Free Republic

It’s important to understand that SVB’s failure didn’t arise from risky startups doing risky startup things.It’s painful for me to watch so many smart pundits and politicians on both the right and the left buy into a media narrative that seeks to blame “wealthy speculators” or “tech bros” or venture capitalists for a banking crisis that ultimately started in Washington. Let me explain.If you want to understand the context for the crisis, look at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair’s March 6 testimony — a week before Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse — where he explains that banks were sitting on...

Collapsed lender Silicon Valley Bank operated without a chief risk officer between April 2022 and January 2023 while the operation's United Kingdom-based Head of Risk stands accused of prioritizing pro-diversity initiatives over her actual role. This revelation comes after the firm became the largest bank to collapse since the 2008 financial crisis - disclosing a $1.8 billion loss in its finances. SVB's former head of risk, Laura Izurieta, who formerly performed a similar role for Capital One, left the bank in April 2022. She wasn't replaced until January 2023 when the bank hired Kim Olson, formerly of Japanese bank Sumitomo...

Since U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf began his second tenure as the agency’s head in February 2022, he has made combating “misinformation” one of his top priorities, arguing it is “a leading cause of preventable death in America now” — though “this cannot be proved,” he said. In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press (AP), Califf, who also headed the FDA between 2016 and 2017, reiterated his pledge to “save lives” by policing online content. One year into his second tenure as FDA commissioner — and despite waning public trust in the FDA —...

A small number of people (eight) had signs of previous natural covid-19 infection. Compared with those without previous infection, their antibody and T cell responses after the first vaccine dose were significantly higher (691-fold and fourfold, respectively). The study also found stronger T cell responses in people who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine, with 31% of this group producing detectable T cell responses compared with 12% of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine group. The researchers said that the clinical importance of the difference in T cell response was not yet clear, but it could be important when dealing with variants of covid-19....

Should Americans be concerned about Ebola? Should we suspend visas from the hardest hit countries? These are the questions we're wrangling with as we face the first outbreak of Ebola in the US. The administration and his supporters in the Democrat party are attempting to portray the very question as foolish, and concerned Americans as "hysterical." So let's take a look at this from a rational risk assessment perspective. (With Charts)

Since retiring and leaving Law Enforcement, I have been active in Risk Management consulting, a field that has grown rapidly throughout every industry over the past 20 years. Some of the companies I have consulted to for risk management include IBM, Gates Lear jet, National Semiconductor, and Pinkerton International Protection Services.

We’ve all heard the children’s story about the emperor and his new suit. The emperor ordered some clothes from some con men that had passed themselves off as weavers. These grifters convinced the king and his court that the clothes were “made of material that possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.” So, they pretend to dress the emperor, and as he stands there naked, all of his advisors and associates begin to comment on the beauty of the suit, since each feared that not being able to...

Bystanders to this financial crime were many By Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pablo Triana Published: December 7 2008 19:18 | Last updated: December 7 2008 19:18 On March 13 1964, Catherine Genovese was murdered in the Queens borough of New York City. She was about to enter her apartment building at about 3am when she was stabbed and later raped by Winston Moseley. Moseley stole $50 from Genovese’s wallet and left her to die in the hallway. Shocking as these details surely are, the lasting impact of the story may lie elsewhere. For plenty of people reportedly witnessed the attack,...

I don't envy Tom Ridge or covet his job for even a brief nanosecond. He's been assigned with managing a risk where there is no upside involved. All of the risk he manages is negative in nature. He constantly mulitiplies the likelihood of a bad outcome by its severity to derive a level of hazard. Unfortunately for We The People, he has color-coded these hazard levels in a manner that sometimes defies eay comprehension and then tells us all to go forth be vigilant. In doing this, Secretary Ridge sets himself up for political failure. If he raises the terror...