that results in the financial crisis, and the very people you wanted to help are the ones who got hurt.”

A worker (center) tells people that the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters is closed on March 10, 2023, in Santa Clara, California. Silicon Valley Bank was shut down on Friday morning by California regulators and was put in control of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“Well, guess what? The same thing with this environmental and social scam as well,” he stressed. “It’s tilting the scales of how capital is allocated. And I’ll tell you this is somebody who succeeded in the system of free market capitalism as we know it. I’ll give it to you straight: When there’s a non-economic factor that guides the flow of capital, bad things happen. You create bubbles, and it hurts the very people that you set out to help.”

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

 

GLOBAL BANKSTER CRIME TIDAL WAVE

 

Chinese Intermediaries Launder Cartels' Drug Proceeds in the United States  -   From the U.S. to China to the cartels

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/chinese-launder-drug-cartel-money-sen.html

“The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.”

 

 

 

BANKSTERS: GLOBAL PARASITES

 

the criminal bank HSBC - CHINESE BANKSTERS TO THE WORLD'S BIGGEST CRIMINALS INCLUDING THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS.

 

no one has served the banksters more than hillary and billary clinton and the bankster regime of obama, eric holder and 'credit card' joe biden - all parasite gamer lawyers!

 

Banksters: The Untouchable Bank (Global Finance Scandal Documentary) | Real Stories

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JVHotswhIk

 

 

JUDICIAL WATCH’S TEN MOST CORRUPT LIST

President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However, in his first year in office, the President has delivered corruption and secrecy, bringing Chicago-style political corruption to the White House. JUDICIAL WATCH 

 “Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG

 During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”

In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.

The Republican staff of the US House Committee on Financial Services released a report Monday presenting its findings on why the Obama Justice Department and then-Attorney General Eric Holder chose not to prosecute the British-based HSBC bank for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.

 

 

GLOBAL BANKSTER CRIME TIDAL WAVE

 

Chinese Intermediaries Launder Cartels' Drug Proceeds in the United States  -   From the U.S. to China to the cartels

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/chinese-launder-drug-cartel-money-sen.html

“The other banks on the top 10 list are JPMorgan Chase (whose CEO Jamie Dimon was once known as Obama's "favorite banker"), New York Mellon, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC, Bank of China, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.”

 

ERIC HOLDERS LONGTIME EXCUSE FOR NOT PROSECUTING BANKS JUST CRASHED AND BURNED

New evidence supports critique that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back from prosecuting big banks.

 

David Dayen


July 12 2016, 8:05 a.m.

ERIC HOLDER HAS long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.

Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.

A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.

When asked on June 8 why his Justice Department did not equally apply the criminal laws to financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Holder told the platform drafting panel of the Democratic National Committee that it was laboring under a “misperception.”

He told the panel: “The question you need to ask yourself is, if we could have made those cases, do you think we would not have? Do you think that these very aggressive U.S. attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”

The report — the result of a three-year investigation — shows that aggressive attorneys did want to prosecute HSBC, but Holder overruled them.

In September 2012, the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section (AFMLS) formally recommended that HSBC be prosecuted for its numerous financial crimes.

The history: From 2006 to 2010, HSBC failed to monitor billions of dollars of U.S. dollar purchases with drug trafficking proceeds in Mexico. It also conducted business going back to the mid-1990s on behalf of customers in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma, while they were under sanctions. Such transactions were banned by U.S. law.

Newly public internal Treasury Department records show that AFMLS Chief Jennifer Shasky wanted to seek a guilty plea for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. “DoJ is mulling over the ramifications that could flow from such an approach and plans to finalize its decision this week,” reads an email from September 4, 2012, to senior Treasury officials. On September 7, Treasury official Dennis Wood describes the AFMLS decision as an “internal recommendation to ask the bank [to] plead guilty.” It was a “bombshell,” Wood wrote, because of “the implications of a criminal plea,” and “the sheer amount of the proposed fines and forfeitures.”

But after British financial minister George Osborne complained to the Federal Reserve chairman and the Treasury Secretary that DOJ was unfairly targeting a British bank, senior Justice Department leadership reportedly sought to “better understand the collateral consequences of a conviction/plea before taking such a dramatic step.”

The report documents how Holder and his top associates were concerned about the impact that prosecuting HSBC would have on the global economy. And, in particular, they worried that a guilty plea would trigger a hearing over whether to revoke HSBC’s charter to do banking in the United States.

According to internal documents, the DOJ then went dark for nearly two months, refusing to participate in interagency calls about HSBC. Finally,on November 7, Holder presented HSBC with a “take it or leave it” offer of a deferred prosecution agreement, which would involve a cash settlement and future monitoring of HSBC.

No guilty plea was required.

But even the “take it or leave it” offer was apparently not the last word. HSBC was able to negotiate for nearly a month after Holder presented that offer, getting more favorable terms in the ultimate $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement, announced on December 11, 2012.

The original settlement documents would have forced any HSBC executive officers to void their year-end bonuses if they showed future failures of anti-money laundering compliance. The final documents say that, in the event of such failures, senior executives merely “could” have their bonuses clawed back.

In addition, HSBC successfully negotiated to have individual executives immunized from prosecution over transactions with foreign terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities, even though the original agreement only covered the anti-money laundering violations and explicitly left open the possibility of prosecuting individuals.

As a Justice Department functionary in 1999, Holder wrote the infamous “collateral consequences” memo, advising prosecutors to take into account economic damage that might result from criminally convicting a major corporation.

In 2013, he unwittingly earned his place in history for telling the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that the size of some of these [financial] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” which became known as the “Too Big to Jail” theory.

Holder told the Democratic platform drafting committee that “it was not lack of desire or lack of resources” that led to the lack of prosecutions for any major bank executive following the financial crisis. “We had in some cases statutory and sometimes factual inabilities to bring the cases that we wanted to bring,” he said.

The HSBC case, however, shows that lack of desire at the highest levels of the Justice Department was indeed the primary reason that no prosecutions took place.

Former Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., who also testified to the drafting committee, cited the HSBC case as an example of the lack of equal application of justice in the Holder era. Referring to the concern over destabilizing the financial system with an HSBC prosecution, Miller said, “That’s not an argument that’s available to too many people: ‘You can’t arrest me for selling cigarettes, it might destabilize the financial system!’ ”

The internal communications in the House report all come from the Treasury Department. The Justice Department, they say, did not comply with subpoenas for information about the settlement.

Holder has returned to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients in 2015. He had worked at Covington from 2001 until he was sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.

Jennifer Shasky, the AFMLS chief who requested the prosecution of HSBC but was overruled, recently resigned as the head of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to become a senior compliance officer with HSBC.

 

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