Posted on 03/14/2023 9:37:04 AM PDT by Beowulf9
The recent implosion of Silicon Valley Bank escalated culture war arguments, as some conservative politicians who were already targeting certain investing approaches blamed the bank’s downfall on “woke” practices.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) called SVB “one of the most woke banks” because of its “ESG-type” policies — a reference to environmental, social and corporate governance-driven investing that has been embraced by billion-dollar asset managers and scorned by conservatives of late.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely believed to be gearing up for a 2024 presidential bid, said Sunday that Silicon Valley Bank’s diversity, equity and inclusion requirements “diverted from them focusing on their core mission.” And Monday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said diversity and inclusion standards are why “big banks are now increasingly incompetent.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
ESG is a leftist, rich-country fantasy - enabled by printed, fiat currency, having a world’s reserve currency and especially - zero interest rates.
As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, it is your duty to ZERO out the White House Budget to pay for this Billionaire Bailout, Maybe the FBI could have their budget ZEROED out also to help...
> Here’s what to know.
Comrades! This is the official party policy. Forward Soviet!
Making money is hard to do, just try it.
No wonder the elites would rather focus on ESG.
MSN is a bulwark for The Ministry of Truth.
Their internet homepage screams bizarre, new accusations against Donald Trump several times a day....every, single day.
ESG policies didn’t have anything to with former Lehman execs bringing down another bank.
They took unseemly risks so they could keep their clients/depositors happy.
Those depositors accepted this risk in exchange for favorable interest and VIP treatment that wasn’t available to them at well run banks.
Now that their risky bank has failed, they will be made whole by middle class Americans AKA taxpayers.
Another go woke and go broke?
Corrupt white liberal ‘elites’ take care of their own... next the corrupt DOJ and FBI will ‘investigate’ and discover these criminal banksters are totally innocent.
And that the border is secure... and inflation is transitory and Hunter’s laptop is Russian Disinformation.
A pox on all fools who put Biden in office.
Where did the billions of dollars withdrawn before the crash go?
And, every bank that follows is the same.
Go woke-—well, you know, the thing.
They aren’t solely blaming ESG. They also understand economics where as the left doesn’t. They know high inflation led to higher interest rates which screwed up the bond market and force the bank to take a huge loss.
Meanwhile the bank didn’t have a risk officer that could have pointed this out to them, but instead was wasting money and focus on ESG programs.
While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs!
By Katherine Donlevy, March 11, 2023
In addition to instituting SVB’s first “safe space catch-up” — which encouraged employees to share their coming out stories — and serving on LGBTQ+ panels around the world, Ersapah also spent time over the last year serving as a director for Diversity Role Models and volunteering as a mentor for Migrant Leaders.
Silicon Valley Bank
What is Silicon Valley Bank? Here’s what to know after sudden collapse
“I feel privileged to co-chair the LGBTQ+ ERG and help spread awareness of lived queer experiences, partner with charitable organizations, and above all, create a sense of community for our LGBTQ+ employees and allies.”
Ersapah couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
SVB was abruptly shut down Friday by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation shortly after it disclosed it had taken a $1.8 billion hit from a $21 billion fire sale of its bond holdings.
It faced a cash crunch due to surging interest rates, and a recent meltdown in the tech sector led many customers to pare their deposits.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-pushed-woke-programs-ahead-of-collapse/
The primary cause of failure was the mismanagement of their balance sheet. Using long term assets to cover short term liabilities is stupid and incompetent. The bank examiners should have been all over these idiots.
Though I have plenty of negative things to say about ESG, the entire exercise of blame-seeking wrt Silicon Valley Bank is entirely misplaced, IMO, and the GOP’s efforts to counter the completely stupid gyrations of the left trying to blame this on Trump is not a level of stupid to aspire to nor compete with. Especially for such a PR-clumsy bunch such as the GOP.
SVBs’ losses are vastly, overwhelmingly due to its management buying 10-year US Tsy bonds (as a way to park excess cash) in the face of promised, sworn-to bumps in interest rates that Powell declared. I mean, that is an utterly inane strategy, absolutely guaranteeing huge losses. It is true that the money center banks parked short term bailout money in T-bills after the 2007-2009 crisis. The Fed was not at all pleased with this, they wanted the money to be shoved into the economy. But there is a hell of a lot of difference buying 30 day or 6 months Tsys securities versus buying 10-years. Many people think bonds are “stable” “non-volatile” investments. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and how bank execs did not know this is unfathomable. Bonds can be CRAZY volatile at times and are capable of showing ENORMOUS face losses over interest rate hikes. But see, this hasn’t happened for a decade or so, so we forget. I will never understand how the SVB execs could have been so oblivious to this.
Bigtime. "Here are your talking points" headlines give the game away too quickly.
Tom King, 63, was the ONLY member of Silicon Valley’s board of directors with experience in the financial industry, while the others include a former Obama employee and a major Hillary Clinton donor who cried when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election....... ..... It has previously been accused of being too focused on ‘woke issues’......
.....major donors to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Clinton, Obama and President Joe Biden who also made contributions to the political action campaigns for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), a longtime member of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.
‘Everyone knew it was the go-to bank for woke CEOs,’ an unnamed source told the New York Post. ‘They knew they were aligned politically. The companies SVB loaned money to all had a woke agenda.’
Sure sounds like malfeasance, shouldn’t all of them be asset stripped as a result of this deliberate failure?
This SVB wasted a whole month celebrating Pride garbage. They were also the largest local financier of “climate” startups. They spent too much time on virtue signalling. Normal banking was not their Forte. Buggery and climate change was.
It may or may not have been ESG directly, but it is clear that they both donated a lot of money, and put a lot of their employee and management resources into ESG things - instead of running a business.
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