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.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Reader Interactions
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.
CUT AND PASTE YOUTUBE LINKS
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.
House Oversight Committee: Beau’s Widow Hallie Is ‘New’ Biden Business Member Who Received China Cash
Beau Biden’s widow and Hunter’s ex-lover Hallie Biden is the “new” family business member who received a $25,000 cash payment on March 27, 2017, from family associate Robinson Walker’s LLC regarding a Chinese venture, the House Oversight Committee revealed Thursday.
Walker, who has described himself as someone who “generally [has] been acting as a surrogate for H[unter] around the country and abroad pursuing opportunities,” received a $3 million payment from State Energy HK Limited, which was divvied up between four Biden family members: Hunter, James, Hallie, and an unknown Biden. According to the committee, Hallie is the new member identified who was previously a mystery. There is still an unknown “Biden” in the bank records. No first name is listed for the fourth Biden.
President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One, Saturday, February 4, 2023, at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“Hallie is the president’s son’s widow and ex-lover of Hunter. She is also widely reported to be a school counselor. It is unknown why Hallie would receive $25,000 from Walker’s LLC obtained from the family’s Chinese venture with State Energy HK Limited. It is also unknown what services, if any, she rendered for the money,” the committee stated.
It is also unclear who the account holder is for the bank account titled simply, “Biden,” according to the committee.
It is notable that State Energy HK Limited was named by Comer as an entity funneling money to the Bidens. State Energy HK Limited was under the control of Chinese company CEFC China Energy’s chairman, Ye Jianming, and was affiliated with CEFC. Ye, State Energy HK Limited, and CEFC were closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) is seen in front of a newspaper page with a photograph of Hunter Biden and his father President Joe Biden during the Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media hearing with former Twitter employees before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability at the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday February 08, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Hunter made huge money from Ye. In 2017, Hunter earned a $1 million legal retainer from Jianming’s company. He also received a large diamond from Ye worth an estimated $80,000 in February 2017. Since 2018, Ye has been under detention in China on charges of bribery.
In 2017, the Biden family had also negotiated a deal with CEFC in which Joe Biden (“Big Guy”) would receive a ten percent equity stake in the joint venture with Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. Another Hunter Biden business partner, James Gilliar, dubbed Joe Biden the “big guy” in his May 13, 2017, email to Bobulinski, who has confirmed “the big guy” was a reference to Joe Biden. The 2017 email revealed that a business deal between Bobulinski, the Biden family, and high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party would include 10 percent “held by H for the big guy ?”
CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming (Photo: CEFC)
In a memo obtained by Breitbart News, the committee outlined how much of the $3 million flowed from State Energy HK Limited to the Biden family members:
On March 1, 2017—less than two months after Vice President Joe Biden left public office— State Energy HK Limited, a Chinese company, wired $3 million to Robinson Walker, LLC. At the time of the wire, Rob Walker’s business account had a balance of approximately $159,000.
The next day, Robinson Walker, LLC wired $1,065,000 to European Energy and Infrastructure Group (EEIG) in Abu Dhabi, a company associated with James Gilliar. Gilliar was a business partner of Hunter Biden and involved in foreign transactions with the Biden family.
After the Robinson Walker, LLC account received $3 million from State Energy HK Limited, Biden family members and their companies began receiving incremental payments over a period of approximately three months. The recipients of the money included Hallie Biden, companies associated with Hunter Biden and James Biden, and an unknown bank account identified as “Biden.”
After the Chinese company wired Robinson Walker, LLC the $3 million, the Biden family received approximately $1,065,692 over a three-month period in different bank accounts. Notably, EEIG, James Gilliar’s affiliated company, received almost the exact same amount— $1,065,000—on March 2, 2017. From the bank records, it appears that the Biden family received approximately one-third of the money obtained from the China wire.
Comer has pledged to unearth China’s financial ties to the Biden family and to ascertain whether Joe Biden is compromised by the Communist Chinese Party
“The Oversight Committee is concerned about the national security implications resulting from President Biden’s family receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals,” Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said about the money funnels. “We will continue to follow the money trail and facts to determine if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business schemes and if there is a national security threat.”
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.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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