Free Republic

Many of you may remember my reporting around "Operation Choke Point 2.0" from the spring of 2023; TLDR, Biden's financial regulators, namely the Fed, FDIC, and OCC, launched a crackdown on banks covering the crypto space. The first casualty was Silvergate Bank, which voluntarily liquidated. The standard reporting around Silvergate was that the bank lent to crypto depositors and those depositors were flighty; when rates rose, Silvergate suffered M2M losses on bond portfolios and ended up insolvent. Except that's not true. Silvergate weathered the storm, even though short sellers and members of Congress like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) encouraged a...

Signature Bank, one of the two big US destinations for crypto companies, has been closed by New York regulators. “All depositors of this institution will be made whole,” the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a joint statement. This is the third major bank that has fallen in the space of a week, and investors are spooked. The joint announcement that depositors will be protected above the $250,000 guaranteed by the FDIC appears to be meant to reassure banking customers that their money will not be frozen. Signature had $88.59 billion in deposits as of December...

Silvergate Capital Corp reported a sharp drop in fourth-quarter crypto-related deposits on Thursday and said it would cut its workforce by 40%, or about 200 employees, as withdrawals surged following the collapse of industry major FTX. Shares in the company, which lost roughly 88% of their value in 2022, were down 40% in premarket trading. Total deposits from digital asset customers declined to $3.8 billion at the end of December 2022, compared with $11.9 billion at Sept. 30, 2022, the crypto-focused bank said in a preliminary earnings report. To maintain liquidity, the bank sold $5.2 billion of debt securities at...