AT THE CENTER OF A NATION UNRAVELING'S PROBLEMS IS A PACK OF BRIBES SUCKING DEM-POLS, MOST OF WHO ARE GAMER PARASITE LAWYERS!
Silicon Valley Bank Board Included Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton Donors
Several Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) board of directors have donated thousands of dollars or have direct ties to prominent Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Kevin McCarthy: Biden’s ‘Failed’ Fiscal Policies, Rising Interest Rates Led to Silicon Valley Bank Crisis
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said during a House Republican Conference call on Monday night that President Joe Biden’s “failed” fiscal policies and rising interest rates led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, according to a report.
The House Republican Conference held a private call with McCarthy, House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), and Rep. French Hill (R-AR).
McHenry said that Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse was the result of “current social media meets the bank rush scene in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.'”
Punchbowl News continued:
McHenry also argued that bank management’s pushed for SVB to grow too quickly, and the assets it held were a poor fit for a rising interest rate environment.
Hill, chair of the House Financial Services subcommittee on digital assets, blamed SVB’s failure on a lack of oversight from the San Francisco Fed office. That complaint was echoed by Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky), chair of the financial institutions and monetary policy subcommittee on Financial Services.
In an interview late Monday night, McHenry said there was not an immediate need for legislation to resolve the banking crisis.
“They currently have the tools, and they‘ve used them appropriately to resolve two banks,” McHenry said in an interview with Punchbowl News. “They acted swiftly and boldly, and I’ve told them more than once that bold action I will absolutely support if it is in the interest of the financial system and in the interest of the American people.”
Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carney pointed out in the Breitbart Business Digest that a research paper from the New York Fed found that increased demand accounts for two-thirds of inflation and that fiscal stimulus was responsible for half or more of the increase in demand.
“The Fed accommodated the Biden administration’s reckless fiscal policy by holding interest rates near zero even after the economy had begun to recover from the pandemic and lockdowns. Massive quantitative easing held down bond yields not just for Treasuries but for mortgage-backed securities as well,” Carney noted.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
Merit issue: Just one guy on Silicon Valley Bank's board knew anything about investment banking
Before its collapse Friday, wokesterism surrounded Silicon Valley Bank like a miasma.
The wokesterly attentiveness didn't per se destroy that mid-sized bank, given that most banks play these games and the big ones are very loud about it.
As I noted earlier, Johns Hopkins University professor of economics, Steve Hanke, put his finger on the problem more precisely in an email:
[T]he real SVB issue was terrible banking and risk management that resulted in a massive duration mismatch between SVB's liabilities (read: deposits) and its assets (read: long-dated bonds). The mismatch was stupidly not hedged. SVB was a poorly run bank, a disaster waiting to happen. Any regulator worth his salt should have seen this coming long ago.
Just one member of Silicon Valley Bank's board of directors had a career in investment banking, while the others were major Democratic donors, it has been revealed.
Tom King, 63, was appointed to the board in September after previously serving as the CEO of investment banking at Barclay's. He has had 35 years of experience in investment banking.
But he is the only one on the board with a career in the financial industry, while others are a former Obama administration employee, a prolific contributor to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even a Hillary Clinton mega-donor who prayed at a Shinto shrine when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
The board is now being investigated by federal authorities after it failed to prevent the bank from going under while it was investing clients' money in risky low-interest government bonds and securities.
It has previously been accused of being too focused on woke issues.
WHAT? ARE WE TALKING ABOUT GAMER LYING LAWYER 'CREDIT CARD' JOE BIDEN OF MANY MANSIONS?!?
The commitment by the Biden administration to do “whatever is needed” to protect the money and wealth of financial investors, speculators and the wealthy has again laid bare the real nature of capitalist governments as the executive committee for managing the affairs of the ruling financial oligarchy.
The Fed and the US government then organized
a bailout of the banks running into hundreds of
billions of dollars, as the unemployment rate rose to
double digits, working class families lost their
homes, and workplace conditions worsened, not
least through the spread of two-tier wage systems
organised by the Obama administration with the
collaboration of the trade unions.
The bailout of Silicon Valley Bank and the historic crisis of capitalism
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—the second largest bank failure in nominal terms in US history—and the ongoing turbulence in the banking system, raising the prospect of more failures, is another expression of the historic crisis of US and global capitalism.
This deepening rot and decay constitute the underlying driving force of two interconnected developments in US and world politics: the rapid escalation towards a third world war and the ongoing and intensifying assault on the working class in the US and internationally, as the ruling classes seek to make it pay for the existential crisis of their outmoded and reactionary private profit system.
The commitment by the Biden administration to do “whatever is needed” to protect the money and wealth of financial investors, speculators and the wealthy has again laid bare the real nature of capitalist governments as the executive committee for managing the affairs of the ruling financial oligarchy.
There is no money for the vital health, education and other social needs of the working class now being battered by the worst inflation in more than four decades, but billions, trillions, can be found overnight to defend the wealth of the financial oligarchy.
At the same time, no expense is being spared in the development of the means necessary for the prosecution of war—the US-NATO war in Ukraine, the goal of which is the breakup and dismemberment of Russia and the war drive against China, which the US regards as its chief global rival.
There is a deep-seated and organic connection between the SVB debacle and the possibility of an implosion of the financial system and the war drive.
The continuous eruption of financial crises, despite all the claims of the regulators and financial authorities that lessons have been learned and safety measures put in place, is an expression of the historic decline of the economic power of US imperialism, which it seeks to resolve through military means.
The demise of SVB and the shock waves it is sending through the financial system, the full consequences of which have yet to be seen, is another expression of the essential dynamic, one could say law of motion, of US capitalism now in operation.
Tracing out the developments of the past 50 years, this dynamic comes clearly into view: Measures taken by the ruling class and its state to try to stave off or alleviate a crisis at one point only create the conditions for its eruption, in even more violent form, at another.
In August 1971, in response to the decline of the position of American capitalism vis-Ã -vis its rivals, US president Nixon withdrew the gold backing from the US dollar, ending the postwar monetary system.
One of the consequences of this decision, taken to shore up the position of the US, was to fuel the growth of financial speculation that increasingly characterised the modus operandi of US capitalism throughout the 1980s, as whole swaths of industry that had formed the foundation of the postwar boom were laid to waste.
In October 1987, the developing crisis these measures produced erupted in the form of a Wall Street crash, still the largest single one-day fall in history, at more than 22 percent.
The guarantee by the US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in response to this crisis—what became known as the Greenspan put—that the Fed would prop up the financial markets fueled an expanding orgy of speculation over the next two decades, leading to the eruption of the US and global financial crisis of 2008.
The Fed and the US government then organized a bailout of the banks running into hundreds of billions of dollars, as the unemployment rate rose to double digits, working class families lost their homes, and workplace conditions worsened, not least through the spread of two-tier wage systems organised by the Obama administration with the collaboration of the trade unions.
In the wake of the crisis, the Fed began its program of quantitative easing, the pumping of trillions of dollars into the financial system via the purchase of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. Instead of ending the rampant speculation that precipitated the 2008 crash, the central bank, the chief financial arm of the capitalist state, further fueled it.
This meant that when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, the Trump administration, supported by the Democrats, refused to institute the necessary public health measures, fearing they would collapse the speculative bubble.
Instead, the Fed pumped in still more money after the financial freeze of March 2020, when, for a number of days, there was no market for US government debt, supposedly the safest financial asset in the world, thus fueling even more speculation and financial parasitism.
But this operation had consequences in the real economy. The refusal to eliminate COVID, the injection of $4 trillion into the financial system, rampant speculation and profit gouging by major commodity traders and giant food corporations, together with the military offensive against Russia in Ukraine, combined to set off the highest rate of inflation in four decades.
Fearing the consequences of a wages upsurge by the working class—the nemesis of the financial system—the Fed then changed course and started the steepest rate hikes since the early 1980s to try to crush it.
Now these measures have created the conditions for a new financial crisis, as can be seen in the collapse of SVB. Like so many other banks and financial corporations, SVB, which has been closely involved with the high-tech sector in California, gorged on the cheap money provided by the Fed in 2020 and 2021.
It had so much cash on hand that it had to place large portions of it in Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, supposedly ultra-safe assets.
With the turn by the Fed to a higher interest rate regime, supposedly to fight inflation but in reality aimed at suppressing the working class, if necessary through recession, the situation shifted sharply.
The market value of the bonds held by SVB fell as interest rates rose, such that it has been estimated its bonds lost $1 billion for every 25-basis point (0.25 percentage point) rise in the Federal funds rate, which has now been lifted by around 450 basis points.
This collapse in its asset base led to the $42 billion run on the bank, resulting in its collapse.
The circumstances of SVB are not replicated everywhere. But all areas of the financial system, the dominant force in the capitalist economy, have become so dependent on the inflow of cheap money that they are now being heavily impacted by interest rate hikes, the effects of which have only started to make themselves felt.
What are the consequences? They flow from the very nature of finance capital itself.
At first sight it appears to be able to conjure up ever greater amounts of money out of money itself.
But this appearance-form masks a deeper reality. Finance capital does not create additional or new value. In the final analysis, it is a claim on the surplus value extracted from the working class in the process of capitalist production.
Thus, while it continually seeks to escape to a realm where money begets more money, finance capital always strives to intensify the exploitation of the working class, above all in time of crisis, as the experience of 2008 so graphically demonstrated.
At the same time, driven by the deepening economic and social crisis at home, the government and the capitalist state must make the working class pay for war by massive cuts in social spending.
In every crisis, the two main classes of society align themselves and more and more directly on their fundamental material interests. The program of the ruling class will develop accordingly: rescue operations for the financial oligarchy combined with war and social counterrevolution.
The working class is likewise driven onto a collision course with the entire apparatus of the capitalist system. However, for that struggle to be successful, no matter how deep the crisis of the ruling class and its system, the working class must be politically armed with a clear program and perspective: the conquest of political power and the construction of a socialist economy.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—the second largest bank failure in nominal terms in US history—and the ongoing turbulence in the banking system, raising the prospect of more failures, is another expression of the historic crisis of US and global capitalism.
This deepening rot and decay constitute the underlying driving force of two interconnected developments in US and world politics: the rapid escalation towards a third world war and the ongoing and intensifying assault on the working class in the US and internationally, as the ruling classes seek to make it pay for the existential crisis of their outmoded and reactionary private profit system.
The commitment by the Biden administration to do “whatever is needed” to protect the money and wealth of financial investors, speculators and the wealthy has again laid bare the real nature of capitalist governments as the executive committee for managing the affairs of the ruling financial oligarchy.
There is no money for the vital health, education and other social needs of the working class now being battered by the worst inflation in more than four decades, but billions, trillions, can be found overnight to defend the wealth of the financial oligarchy.
At the same time, no expense is being spared in the development of the means necessary for the prosecution of war—the US-NATO war in Ukraine, the goal of which is the breakup and dismemberment of Russia and the war drive against China, which the US regards as its chief global rival.
There is a deep-seated and organic connection between the SVB debacle and the possibility of an implosion of the financial system and the war drive.
The continuous eruption of financial crises, despite all the claims of the regulators and financial authorities that lessons have been learned and safety measures put in place, is an expression of the historic decline of the economic power of US imperialism, which it seeks to resolve through military means.
The demise of SVB and the shock waves it is sending through the financial system, the full consequences of which have yet to be seen, is another expression of the essential dynamic, one could say law of motion, of US capitalism now in operation.
Tracing out the developments of the past 50 years, this dynamic comes clearly into view: Measures taken by the ruling class and its state to try to stave off or alleviate a crisis at one point only create the conditions for its eruption, in even more violent form, at another.
Silicon Valley Bank Board Included Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton Donors
Several Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) board of directors have donated thousands of dollars or have direct ties to prominent Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Federal investigators are now looking into the role the board may have played in the bank’s abrupt collapse, as the board members failed to prevent its failure.
Although there are 12 board members, several are under scrutiny for their donations and connections to Democrat politicians.
For example, director Kate Mitchell is a Clinton mega-donor who prayed at a shrine after Clinton’s 2016 loss to former President Donald Trump.
“I prayed for me and us to get beyond our grieving and shock and to figure out how to engage and listen to what happened and come back together,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell also donated $50,000 to Clinton’s victory fund, the New York Post reported.
Next on the list of Democrat donor SVB board members is Garen K. Staglin, who owns a vineyard less than 15 minutes from the Pelosi family’s Napa Valley estate.
As the New York Post detailed:
He gave the Biden Victory Fund $10,000 in 2020, sent $54,000 to Clinton’s Hillary Victory Fund in 2016 (on top of $25,000 the previous year), backed Obama with $35,800 in 2011 and gave the Democratic National Committee $10,000 last year.
Some board members also donated to political action committees for Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, the Post reported.
Another SVB board member with ties to prominent Democrats is Mary J. Miller, who served as Obama’s domestic finance undersecretary at the Treasury Department for two years.
As the Post noted, the “only real banker” on the Silicon Valley Bank board is Tom King, the board’s newest director. King brings 35 years of experience in investment banking to the board, having spent years at Citigroup and Barclays.
The Post also reported that the Democrat donations were part of SVB’s business model. “Everyone knew it was the go-to bank for woke CEOs,” one source told the outlet. “They knew they were aligned politically. The companies SVB loaned money to all had a woke agenda.”
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
Pollak: Barney Frank Returns, 14 Years After Our Fight at Harvard
Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) is at the center of another financial crisis — this time on the board of now-defunct Signature Bank, which was closed by New York State and taken over by federal authorities on Sunday.
Ironically, given his general zeal for regulation, and the Dodd-Frank law that bears his name, Frank has pushed back against claims that regulatory easing caused the panic that took down Signature and Silicon Valley Bank.
Instead, Frank blamed government hostility to the cryptocurrency industry, which his bank had supported. And as a board member, he had once argued that smaller banks should be exempt from the regulations he created.
Whatever the reason, it is hard to ignore Frank’s curious presence at the scene of yet another oversight failure that could take down the entire financial system.
In 2008, as the financial crisis unfolded, Frank chaired the House Financial Services Committee. The meltdown happened on his watch — after he and fellow Democrats had zealously resisted efforts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, leading to the subprime mortgage crisis.
In April 2009, Frank — still in charge of the committee, and tasked with writing new legislation to regulate the country’s large financial institutions — came to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to give a speech.
It was an evening that would change my life.
My fiancée and I were both about to graduate — she from college with a degree in economics, and me from law school. Neither of us had jobs yet, thanks in part to the recession.
We decided to go to the lecture out of simple interest. I happened to have been studying tax law in my final semester, and I had planned to ask a question about the constitutionality of a tax on Wall Street bonuses.
But as I stood in line behind the microphone, waiting my turn, I became astonished at Frank’s approach to the crisis, which he sought to blame squarely on Republicans, all the way back to President Taft a century before.
So when my turn came, I asked: “How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?”
He blew up at me.
But I had also just taken a trial advocacy course, and had learned how to handle a hostile witness.
So I asked the question again.
We went back-and-forth for several minutes, much to the audience’s delight, and then I went home. I thought the exchange might merit a mention in the Harvard Crimson, but nothing more.
As it happened, there was a camera from the local Fox affiliate in the room. They aired the argument, and it was picked up by the Drudge Report.
Suddenly, I was famous — and everyone, even MSNBC, wanted an interview.
Looking back, I think what resonated with people was the idea that a student — nobody, really — could stand up to one of the most powerful members of Congress.
You have to remember the political atmosphere of the time: Barack Obama had just taken office, and there was a new and stifling sense of political correctness. A new elite felt entitled to dictate terms to everyone.
This was the time when Miss California, Carrie Prejean, lost her title because she defended states’ prerogatives to define their own marriage laws — the same position as Obama.
After being at the mercy of powerful people for months — first the titans of Wall Street, then the big shots of the Beltway — many people, even Democrats, enjoyed watching a big ego being punctured by a simple question. I even received a congratulatory email from Professor Laurence Tribe, who thought the whole thing was great.
For 48 hours — until I went offline for the Jewish holiday of Passover — my life was a whirlwind. When I came back to campus, the dean’s office asked me to pick up my fan mail.
Then the Illinois Republican Party called.
The GOP wanted to run candidates in as many districts as possible, and they were looking for a candidate to challenge Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), my hometown representative.
It was a tough decision. I had already decided to take the California Bar exam. And plenty of people told me to challenge Frank, though I thought (wrongly) that he was invincible, as the first openly gay member of Congress. But in the end, I decided to give it a try.
It was an uphill climb against an entrenched Democrat incumbent in a deep-blue district. Yet conservatives came out of the woodwork to support me.
And I befriended conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart.
After the election, I pitched Andrew on the idea of joining his startup company. He eventually agreed, and I moved out to L.A.
I worked alongside Andrew — through Weinergate and the rest of it — until he died in 2012.
I’m still here (and Schakowsky is still in Congress). But Barney Frank somehow found his way to a bank. The man who was supposed to have protected us from another financial meltdown is again at the center of one.
Once again, it’s not his fault. He’s probably right that the Trump-era rollback of Dodd-Frank regulations — which was backed by members of both parties in Congress — did not lead to the current banking crisis.
The likelier cause, as Silicon Valley investor David Sacks explained in a detailed Twitter thread, was simply poor management, as interest rates rose rapidly to fight inflation that was set off by President Joe Biden’s spending.
I’d add that Frank’s assurances in 2009 that new regulations would protect the system may have encouraged reckless behavior by banks and their customers.
Not to worry: Biden says new regulations will be even better.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Barney Frank Sat on Board for Collapsed Signature Bank
Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, sat on the board for Signature Bank which collapsed in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) implosion.
The U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced in a joint statement on Sunday the plan to manage the fallout of SVB’s collapse as well as the demise of Signature Bank.
“Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system,” the joint statement read. “This step will ensure that the U.S. banking system continues to perform its vital roles of protecting deposits and providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth.”
“We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority,” it added. “All depositors of this institution will be made whole. As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses will be borne by the taxpayer.”
Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last Friday after depositors rushed to withdraw money in fear of its impending fall. It was the 16th largest bank in the country.
Signature Bank became “popular among crypto companies” and provided “deposit services for its clients’ digital assets but did not make loans collateralized by them” according to Fox Business.
Prior to the SVB collapse, Signature said it had been trying to limit such deposits, pledging it was in a “well-diversified financial position” and had “limited digital-asset related deposit balances in the wake of industry developments.”
“We want to make it clear again that Signature Bank is a well-diversified, full-service commercial bank with more than two decades of history and solid performance serving middle market businesses,” Joseph J. DePaolo, Signature Bank Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer said in a statement.
“We have built a strong reputation serving commercial clients through nine business lines and reached in excess of $100 billion in assets by continually executing our single-point-of-contact, relationship-based model where banking teams are capable of meeting all client needs,” he added.
Frank, who sat on Signature Bank’s board, strongly supported legislation in 2018 that curtailed some of the regulations that his own law Dodd-Frank put in place.
“Dodd-Frank imposed additional regulatory safeguards on banks with more than $50 billion in assets, but the rollback that passed this week, among other things, raises that threshold to $250 billion,” the Washington Post reported in 2018.
“Signature Bank has more than $40 billion in assets and can now grow significantly without automatically facing additional regulation. Frank has served on Signature’s board for three years and has received more than $1 million in payments from the bank during that time,” the report added.
When pressed at the time, Frank said while indeed stood to benefit from the rollback, his position at Signature Bank did not influence his decision.
“My being on the board has not changed my position on this at all,” Frank said. “These efforts began well before I began at Signature Bank.”
In 2009, Breitbart News editor-at-large Joel Pollak confronted Frank, who was then the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, asking if he shared any responsibility for the global financial meltdown of 2008.
“Frank, perhaps defensive over charges that he fought Bush administration efforts to reign in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in 2001, dismissed the question as ‘a right-wing attack,’ and challenged the student to make clear what else a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts might have done to prevent the crisis. Per the Los Angeles Times:
Frank, perhaps defensive over charges that he fought Bush administration efforts to reign in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in 2001, dismissed the question as ‘a right-wing attack,’ and challenged the student to make clear what else a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts might have done to prevent the crisis.
The student, Joel Pollak, replied that perhaps Frank could have done more to patrol executive bonuses to AIG and other giants bailed out with $700 billion in taxpayer funds. The exchange got pretty heated — another student came to Pollak’s rescue, imploring Frank not to label the student as a conservative but to answer his question.
But Frank insisted that he had not been chairman of the committee before 2007, and was hardly to blame for policies before that.
Speaking with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News after the exchange, Pollak said Frank had been putting too much blame on Republicans.
“When I heard his speech and I heard him blame everyone from Ronald Reagan to the conservatives of the 1930s for opposing whatever it was he was pushing, I thought to myself, Hang on a second,” said Pollak.
“This guy is someone in a position of responsibility and authority. This guy is the one who’s making the regulations. He’s responsible, essentially, for recreating and redesigning our financial system, and he’s not taking any responsibility for what happened at all,” he added.