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Glasseye

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On 3/11/2023 at 1:10 PM, Lemondropkid said:

Definitely a worry.

After all this easy monetary policy, banks are left holding a load of goverment bonds, and that doesn't look to clever when interest rates rise ,and the value of the bonds goes in the opposite direction.

 

 

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing with most of these big banks.  The level of corruption is stupendous, while the majority of the public has no clue. 

The rating agencies ? Are they fucking serious ??? Look what happened in 2008 with that load of bollocks. 

The markets have steamrolled since then, unreal the levels we are at now. No doubt there will be a big bust soon. The question is how will those containment programs they supposedly instituted with the stress tests and all of that work when the shit starts hitting the fan.

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Worth noting here IMO is that the easing of restrictions for so called mid-range banks and also hazardous materials carrying railroads, both easings occurring under the DaRump administration, has directly led to these recent crises. 

And watch Faux News declare in detail how Biden f***d this up. 😏

Edited by ChiFlyer
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  • 2 weeks later...

 

Dems who voted to roll back bank regulations in 2018 took campaign cash from Silicon Valley Bank, lobbyists

 
  • FIRST ON FOX: Nearly two dozen Democrats in the House and Senate who voted for the 2018 banking legislation that prominent Democrats, including President Biden, are blaming for last week's collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) received thousands of dollars in contributions from the now-shuttered bank and its lobbyists prior to the vote.

SVB, the nation's 16th-largest bank, collaped last Friday after depositors hurried to withdraw money amid anxiety over the bank's health. It was the second-biggest bank failure in United States history after the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008. Two days later, Signature Bank in New York was closed by federal regulators over concerns of a bank run, sparking fears of a wider financial crisis.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which passed in 2010 under the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Great Recession, set tougher regulatory safeguards on banks with assets worth over $50 billion. SVB lobbied heavily for the passage of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which passed in 2018 under the Trump administration and raised the asset threshold to $250 billion.

Prominent Democrats, including President Biden, have blamed the bill for contributing to the current banking crisis.

"During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks, like Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, including the Dodd-Frank law to make sure that the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again," the president said Monday. "Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements. I’m going to ask Congress and the banking regulators to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely this kind of bank failure would happen again and to protect American jobs and small businesses."

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

The 2018 bill was able to pass both chambers of Congress with 16 Senate Democrats and 33 House Democrats voting in favor. Of those 49 Democrats, at least 23 received campaign contributions from SVB, its CEO and its lobbyists.

The campaign for Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., for instance, received a total of $19,200 from Franklin Square Group consultants and longtime SVB lobbyists Matthew Tanielian, Joshua Ackil and Brian Peters between 2009 and 2018, according to Federal Election Commission records. His campaign also received $6,500 from Silicon Valley Bank PAC and SVB Financial Group PAC between 2012 and 2017.

The campaign for Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., received a total of $21,200 from Tanielian and Ackil between 2010 and 2017. He received $19,100 from Silicon Valley Bank PAC and its parent SVB Financial Group PAC between 2011 and 2017.

The campaign for Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., received a total of $11,800 from Tanielian and Ackil between 2012 and 2017. He received $5,000 from Silicon Valley Bank PAC and SVB Financial Group PAC from 2012 to 2017.

FORMER DEMS INCLUDING CLINTON DONOR, OBAMA OFFICIAL DOMINATED SVB'S BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The campaign for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., received a total of $9,350 between 2012 and 2018 from Tanielian, Ackil and Peters, who left Franklin Square Group in 2022, according to his LinkedIn.

The campaign for Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., received a total of $7,500 from Tanielian between 2011 and 2017 and $2,500 from Ackil in 2011.

The campaign for Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., received a $1,000 contribution from SVB President and CEO Greg Becker in February 2016.

The campaign committee for Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., received a $1,000 contribution from Silicon Valley Bank PAC in 2017 and a total of $4,000 in contributions from Ackil between 2015 and 2018.

The campaign for Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., received $3,000 from SVB Financial Group PAC between 2009 and 2012, a total of $2,500 from Ackil from 2010 to 2013, and $1,500 from Tanielian from 2010 to 2012. 

The campaign for Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., received $1,000 from Silicon Valley Bank PAC in May 2017 and a total of $6,400 from Tanielian and Ackil between 2015 and 2017.

The campaign for Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., received a total of $3,000 from Peters between 2009 and 2016, and he received $1,000 from Ackil and $500 from Tanielian in 2011.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., received a total of $4,000 from Tanielian and Ackil between 2012 and 2015.

Other Democrat senators who voted for the 2018 legislation and received contributions from Tanielian, Ackil or Peters, albeit nominal amounts, include Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.

Other House Democrats include Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., and Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn. Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., former Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., and former Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wisc., also received contributions from Silicon Valley Bank PAC and the SVB lobbyists before the 2018 vote.

On the other side of the aisle, at least 16 Republicans who voted for the 2018 bill received thousands in contributions from Silicon Valley Bank PAC prior to the vote, but not from the individual lobbyists, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Sen. Portman, R-Ohio., among others.

Franklin Square Group and the campaigns named did not respond to Fox News Digital's requests for comment.

Post-2018, SVB’s California executives and PAC have been busy propping up a handful of politicians, which has primarily benefited Democratic lawmakers prior to the bank’s collapse last week that has sent ripples throughout the banking industry. The board of directors is also reportedly packed with staunch Democrats.

Becker, the bank's president and CEO, cut two maximum checks totaling $5,800 to the campaigns of Sen. Warner and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer during the 2022 midterm election cycle. Schumer has since pledged to return all SVB-related contributions.

Becker also gave $2,500 to the New Democrat Coalition Action Fund in May last year. The New Democrat Coalition Action Fund sent $1 million in contributions to numerous Democrat politicians during the 2022 elections.

Becker's most recent donations came on the heels of $5,600 he donated between President Biden's 2020 campaign and victory fund.

The bank's political action committee has received around $40,000 from its employees over the past two election cycles. In turn, it contributed thousands to Warner, New York Democrat Rep. Gregory Meeks and North Carolina Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry during the 2022 elections.

It also passed thousands of dollars to Sen. Peters and California Democrat Reps. Maxine Waters and Zoe Lofgren's campaigns during the 2020 elections, among a few others. Waters has also announced plans to return all SVB-related donations.

Fox Business' Joe Schoffstall and Bradford Betz contributed to this report.

______________________________________________________________________________

Kevin O'Leary has investment accounts in SVB and stood to lose money from the collapse, said yesterday SVB was a bank with "idiot management and an incompetent Board" was the reason for the collapse. 

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NEW YORK POST

BUSINESS

 

  •  

JPMorgan analysts warned about Silicon Valley Bank’s $16B in ‘unrealized losses’ in November

March 12, 2023 6:11pm 

JPMorgan warned in November that Silicon Valley Bank’s “$16 billion unrealized losses” could pose a serious risk, according to an analyst report reviewed by The Post on Sunday.

SVB — which collapsed Friday — was the subject of a Nov. 15 report issued by the JPMorgan North America Equity Research Team for customers paying for the research.

JPM released its now-troubling research after holding a “deep dive webinar with SVB CFO Dan Beck,” the report said.

“Should the balance of deposit outflows and inflows persist for longer than expected, another key topic we discussed … is the risk that SVB will need to sell underwater [Held To Maturity] securities and realize losses,” the report said.

“The focus of investors rapidly shifted to the company’s $16 billion unrealized losses in its HTM securities portfolio with investors expressing that should deposit outflows persist for longer than expected, the company may need to sell underwater HTM securities to meet cash needs.”

Still, JPM’s analysts were largely optimistic about the California-based bank and even gave it an “overweight rating” — meaning the stock’s value would increase.

But insiders say that’s just part of the internal corporate kissing-up that goes on between analysts and businesses.

“Sell-side analysts always put a positive spin on things to remain in the company’s good graces,” a banking source told The Post. “But to a sophisticated Wall Street investor, that [HTM] note says it all.

“That note laid out all the risk concerns on the front page,’’ the source said.

“SVB and people covering it knew they had serious risk-management issues.”

JPMorgan declined to comment to The Post on Sunday.

To be sure, many on Wall Street were blindly optimistic about SVB’s prospects before the US bank’s fall.

CNBC analyst Jim Cramer has been under fire on social media over a clip that recently resurfaced showing the “Mad Money” host recommending viewers buy shares of SVB’s parent company, which owns the tech-driven commercial lender that collapsed.

“The ninth-best performer to date has been SVB Financial [the bank’s parent company] — don’t yawn,” Cramer told viewers during a Feb. 8 episode of “Mad Money.”

Cramer listed SVB Financial among his “biggest winners of 2023 … so far” alongside blue-chip stocks such as Meta, Tesla, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Norwegian Cruise Line.

“This company is a merchant bank with a deposit base that Wall Street has mistakenly been concerned by,” Cramer said in the clip.

 

My Comment of the above article: JP Morgan Bank was able to see the vulnerability of SVB. The 12th District Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco either didn't see or ignored! 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The Washington Examiner

 

SVB collapse: San Francisco Federal Reserve president comes under bipartisan fire for missing signs

 March 22, 2023 11:25 AM

San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly could offer Republicans and Democrats a rare point of unity as lawmakers trade blame for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month.

That’s because Daly’s failure to act on clear signs of weakness at the bank under her supervision has drawn ire from both sides of the aisle.

MEET ALVIN BRAGG, THE PROSECUTOR GOING AFTER DONALD TRUMP

Critics agree that the San Francisco Federal Reserve should have spotted warnings about Silicon Valley Bank’s balance sheets long before the bank shuttered and sparked unease about the banking industry.

But they disagree on why the system failed at one of its most basic responsibilities.

“The Fed screwed up. People are mad because they made a major error with profound consequences,” Aaron Klein, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Examiner. “But it’s not just the San Francisco Fed. It’s the entire system.”

Both the San Francisco Fed and the Federal Reserve had responsibility for overseeing SVB.

The San Francisco Fed has come under particularly harsh criticism, however, because it failed to exercise its legal discretion to perform stronger oversight of the bank. Greg Becker, SVB’s chief, sat on the board of the San Francisco Fed until his bank collapsed.

“The SF Fed had all of the resources and information necessary to properly supervise SVB, yet it spectacularly failed to do so,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote in a letter to the institution last week. “Instead of fulfilling its statutory mandate to supervise SVB, the SF Fed has been distracted with engaging in politically-charged research and advocacy on environmental, social, and governance (‘ESG’) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) topics, like global warming and racial justice.”

Indeed, Daly, the San Francisco Fed president, has come under fire in recent days from conservatives for her high-profile embrace of liberal pieties such as climate change and racial equity.

For their part, Democrats have blamed a 2018 law that exempted some banks, SVB included, from the most strenuous regulations applied to banking giants.

But experts say the real reasons she and the Federal Reserve’s board of governors missed the signs of trouble are far more complicated — and not yet entirely clear.

Under the 2018 law, San Francisco Fed officials had the option to perform stricter oversight of banks with $100 billion or more of assets; they chose not to do so in SVB’s case.

Klein compared the stricter oversight the San Francisco Fed could have performed, if it wanted, to an “advanced test,” while the oversight SVB did receive was more like a “basic test” in school.

“That law also gave the Fed the discretion to apply the advanced test to banks whose failure would be systemic, which highlights another flaw of the Fed’s judgment, in that by choosing not to give the Silicon Valley Bank the advanced test, they were saying the failure of Silicon Valley Bank would not be systemic,” he said. “Then they reversed course when Silicon Valley Bank failed.”

“Silicon Valley Bank failed the basic test,” Klein added. “Whether the advanced test would have caught it or not, we can debate also.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) signaled potential scrutiny may lie ahead for Daly when she said on Sunday that she had lost confidence in Daly specifically.

“The Fed should have acted,” Warren said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Fed officials reportedly did raise several concerns with SVB in 2019 and 2021, mostly related to the bank's processes for determining risk management. What the Fed did to ensure its concerns got addressed, and whether regulators warned of the particular factors that brought down the bank or just of procedural weaknesses, remains to be seen.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call less than a week before the SVB collapse, Daly said she was “hearing some very encouraging news” from people in her district about inflation and the direction of the economy.

She, like many other top officials at the Fed, has repeatedly acted as a cheerleader for the higher interest rates that helped bring down SVB.

SVB was the largest bank in her district, and its client base consisted largely of depositors reliant on a technology industry that had publicly struggled for months. Layoffs and falling revenues in the tech sector had splashed across headlines for months before SVB’s collapse.

SVB’s deposits were almost all uninsured — meaning most were above the $250,000 level that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation guarantees to repay in the event of a bank disaster — which regulators should have seen as a warning sign amid the economic uncertainty. Uninsured depositors are more likely to flee their bank if they sense turbulence ahead, heightening the risk of a bank run.

Silicon Valley Bank had uninsured deposits around 90%; Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, two far larger and more stable banks, both had uninsured deposits around 33%.

First Republic, another regional bank seen as facing the same kinds of risks as SVB, had fewer uninsured deposits at 68%, according to a Business Insider analysis.

And the Fed appeared to miss the extent of unrealized losses SVB was carrying on its books due to its heavy investment in securities that lost value once interest rates started to rise. While those investments appeared on paper to give SVB more value, they cost the bank dearly when bank executives went to sell the investments in a desperate effort to have more cash in hand.

Critics say San Francisco Fed officials should have weighed the risks posed by rising interest rates at the largest bank under its jurisdiction.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The Fed has said it will conduct a review of how its own process broke down with regard to SVB.

Cruz, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, has also demanded answers from the San Francisco Fed, including whether SVB conducted regular stress tests and whether the Fed officials enforced liquidity requirements on the bank.

__________________________________________________________________________________

CalEden:

SVB Bank was a Woke Bank poorly managed. SVB gave BLM at least $73 million. SVB invested $5 Billion in Green investments. SVB was also a major funding source for Chinese start up technology companies in addition to the source major funding for US Tech Companies. SVB was a major contributor to the Democratic Party and to Joe Biden. Most of SVB's account balance were well over the FDIC protected $250,000 limit. SVB was a Bank for Tech Companies Capital and Tech Billionaires. The Fed's are now rescuing Billionaires that Joe Biden declared in his Budget that Billionaires must pay their fair share. Additionally, the Fed is bailing out PRC Investments by Federal Law foreign investors stand behind all US investors. And this bailout was announced within 24 hours of the collaspe.  If this Bank was located in East Palestine, Ohio there would not be any Federal bailout. Prior to SVB collapse there were a couple of suitors, but FIDC took control of the Bank.

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Newsom Pushed White House to Bail Out SVB, Celebrated Decision Without Mentioning Conflict of Interest

Story by Ari Blaff  2h ago
 
 
California governor Gavin Newsom lobbied the White House to bail out Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and later celebrated the decision after it was made public, without mentioning that the firm is a backer in at least three wine companies he owns.
 
The Biden administration “acted swiftly and decisively to protect the American economy and strengthen public confidence in our banking system,” the governor noted in an official statement released on Monday.
 

“Their actions this weekend have calmed nerves, and had profoundly positive impacts on California,” Newsom added. “California is a pillar of the American economy, and federal leaders did the right thing, ensuring our innovation economy can continue to grow and move forward.”

However, The Intercept revealed Tuesday that the governor failed to note in his official remarks that at least three wineries owned by Newsom – CADE, Odette, and Plumpjack – are listed clients of SVB. Newsom further glossed over his personal banking ties with the now-defunct firm and the fact that his wife, Jennifer Siebel, was the recipient of a $100,000 charitable donation from SVB in 2021.

The potential conflict of interest did not appear to be on Newsom’s mind when the governor’s office acknowledged over the weekend that he had been in touch with the White House and was directly involved in discussions over the failing bank.

“Over the last 48 hours, I have been in touch with the highest levels of leadership at the White House and Treasury. Everyone is working with FDIC to stabilize the situation as quickly as possible, to protect jobs, people’s livelihoods, and the entire innovation ecosystem that has served as a tent pole for our economy,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

“Governor Newsom’s business and financial holdings are held and managed by a blind trust, as they have been since he was first elected governor in 2018,” a spokesman representing the governor’s office said in a statement to The Intercept.

During the 2018 gubernatorial campaign, which eventually brought Newsom to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, the candidate insisted that he would not part with the wineries. “These are my babies, my life, my family. I can’t do that. I can’t sell them,” the candidate reportedly responded following one question.

The next year, upon assuming office, Newsom established a blind trust to be run by a family friend to oversee the family’s portfolio of hotels, restaurants, and wineries.

SVB went into economic free fall last Friday as depositors rushed to pull funds from the bank triggering a run. It became the second-largest bank to experience such a fate in American history and the first since the Great Recession. More than 90 percent of depositors held above the $250,000 threshold protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

 

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Edited by CalEden
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2 hours ago, Yesitisdakid said:

If my US bank fails i am convinced the insurance will keep my money safe. Now here in Thailand i am not so sure if there is a failure

Thailand deposits are only insured up to 1 million baht per deposit per financial institution (link).

A bigger concern here is an unscrupulous employee taking your money and the bank not covering the loss. Been several news reports of that happening over the years.

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