We are starting to get a better, a more precise sense of what it means when Joe Biden brags about the strongest and most equitable economic recovery in modern history. What it means is it could be time to buy gold and stockpile food. Oh, there's a deal on Russian steel case and then go pick up a pallet. Just kidding, sort of.
Yesterday, some of the biggest banks in this country, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley collectively lost more than $50 billion in market value in one day. That's quite a hit. On the other hand, those banks still exist, and you can't say that for Silicon Valley Bank. As of this morning, Silicon Valley Bank or SVB has gone under completely. That makes the second-biggest bank failure in the history of this country, and that's significant.
SVB financed nearly half of all venture-backed health care and technology companies in the United States. It also apparently held significant cash reserves for some of the biggest cryptocurrencies, and it's now gone. Federal regulators have renamed it and taken it over and that means an awful lot of people lost an awful lot of money and no, most of that money was not insured, no matter what they tell you. The FDIC only guarantees bank deposits up to $250,000, and according to some reports, more than 90% of all deposits at SBP exceeded that and it's unclear whether those people will ever see their money again.
In fact, when customers showed up at SVB's branch in Manhattan today to get their deposits back. Managers called the police. So, what we have here is a 1929 style bank run and that's not a good sign for anyone. The question is whether the people who run SVB saw it coming. The CEO, a man called Greg Becker, apparently sold more than $2 million in bank stock over the last two weeks. According to the site, "Unusual Whales," several other high-level employees of SVB, including Chief Marketing Officer Michelle Draper, Chief Operations Officer Phil Cox, General Counsel Michael Zuckert, all sold significant amounts of stock in SVB this year. Did those employees know their bank was in trouble? We don't know and once again, where were the regulators? They’re supposed to prevent this.
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Once again, we don't know and the business press is supposed to be telling ordinary people what's happening with business. Apparently, nobody noticed anything. In fact, as with the FTX crypto scam, you may recall, self-described financial experts in the media were busy promoting Silicon Valley Bank as a great investment that would last forever. The formerly great, but now quite embarrassing Forbes Magazine, in fact, named SVB to its list of America's best banks, not once, but five years in a row. And of course, inevitably you saw this coming, here is professional B.S. artist/dumb person Jim Cramer of CNBC telling his viewers to buy Silicon Valley Bank even though it was in the process of going under. This is last month;
JIM CRAMER: SVB Financial, this company is a merchant bank with a deposit base that Wall Street had been mistakenly concerned about. SVB is the old Silicon Valley Bank, recently bought one of our favorite research firms Moffett Nathanson and it's become less dependent on private equity and venture capitalist offerings. Wait a second, those dried up last year, they could come back! Long-term private equity and venture capital, they're not going away, being a banker to these immense pools of capital has always been a very good business. SVB's nearly 40% rally this year is barely a drop in the bucket
SVB is great. If that guy ever endorses anything you're doing, move to the Canary Islands. Change your name because disaster is coming, but just like FTX, all the geniuses told you to buy SVB, even when it was on the brink of total collapse. What explains that? Surely something does. We don't really know at this point. Hopefully we will someday.
What we can say tonight is that SVB, like the scammers at FTX, had quite the public relations department. We're not some greedy finance outfit that exists solely to generate cash for overpaid sleaze balls who run it. No, that's not us. We may be a bank. We've got the soul of an NGO. We care. We're saving the world and to prove it, there's a whole page on SVB's website about their plans to "monitor and reduce our own carbon emissions." Yes, because you want a bank that cares about carbon emissions and of course, there's endless posturing because it's all free about diversity, equity and inclusion.
Marisa Phan, the managing director at SVB, wrote this on LinkedIn just three weeks before the bank collapse "Feeling inspired and energized after hosting an extraordinary group of pioneering and dynamic women in Silicon Valley Bank's Female Founder and VC Tahoe Ski Retreat." Adjectives are free. They use a bunch of them and then she attached pictures of the ski trip showing the group of these pioneering and dynamic female bankers having a great time because, of course, they're having a great time because few things are more empowering to oppressed female bankers than skiing in Tahoe.
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And they kept this cr-- up to the very end. As their bank began to slip beneath the waves, SVB posted this on its social media feeds "As part of Women's History Month, we're celebrating founders of women led companies like Suma Wealth's, Beatriz Acevedo, a company that SVB described lovingly as "focused on closing the Latinx wealth gap." It's the problem with Latinx. There's a wealth gap and there was a video, too. Of course, there was.
So, now that SVB has blown up and lost billions of other people's money in the process, we thought we would show you the video because, oh, we can't resist. Enjoy.
BEATRIZ ACEVEDO: My name is Beatriz Acevedo and I am the CEO and co-founder of Suma Wealth. I was born in Tijuana, Mexico. I am a very proud border girl who had the privilege to grow up with the best of both worlds. I went to school in San Diego. I went to UCSD. I have a lot of scars from my days going across the border. I remember I got this memo and it just said that all my shows were cancelled, and it was a time where women, never men, were put into something they called their refrigerator. If they felt like you had a lot of power, they would just put you there to cool you off for a while.
Unaddressed in the video is whether she's actually a capable banker. We hope so. We have no idea. We know the guys at SVB were not capable bankers, didn't seem to spend a lot of time banking or paying close attention because they had videos to make about dynamic, pioneering, glass ceiling shattering women. So, when interest rates were at historic lows, SVB bought more than 20 billion in long-term Treasury bonds and to be fair, they were encouraged by the government to do this. All banks were.
The problem was when interest rates went up as they were always going to, because they can't stay at zero forever (Did you know that?). Well, when that happened, those bonds lost their value and that, of course, was a disaster for a ton of banks, but a true disaster for SVB and then a disaster for a lot of individuals who had their money there and companies that had borrowed money from SVB.
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So, you can expect a lot of bankruptcies in the coming weeks due to this and then the countless downstream effects from those bankruptcies, all of them bad. This is a disaster, not just for the tech industry, people who we could easily make fun of, but for everyone, for all of us.
But the interesting thing is the Biden administration doesn't seem to care at all. They're not that interested because numbers, whether you're making money or losing money or doing something efficiently, you're doing it sloppily doesn't really matter as long as you're making videos about pioneering female bankers and as long as they get to ski in Tahoe. That's the real concern.
Just today, Biden's top economic adviser, Cecilia Rouse, addressed reporters in the White House in the briefing room about what had just happened and she assured everybody that the bank run we're watching is an isolated incident. No, it's not a big deal, just this one bank. It's not connected to anything else at all and the fact that this bank failed, just like the fact that FTX failed, has nothing to do with the fact that the people who run it spend a ton of their time doing completely irrelevant cr-- that had to do with politics and changing American culture.
Were you reassured by that? We should know that Cecilia Rouse has been thinking a lot about this when she worked at Princeton, which is a university in New Jersey. She wrote her research agenda on diversity, equity and inclusion. The title is "Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem." Because the color of your economists is essential. Their competence? Not so much. Just so you know, by the way, these are the consequences of that attitude. See in South Africa, where they don't have electricity tonight.
Coincidentally or not, that is the very same topic, diversity in economics, that our director of our National Economic Council, Lael Brainard, is also fixated on. Another genius! When Brainard was at the Fed in 2021, she wasn't too concerned about future bank collapses due to the insane and reckless Fed policy she was overseeing. No, why worry about that because there's climate change? That's what she was really worried about, climate change. "As part of our prudential and financial stability responsibilities, we are developing scenario analysis to model the possible financial risks associated with climate change and assess the resilience of individual financial institutions in the financial system to those risks."
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Just a pause for one second. Anyone who writes that way is a moron m-o-e-r-o-n, moron. So, if you find someone in a position of authority, particularly economics, who cannot write a declarative sentence, be prepared for your banks to fail.
We should be honest that ESG and equity are only part of the problem here. Stupidity is a huge part of the problem, SVB and FTX for that matter are just two of several major players in the financial industry that have gone under in recent months. Are you noticing any of this?
There was the bank Silvergate (more than 11 billion in assets). There was a crypto broker, Voyager (a billion in assets), the crypto fund 3AC ($10 billion in assets), Block-fi and a number of others. On Friday, Wells Fargo customers reported they didn't get their paychecks as expected. The bank says that was just a computer glitch. We don't really know, but we're paying attention.
What is very clear is that we're witnessing something serious happening in the finance sector and in other sectors of our economy. We don't know where any of this is going. We're certainly praying for the best. We don't want to see hysteria. But if you're the Treasury secretary of the United States, you would be very concerned. You'd be paying really close attention because that's your job.
But Janet Yellen is not paying close attention. She's not worried about it because it's in this country. She's worried instead about funding the pensions of Ukrainian government workers. She flew to Kyiv the other day to tell us that and as always, Janet Yellen is highly focused on her core duties as treasury secretary. That would be equity, climate change and abortion.
JANET YELLEN: The Biden-Harris administration has made racial equity a centerpiece of our economic agenda.
YELLEN: Roe v. Wade and access to reproductive health care, including abortion, helped lead to increased labor force participation.
YELLEN: President Biden, and I feel the same way too, believe that climate change is an existential threat that absolutely must be addressed.
YELLEN: The message I bring you from President Biden is simple. America will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.
She's very upset about Ukraine and we don't have enough abortions and equity, equity, abortion and Ukraine. Got it. Got it. Got it. Children hour is over. It's time for the adults because we have actual problems, not even call them systemic problems with our economy and so when you have those, you want smart, wise people with foresight and self-control and the ability to focus on things of actual consequence, not on the fashionable cr-- that occupies most of our time here on cable news, but in the long-term stuff that will ensure your country remains strong and prosperous when you are gone, which for most of these people won't be long because they're very, very old.
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Where are those people? Where are the adults? Here you have the second biggest bank failure in American history, the biggest since 2008, the second largest failure in our nation's history and they're yammering on about racial equity. Really? Yes, they are because nobody in Washington at this point even acknowledges economics is real unless it can be tied somehow to climate change or racism. Here's Congresswoman Cori Bush of Saint Louis.
REP. CORI BUSH: My Republican colleagues have unironically invited a for-profit think tank and oil titans whose expertise is in maximizing profits, especially at the expense of our Black or Brown and our indigenous neighbors’ health, safety and well-being. Last week, I joined ranking member Raskin and all of my Democratic Oversight colleagues in calling on Oversight Republicans to denounce White nationalism and denounce White supremacy in all its forms.
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White supremacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, great. That's fine and we get peace and prosperity. You can handle some dumb people at the helm and it's kind of amusing. They're fun to laugh at, but if things start going south, the dumb people have to leave and they should be replaced by the smart, wise people who have some idea of how to fix things. But those people have not yet arrived. Joe Biden just introduced a $7 trillion budget. Oh, a budget? That’s funding, that's money, right? That should address the core economic concerns that every person can feel. Most people don't understand it. Everybody can feel it.
The $7 trillion budget mentions "climate change’ 148 times. He mentions "equity," never defined, 63 times, "environmental justice" 25 times and cross-dressing, now known as transgenderism, eight times. Feel better? Are the adults back?
No, but it will add $20 trillion to the national debt over ten years and that means more inflation and more interest rate hikes and more bank failures. This could be very, very, very serious. We hope it's not. We hope it ends today, an isolated story, but it very much could be. But our leaders don't care. In fact, they seem to be doing everything they can to accelerate it, and that's not reassuring.
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