In the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank failure, a deeper look at the bank’s practices and its links to the political left are becoming apparent, and the subject of taxpayer-funded bailouts for corporations arises.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a favorite of the left for a very long time until its cataclysmic downfall. It partnered with a leftist charity led by the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom and adopted the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda, which is currently outlawed in several Republican states, while highlighting the role of its executives in the LGBTQ+ movement.
Just the News revealed a connection between the “California Partners Project” (CPP), which was co-founded by Jennifer Newsom, the wife of California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, and SVB. Four contributions totalling $100,000 were made by the organization to the SVB in 2021, and John China, a member of the CPP’s board of directors, is the president of SVB Capital, according to documents from the Fair Political Practices Commission.
Just The News reported:
As SVB’s investment failures mounted, the bank doubled down on its ideological commitments by pledging $5 billion in new green tech outlays, despite signs of rising interest rates negatively impacting that sector. Some institutional investors also began to raise concerns about the overall balance sheet.
Last July, the sharp difference between the liberal investment icon and the underperforming bank was on full show. According to the transcript of the discussion, SVB was boasting about its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and a Pride Month conference as J.P. Morgan executive Steve Alexopoulos pressed for answers on an investor call about why its investments had lost 8% of value in a single quarter.
“So if we look at the $137 million of investment losses, which are detailed on Page 7, that declines a bit more than we’ve seen in other periods, right, is over 8%, typically you’re like 2% to 3%,” Alexopolous said. “Can you walk us through the three buckets, so we can understand that a bit better.”
Greg Becker, president and CEO of the bank, sought to quell the fear by describing the bank’s countermeasures against potential panic. “I believe and I certainly hope we’ve kind of gotten down to the floor,” he said. “No guarantees, but this is just a flavor for how we’ve approached the securities portfolio.”
Notwithstanding these guarantees, Becker has been sued and his institution has been taken over by the FDIC in the greatest bank collapse since the Great Recession of 2008. According to experts, the crash is a signal to eliminate risky assets.
“We knew it was financially mismanaged, but oh my gosh, this is probably the most woke bank in existence of mankind — or it was the most woke bank,” said Joel Griffith, a financial fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “We should recognize the primary cause of this bank going belly up was just gross financial mismanagement. They took depositors’ money, and they put this in long term debt investments at record low interest rates, and as any financial risk manager knows, if you have interest rates that increase, the value of those debt assets are actually going to decline.”
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
Monday on the John Solomon Reports podcast, former Treasury Department official Monica Crowley spoke about the recent string of bank collapses during an interview saying government “fail safes” haven’t worked and that the dedication to social justice policies helped drive them into the ground. “Within a couple of days, we have seen three major … banks fail,” she said. “So the lightning speed of this thing and how fast the financial sector can go into crisis — and then how fast that can then spill over into the broader economy — that lesson should be lost on no one.” CONTINUE READING…