Following the last banking collapse in 2008, caused by the banksters of Wall Street and their subprime mortgages fraud scheme, Congress enacted the bare minimum of new banking regulations in Dodd-Frank to prevent the so-called “too big to fail” banks from engaging in this kind of risky speculative investments again.

Republicans were largely opposed to Dodd-Frank, and when they took control of Congress again in 2017 with Donald Trump in the White House, they rewarded their banksters of Wall Street campaign donors by rolling back provisions of Dodd-Frank. It was once again the Wild West.

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The New York Times reported:

Some banking experts on Friday pointed out that a bank as large as Silicon Valley Bank might have managed its interest rate risks better had parts of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulatory package, put in place after the 2008 crisis, not been rolled back under President Trump.

In 2018, Mr. Trump signed a bill that lessened regulatory scrutiny for many regional banks. Silicon Valley Bank’s chief executive, Greg Becker, was a strong supporter of the change, which reduced how frequently banks with assets between $100 billion and $250 billion had to submit to stress tests by the Fed.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is the biggest in the U.S. since Washington Mutual in 2008, and was not the last.

On Friday, Signature Bank customers panicked by the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank withdrew more than $10 billion in deposits in a bank run. Why regulators seized Signature Bank in third-biggest bank failure in U.S. history:

That run on deposits quickly led to the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history. Regulators announced late Sunday that Signature was being taken over to protect its depositors and the stability of the U.S. financial system.

The sudden move shocked executives of Signature Bank, a New York-based institution with deep ties to the real estate and legal industries, said board member and former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank. Signature had 40 branches, assets of $110.36 billion and deposits of $88.59 billion at the end of 2022, according to a regulatory filing.

“We had no indication of problems until we got a deposit run late Friday, which was purely contagion from SVB,” Frank told CNBC in a phone interview.

Problems for U.S. banks with exposure to the frothiest asset classes of the Covid pandemiccrypto and tech startups — boiled over last week with the wind down of crypto-centric Silvergate Bank. While that firm’s demise had been long expected, it helped ignite a panic about banks with high levels of uninsured deposits. Venture capital investors and founders drained their Silicon Valley Bank accounts Thursday, leading to its seizure by midday Friday.

That led to pressure on Signature, First Republic and other names late last week on fears that uninsured deposits could be locked up or lose value, either of which could be fatal to startups.

Business Insider reports, Bernie Sanders says Silicon Valley Bank’s failure is the ‘direct result’ of a Trump-era bank regulation policy:

Sen. Bernie Sanders has blamed a Trump-era banking law for the Silicon Valley Bank’s failure.

“Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed,” Sanders wrote in a statement on Sunday.

Sanders was referring to the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which former President Donald Trump signed into law in May 2018.

The bill was seen as a significant rollback of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. At the bill signing, Trump commented on the previous banking reforms, saying “they were in such trouble. One size fits all — those rules just don’t work,” per The Washington Post.

Trump also said at the time that the Dodd-Frank regulations were “crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide.”

Signing the bill into law meant that Trump was exempting smaller banks from stringent regulations and loosening rules that big banks had to follow. The law raised the asset threshold for “systematically important financial institutions” from $50 billion to $250 billion.

This meant that the Silicon Valley Bank — which ended 2022 with about $209 billion in assets — was no longer designated as a systematically important financial institution. As such, it was not subject to the tighter regulations that apply to bigger banks.

Sanders wrote in his Sunday statement that the Trump administration had disregarded all the lessons it should have learned from the 2008 Wall Street crash and the Enron scandal.

“Now is not the time for US taxpayers to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. If there is a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, it must be 100 percent financed by Wall Street and large financial institutions,” he wrote.

Sanders added that the US “cannot continue down the road of more socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.”

“Let us have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, repeal the disastrous 2018 bank deregulation law, break up too big to fail banks, and address the needs of working families, not the risky bets of vulture capitalists,” Sanders wrote.

And what do we hear today from the Republicans who helped enact the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018? These accomplices to the banksters of Wall Street want to blame the bank panic on “wokeness” – WTF? Far-right falsely blame diversity as reason Silicon Valley Bank collapsed:

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is leading the charge against “wokeness” and diversity, this time falsely blaming “DEI” – diversity, equity, and inclusion – as the reason Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday.

“I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis told Fox Corp.’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, as Florida Politics reports.

“I also look at it and say we have such a morass of federal regulations. We have a massive federal bureaucracy and yet they never seem to be able to be there when we, we need them to be able to prevent something like this,” DeSantis said.

Ron DeSantis is a complete moron. It was GQP deregulation of the banks that made this possible, not regulation.

Donald Trump, as President, stripped away the very regulations that could have stopped Silicon Valley Bank from collapsing. Just hours after DeSantis made his remarks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced all SVB depositors would be able to access all their funds on Monday, even over and above the FDIC guarantee limit of $250,000, and promised Wall Street, not U.S. taxpayers, would foot the bill.

[Coup Plotter co-conspirator] U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), posting screenshots from SVB’s website, mocking the bank’s diversity policies along with its environmental, social, and corporate governance polices.

“Well, ESG and DEI certainly didn’t save SVP,” he declared.

[As] Florida Politics noted, “a more proximate reason for the bank run that led to FDIC receivership could be its heavy investment in 10-year bonds with low-interest rates combined with the need for liquidity from its high-dollar account venture capital clients. When interest rates surged recently, SVB found itself in a cash crush, made worse by an earlier meltdown in the tech sector, causing many capital investors to scale back.”

Republican House Oversight Chairman Jim Comer wrongly blamed SVB’s “woke” policies for its downfall.

Comer, as Mediaite noted, told Bartiromo on Sunday, “we see now coming out they were one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing. This could be a trend and there are consequences for bad Democrat policy.”

This MAGA Fascist is one serious POS.

The former Moron-in-Chief who signed the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (2018), is his usual totally insane self. CNBC reports:

Trump, who is widely considered the frontrunner among the early field of official and likely candidates, took the opportunity to lash out at President Joe Biden, while offering no specifics about how he would handle the situation differently.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump issued an all-caps prediction that “WE WILL HAVE A GREAT DEPRESSION FAR BIGGER AND MORE POWERFUL THAN THAT OF 1929. AS PROOF, THE BANKS ARE ALREADY STARTING TO COLLAPSE!!!”

That claim came as Trump’s spokesman asserted in a statement to Fox News that “Biden has presided over a catastrophic economy that has devastated everyday Americans and has caused misery across the country due to his anti-America policies.”

Insane Republicans like these are yet another reason why Republicans should never be in charge of the government ever again. In addition to being anti-democracy seditious insurrectionist MAGA Fascists.




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