Free Republic

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable center of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better. In the early days of the tech revolution, some watchers imagined an almost utopian, communitarian society on the horizon. In 1972, the California writer and zeitgeist...

The company plans to lay off employees on Wednesday ... In an internal memo posted to a Meta employee message board on Tuesday evening and viewed by Vox, the company told employees that the layoffs will start on Wednesday and will impact a wide range of technical teams including those working on Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the memo was sent to employees but declined to comment further. The cuts could be in the range of 4,000 jobs ... Meta employees in North America will be notified by email between 4 am to 5 am...

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence April 27. *SNIP* When Javice was trying to sell her college financial planning startup, Frank, to JPMorgan Chase, she told an employee not to share exactly how many people used Frank’s service,...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pressing some of the largest depositors at the failed Silicon Valley Bank to reveal the nature of their relationship with the firm that collapsed last month. Warren and Ocasio-Cortez, two of the most progressive lawmakers in Congress, sent letters to 14 of the bank’s largest depositors, raising concerns about the relationship between the failed bank and some of the largest venture capital firms that invested in it. The fall of Silicon Valley Bank marked one of the largest bank failures in U.S. history and sent shockwaves through the global banking...

Gordon Moore, the tech pioneer and co-founder of Intel, has died at age 94, Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced Friday. Moore died peacefully in his home, surrounded by family. Moore was best-known for his famous observation known as Moore's Law. In 1965, Moore made the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. Moore's prediction proved to be correct, and the idea of faster, smaller, and cheaper chip technology is still the driving force behind Silicon Valley's mission to this day. “Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his...

Wokeness has replaced competence and merit across the banking sector, and San Francisco Fed Chief Mary Daly is the poster child of this pernicious trend. A protege of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and short-list candidate for Federal Reserve vice chair, Daly was supposed to be supervising Silicon Valley Bank but apparently was too busy playing politics and pushing woke agendas to regulate rogue banks like SVB, the second-biggest bank failure on record. ... Daly missed all the warning signs of runaway inflation, which led to the steep interest-rate hikes that made SVB’s investments worthless. ... she said inflation didn’t affect...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on Monday decided to break up Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and hold two separate auctions for its traditional deposits unit and its private bank after failing to find a buyer for the failed lender last week. It will seek bids for Silicon Valley Private Bank until March 22 and for the bridge bank until March 24. The private bank, which is housed within SVB's retail operations, caters to high net-worth individuals. Bank and non-bank financial firms will be allowed to bid on the asset portfolios, the regulator said. ... First Citizens said in a statement...

In the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th biggest bank in the country, many are left wondering what went wrong. Both current and former employees have stated that the bank’s support of remote work is a contributing factor. Axios reports that current and former employees of Silicon Valley bank have mentioned the bank’s support of remote work as a contributing factor to its recent collapse. SVB stood out in the banking sector for its commitment to remote work. “If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it’s that we can trust our employees to...

Americans need to have an important discussion about free speech now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so. The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public. To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals: Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers,...

One of the benefits of being a Washington insider, from the president of the United States to the lowliest bureaucrat, is never having to admit your policies are wrong. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) - the nation's 10th largest - the financial policy chickens of this, and previous administrations, have predictably come home to roost. Record debt, massive new spending, and the failure of regulators to see what was coming contributed to the run on SVB. It didn't help that in 2018 President Donald Trump signed the biggest rollback of Dodd-Frank bank regulations since the global financial...

One entrepreneur says the bank was offering ‘basically subprime business loans.’ ... If government funds it, they will come. That’s an overlooked story line in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. If Washington wants to point fingers, it should aim the biggest digit at itself. ... We serve those creating positive environmental change,” SVB’s website brags, noting that the bank worked with some 1,550 companies in the “climate technology and sustainability sector.” Most of these companies weren’t filling some vital market need. Rather .. SVB was beloved for its willingness to offer “banking services to startups that often weren’t profitable,...

The vast majority of Americans believe U.S. companies should hire executives based solely on merit, character and quality, according to a CRC Research poll shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Among respondents, 87% supported a merit-based approach, compared to 8% who supported a quota system for race and gender and 5% who were unsure or refused to answer, according to the CRC Research poll conducted for the 85 Fund. The pattern held true across political affiliations, with most Democrats, Republicans and independents favoring a merit-based hiring approach for executives. At 93%, Republicans were only slightly more likely to...

Nearly 200 more banks may be vulnerable to the same type of risk that took down Silicon Valley Bank: The value of the assets they hold. There are 186 banks across the country that could fail if half of their depositors quickly withdraw their funds, a new study published on the Social Science Research Network found. Even insured depositors — those with $250,000 or less in the bank — could have problems getting their cash if these institutions face the sort of run that Silicon Valley saw a week ago. The concern is that these banks hold a significant amount...

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...

SVB Financial Group, the company whose former subsidiary Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week, filed a voluntary petition for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York to preserve value for stakeholders.SVB Financial said it has approximately $2.2 billion of liquidity and cash and its interests in SVB Capital and SVB Securities. It also said it has "other valuable investment securities accounts and other assets for which it is also exploring strategic alternatives." The bankrupt entity listed assets and liabilities of up to $10 billion each.SVB Financial also...

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.

the rush to rescue depositors of Silicon Valley Bank .., a bank directly associated with Silicon Valley, which he terms as the "Democratic stronghold of the world," is as big a "crony payoff as you possibly can have.".. the Silicon Valley Bank is enjoying a charmed life because it's in Silicon Valley," ... "It's the Democratic stronghold of the world. And 99% of their people are probably Democrats and depositors that raised hell they're all democratic donors, so this is as crony a payoff as you possibly can have." ... Morris's statement comes after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen proclaimed .....

It's no surprise that a bank focusing on woke politics failed, former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell ... "whenever you have an administration that is going to completely concentrate on diversity, equity, [and] inclusion-type of programs, you're going to have a huge problem." ... this small bank had 1,500 climate-related loans. ... The New York Times reported that Silicon Valley Bank issued billions of dollars to more than "1,550 technology firms" working in areas such as solar, "hydrogen and battery storage projects." According to the CEO of Arcadia, the largest community solar manager in the country, Kiran Bhatraju,...

JUST IN: First Republic Bank, the San Francisco-based lender that was cut to junk by S&P and Fitch, is exploring strategic options including a sale https://t.co/fRG03oAtZG pic.twitter.com/p5vSNmnTnd— Bloomberg (@business) March 15, 2023

Friday was a dark day for the U.S. economy. Last Friday, Wells Fargo customers started complaining about missing money from their accounts. Wells Fargo has publicly acknowledged that customers are missing money from their accounts but did not provide customers with a timeline for fixing the issue. Silicon Valley Bank also collapsed on Friday. When Wells Fargo customers logged into their bank accounts Friday, they were greeted with a message that read. “If you see incorrect balances or missing transactions, this may be due to a technical issue and we apologize. Your accounts continue to be secure and we’re working...