Tag Archives: Silicon Valley Bank

Is Anyone Surprised?

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The bailout of the Silicon Valley Bank was a little odd–depositors are going to be paid for bank deposits above the $250,000 limit of the The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). That’s very interesting when you begin to examine who these large depositors are.

On Saturday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article revealing who some of the depositors in the Silicon Valley Bank whose money will be paid back are regardless of the supposed limit.

The article reports:

Prominent tech companies, liberal news outlets, and a Democratic politician’s vineyards are among the thousands of businesses that breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday when the Biden administration moved to bail out Silicon Valley Bank.

It’s good to have dishonest friends in high places.

The article continues:

Silicon Valley Bank maintained $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in total deposits, making it the 16th-largest bank in the country. It was the second-largest bank to fail in American history when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took control of the institution on Friday.

President Joe Biden has insisted that the FDIC’s move was not a bailout, and claimed his administration is working to protect “American workers and small businesses.” But average Americans won’t benefit the most from the bailout. Ninety-three percent of the bank’s depositors kept more than $250,000 in the bank.

While the California bank was famous for its rolodex of tech clients, it happily accepted deposits from all manner of people, including some of the individuals and institutions involved in pushing the Biden administration’s bailout.

Here are some of the companies and individuals involved:

Gavin Newson

BuzzFeed

Vox Media

Black Lives Matter

The Green Energy Racket

The article concludes:

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure could have delivered a seismic blow to the climate change industry and the more than 1,550 technology companies that specialize in solar, hydrogen, and battery storage solutions that held funds at the bank, had Biden not bailed the institution out.

Still, the bank’s failure will have lingering effects for the industry, with insiders warning that Silicon Valley Bank was often the only institution willing to lend funds for their projects.

“Silicon Valley Bank was in many ways a climate bank,” Kiran Bhatraju, the chief executive of the nation’s largest community solar manager, Arcadia, told the New York Times. “When you have the majority of the market banking through one institution, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage.”

Wedbush Securities technology sector analyst David Ives added that the bank’s failure is a “major blow to early-stage and even late-stage tech startups.”

Please follow the link to read the details. Hard-working Americans are bailing out people who make more money than most of us every dreamed of. President Biden really doesn’t want the rich to ‘pay their fair share.’

Misplaced Priorities?

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On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about some of the financial activities of the Silicon Valley Bank. Admittedly, the Biden economy has made life for banks more challenging, but that should encourage careful use of depositors money–not reckless spending by banks.

The article reports:

Silicon Valley Bank might have been able to make good on $74 million promised to customers had it not pledged the money to leftist causes.

According to a new database by the conservative Claremont Institute, the collapsed bank donated or pledged to donate nearly $74 million to groups related to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Federalist that SVB’s failure on the heels of its left-wing activism “is yet another indication that SVB was focused on woke virtue signaling instead of protecting their customers’ deposits.”

“Time after time we see the same pattern: companies that are the most concerned with ESG scores and woke politics do the worst jobs serving their customers,” Hild explained. “The rest of corporate America should learn from SVB’s failure now, before they are the next company to make headlines for comically poor management.”

Public reports published on the company’s website offer a window into the bank’s leftist corporate apparatus that prioritized Wall Street’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards over its fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Robert DuChemin at Substack points out:

Something that is suspicious about Joe’s (Biden) behavior is that on Monday morning he guaranteed repayment of depositors such as Roku (that had $580 million on deposit in Silicon Valley Bank). On Monday night Joe had a “private” fundraiser in the neighborhood, at which executives of RoKu and other Silicon Valley Bank depositors were present.

So, on Monday morning China Joe gave them hundreds of millions of dollars from government funds and on Monday night they gave some of that money to the democrat party. Nothing to see here.

BTW, Roku only has 1,600 employees worldwide. There is no way in hell they needed $580,000,000.00, to make payroll this month. It is just one more lie from the Biden Administration, a gang that lies every time they speak.

This is corruption on a level that could even make Hillary Clinton jealous.

It’s where we are, folks.

Actually, The Tax Payers Are The Ones Who Paid For This

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Om Saturday, CNBC posted an article about the Silicon Valley Bank.

The article reports:

  • Silicon Valley Bank employees received their annual bonuses Friday just hours before regulators seized the failing bank, according to people with knowledge of the payments.
  • The payments were for work done in 2022 and had been in process days before the bank’s collapse, these people said.
  • On Friday, SVB CEO Greg Becker addressed workers in a two-minute video in which he said that he no longer made decisions at the 40-year-old bank, according to the sources.

Who made the decision?

The article continues:

On Friday, SVB CEO Greg Becker addressed workers in a two-minute video in which he said that he no longer made decisions at the 40-year-old bank, according to the people.

The size of the payouts couldn’t be determined, but SVB bonuses range from about $12,000 for associates to $140,000 for managing directors, according to Glassdoor.com.

SVB was the highest-paying publicly traded bank in 2018, with employees getting an average of $250,683 for that year, according to Bloomberg.

After its seizure, the FDIC offered SVB employees 45 days of employment, the people said. The bank had 8,528 employees as of December.

A spokesman for the FDIC declined to comment on the bonuses.

There are two sides to this discussion–the employees did earn their bonuses in the prior year and it was customary to pay them at this time, but essentially the taxpayers all over the country were responsible for paying those bonuses. Those are pretty generous bonuses for a business that failed.

On Monday, The New York Post noted that despite what we are being told, the taxpayers will be bailing out the Silicon Valley Bank.

The New York Post reports:

The cost of bailing out two banks that catered to the tech industry will likely be paid by average Americans in the former of more fees, less service and potentially higher taxes — despite President Biden’s pledge otherwise, experts warned Monday.

The dire predictions came as the price of regional bank stocks fell due to fears of further collapses, with trading in more than a dozen of them paused during a massive market sell-off.

The extraordinary rescue announced Sunday night will use the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s Deposit Insurance Fund to make whole all customers of the Silicon Valley Bank and Manhattan’s Signature Bank, which did business with tech startups and the cryptocurrency industry, respectively.

But the fund gets its money in quarterly payments from FDIC-insured banks, which will likely make customers shoulder the burden of any added costs, said William Luther, director of the American Institute for Economic Research’s Sound Money Project.

Hold on to your wallet–President Biden is in the White House.

The Cost Of “Woke”

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Don Surber posted an article at Substack today about the cost of the ‘woke’ culture. Please follow the link to read the entire article. I will post a few highlights here.

The article notes:

As I watched the sudden collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, I marveled once again at how a geezer’s administration run by tokens of diversity can wreck the economy by turning mundane functions — say, unloading transport ships — into extraordinary catastrophes, such as a supply chain backlog.

Train wrecks happen, sure, but it takes a special innate incompetence to have the EPA set fire to the toxic contents spilled over the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio, sending a black cloud into the air that was seen for miles around as it spread the danger over hundreds of square miles.

I am awestruck by the ineptitude of a Department of Transportation that spends billions of dollars not to build roads but to destroy them in the name of fighting racism.

The return of inflation after a 40-year hiatus tops the list of Biden’s calamities. Thus far the administration’s answer is to keep borrowing and spending as if there is no tomorrow in the fervent and erroneous belief that this will make it go away, when in fact all it does is fuel inflation.

No idea is too kooky for these Ivy League-educated idiots. The Los Angeles Times reported, “How white and affluent drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color.”

The story said, “Angelenos who drive less tend to be exposed to more pollution.

“It may sound like a paradox, but it’s not. It’s a function of the racism that shaped this city and its suburbs, and continues to influence our daily lives — and a stark reminder of the need for climate solutions that benefit everyone.”

The people who live near freeways are poor and the LA Times presumes they all are people of color. Look for Biden and his Band of Bimbos to destroy freeways in Southern California in his second term and turn them into more camps for the homeless. This will continue until liberals decide that because most homeless people are white that homelessness is white privilege and start destroying the camps.

Behind every disaster, of course, is a token that Biden appointed to be the first fill-in-the-blank.

The article points out:

The money poured into SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) like it did to Studio 54 in the coke-craven 1970s and 1980s. Unlike that New York disco, the money was legal and not kept in garbage bags, but the amounts deposited were outside the FDIC’s coverage.

97% of its deposits were uninsured. As the big banks spin this as the fault of the FDIC, remember they seek insurance coverage of money they did not insure. SVB paid insurance premiums for only 3% of its deposits. That is all the money it is entitled to. These are the rules the banks wanted because if the banks wanted the coverage, they would have gotten Congress to cover them.

If you go uninsured and you wreck your car, you pay to fix it. The same should be true with bank deposits. I get that the feds limit their insurance to the first $250,000 of each depositor’s money. But why isn’t there a secondary insurer? Why don’t the Aflac duck and the Geico gecko get together and provide insurance for deposits above $250,000? They could hire Flo to pitch their insurance.

The article concludes:

Zero Hedge pointed out that as it died, SVB still pushed DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion. Zero Hedge said, “You see, SVB believes ‘inclusion ignites innovation,’ although I guess liquidity wasn’t part of the ethos.”

Go woke. Go broke. Have the Fed bail you out.

This situation is the son of the $700 billion bailout from 2008-2009.

Pundits say the bankers learned nothing from that debacle but they learned plenty — mainly that they can ignore the rules because Uncle Sam will always bail them out.

This time, the bailout did not include taxpayer money. Instead, the Fed will print up another $25 billion to feed the fires of inflation. Next time, taxpayer money will be needed because all those banks that are Too Big To Fail are not big enough to cover Biden’s many, many calamities.

And no one will be held accountable.