silicon valley bank

I checked the database that was provided that claimed that they did, and my keyword search of the docs for BLM and Black Lives returned no response. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I contacted the author and requested an explanation. If I get a reply, I'll post it.

 

Well, first off, bank regulations will never ever stop a banking crisis, because for example, banks have no control over Credit Reference Agency's mistakes.

 

Remember too much of the Left's self-righteous virtue-signalling over Occupy Wall Street?

'Occupy Wall Street' Redux

'...a series of bank bailouts and consolidations could be the perfect setup for a very destructive Credit-Anstalt situation. The BTFP bailout of SVB – and Gavin Newsom – offers a pathway to a mega crisis.'

GREASY GAVIN GETS BAILED OUT

'in a world where you can score nearly 5 percent from Treasury Direct – with no brokerage fees – why keep excess deposits in the bank when you only get a fraction of a percent? It’s a good question…'

And folks started withdrawing. SVB buckled in 10 hours.

'Customers at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) recently answered this question by pulling their deposits en masse. On March 9, SVB customers withdrew more than $1 million per second for 10 hours straight – totaling $42 billion – before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized the bank and declared it insolvent.'

'since SVB failed, Signature Bank has also failed. In addition, Credit Suisse is now getting a bailout from the Swiss National Bank. At this rate, any number of other banks could soon be toast.'

'BTFP is code for socializing losses. The regulators may say it isn’t a bailout. The taxpayer isn’t directly paying for it. Nonetheless, if you – the taxpayer – have a bank account, you will be picking up the tab via surcharges and fees your bank imposes to bailout SVB depositors.'

That would those of us without accounts in excess of $250,000, or, if we did, we took the time to open multiple accounts to keep each under the FDIC limit. If one doesn't want to go to that effort and inconvenience, fine, but the amounts above $250k are uninsured, unless of course you are politically connected privileged gentry. You know the very folks that Occupy Wall Street railed against, and too much of the Left loudly virtue-signalled support for.

'Should you have to pick up the tab for California Governor Gavin Newsom’s wineries, billionaire businessman Mark Cuban’s drug company, or any of the other rich elites that failed to appropriately manage their risk?'

NO!

 

Private Profits - Public Losses

 

Because it isn't the president's job. That's is supposedly why we have all those regulators who don't regulate. They knew months ago that there was a problem and did nothing why? Look at the list of depositors.

 

there are times when Government needs to step in and there are times when Government does step in when no one asked. But the one thing she is known for, the Consumer Protection Bureau was a good idea because you really can't have businesses police themselves. That is definitely letting the fox guard the hen house from inside the hen house. Eventually, they will screw up too just as much as government screws up. As for Sen. Tsongas, he too was for big government, especially on social issues such as environmental conservation, aka climate change now, and to protect consumers from unhealthy business practices, he was a die hard Reaganomics type of guy and we now know that Reaganonics, or voodoo economics that GHWB labeled it does not work at all.

 

“Reaganonics” worked very well for many people, @Alwayssa. If you are young, you need to get a perspective other than the one many college professors give you these days. George H. W. Bush later regretted coining that term. It was a piece of campaign rhetoric Bush coined during the 1980 Republican primaries.

If you lived during that period, you would know that the economy really sucked during the Carter administration (1977 - 1981). Inflation was out of control, unemployment was high, economic growth was at a standstill and some people thought that there was no way out. It was called “stagflation.” Ronald Reagan’s policies fixed that which was one of the reasons why he won the 1984 election in a landslide.

If the leftist professors have any objectivity at all, they have to grudgingly give Reagan credit for fixing a difficult situation.

 

Each time the lack of regulation results in members of an industry engaging in risky behavior that would otherwise have been prevented under a more rigorous regulatory environment, the deceit of conservative's demonization of regulators becomes more obvious.
Remember, the roots of Reagan's S&L crisis was excessive lending, speculation, and risk-taking created by deregulation.

 

Yep, a team of government bureaucrats, unelected and with no checks on them, are going to fix everything. All we need to do is give them total control, and everything will be perfect.

Have you ever heard of market forces? Their influence over bad behavior is more effective and fair. I had my accounts at Bank of America for years. If you asked me a decade ago, I would have recommended them.

A few years ago, it seemed that their business strategy changed. There was far less interest in retail banking and more toward what they saw as the more lucrative business services. The quality of their product went down, and I left them for another bank that met my needs. That’s how the market works. It’s not perfect, but it’s an essential part of the mix and definitely more desirable than heavy handed regulation.

Is banking regulation necessary? Absolutely! In the 19th century banks ran wild. They issued their own paper money, which sometimes totally worthless, and cheated a lot of people. The saving grace was that many people never ventured more than 10 miles from home their entire lives. A national currency wasn’t necessary for many. All of that began to change during the Civil War. Most people don’t known it, but banking reform got started during the Lincoln administration with the national bank system.

 

we were not "virtue signaling" at occupy. we were seriously disagreeable about the outrageous bail outs and the bonuses then, and oppose whatever they are called this time.

the problem with capitalism is that it is not sustainable, and must be refinanced (in the form of bail outs and gov't programs) by the working class in order to survive.

 

Not remotely close to what I said. Read it and learn.

How Trump’s Deregulation Sowed The Seeds For Silicon Valley Bank’s Demise
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrar...-silicon-valley-banks-demise/?sh=37d215cb3432

 

It’s exactly you said. Your message, “We need more regulation.” Own it.

In the mean time, I have had some alternative thoughts on these bank failures. Banks are supposed to make conservative, safe investments to satisfy regulators. The banks in question had a lot money in U.S. Treasury bonds which are beyond AAA. They also invested mortgage backed securities, which are only as good as the loans their portfolio. Investing in other things like common stock and lower grade bonds is too risky. The trouble is when the interest rates went up, the value of the long term bonds went down. This leads to a salient question. What should have been in these bank’s portfolios that would satisfy the regulators and hold their value?

 

Yes, it did, namely, those who lived on the West Coast, aka California, and East Coast, namely NY, Virginia, and a few other places. What is also did was a wealth drain in the midwest, namely Chicago, Detroit, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. It also got hooked on credit, began our process to be dependent on debt financing for the government, and it worked for banks, which brokered the first financial crisis, the Savings and Loan crisis. Yes, in the 1980s, it was bad, at least in the early part, but that was due to high inflation and a more competitive environment. But what it did do was make businesses smaller, namely, the HQ and centralized location of those businesses and why most of the people who were laid off were not ordinary workers, but middle managers. And that was part of that wealth drain I was talking about. It was mostly a bag of mixed nuts. We exchanged lower interest rates through more FED involvement, which is not Reaganonics, in exchange for Reaganonics in which we doubled our debt in order for government to do things. And yet, Reaganomics really does not work because it never pays for itself, the classic line from Reagan in selling the idea. And now, we still do it, cut taxes to the bone, and still have debt financing that is now becoming a financial hazard.

So, in order to get the budget balanced in ten years, the CBO has now released a report, assuming the Trump tax cuts are removed. If we do not touch SS, Medicare, mandatory VA benefits, and Defense Spending, ALL programs, including DHS and every agency we have that receives federal Tax Dollars for its operations would have to be cut by some 87%. That includes farm subsidies, business subsidies, and the Afphabet soup of the federal government, and so forth. If we don't cut the Trump tax cuts and do that, it is 110%.

In more detail of the report, the following are the options:
1. 41% cut on all programs including SS, Medicare, Defense, VA benefits, and all remaining Federal Programs if we reverse the Trump tax cuts. This is not politically feasible at all, not even the Freedom caucus would want to do that, namely Defense and a few of their pet peeve agencies like DHS for instance.
2. If we take Medicare off the table, that rises to 57% for all agencies remaining. Again, not politically feasible by any means.
3. If we take Medicare, discretionary defense, and VA benefits, that rises to 87%. Again, not politically feasible by any means.
4. If we take Medicare, discretionary defense, VA benefits, and keep the tax cuts, it is 110%. And that is definitely not feasible.

So, the question is why to continue the Reaganomics when it is clearly not paying for itself? You really can't blame spending at all, especially discretionary spending because if you cut just "democratic favored programs" such as safety net programs such as food stamps, and others, that really won't balance the budget in 10 years AND you are putting the most vulnerable in a more desperate situation while the upper-income classes reap all the rewards and pretty much have none of the responsibility.

So, the game that the GOP is playing is not going to work in reality, and Reaganomics is not going to solve the deficit problem if we cut even 100% of all discretionary spending, including DHS, ICE, and others while leaving the DoD, SS, Medicare, and VA benefits alone.

Biden's plan is not perfect, and there are some things I disagree, but I am waiting for the CBO to give an estimate of how much savings there will be. I don't think it is $3 trillion in 10 years, more likely $2 trillion. And the GOP plan won't even match that in their current proposals.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/economics/reaganomics/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5139661/

https://apecsec.org/reaganomics-pros-and-cons/

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/01/...es-too-for-reaganomics-economic-analysis.html

 

Don't miss the connection between the Presidency and the willingness of regulators to clamp down on financial institutions taking on too much risk.

 

The competitive environment involved crushing unions and the bargaining power of labor.



This is the beginning of wage stagnation for workers, even in times of low inflation.

"Reaganomics" is tax cuts for wealthy people who take the largesse and invest it overseas. There's little reason to invest here when the domestic economy is growing more slowly as employees have less real income to spend. Of course, there would be reason to invest if we could be low-cost producers, but that was often limited to high technology products. Workers producing low technology consumer products, from socks to furniture, saw their wages stagnate and their work farmed out to low wage countries.

We have the Boomer population bulge now well into retirement with more to be added over the next ten years or so. Social Security will remain viable without too much change because we can make a good guess as to the real dollar cost. Medical care is another matter and the budget buster.

The simple matter is that we need to raise taxes to provide services old people need. There is no free lunch.

 

So what's your excuse for the last two years under Biden?

 

We have a problem with medicare because the last five years of a person's life provided they don't die young in a car wreck are always the most expensive. And CBO has been underestimating medicare costs for the entire life if the program. The CBO if I remember the number correctly estimated in the year the bill was passed that the program would only cost about 90 billion over its life time. trebled that in the first two years. Most of this has to do with advances in medical care and the fact that people live longer than ever. Note many if not most of current cancer treatments did not exist as little as two decades ago. And most of these are radically more expensive than any thing that came before. Oh and a portion of this can be attributed to our success in stopping smoking.

 

Good!

Well, Crony Capitalism, but not Free Markets. Crony Capitalism isn't Capitalism, it's much closer to Italian Fascism.

 

Your graft does not show the crushing unions. Unions were still quite popular in various manufacturing industries. The problem was that Europe was starting its EC/EU and trade barriers were in place. Then you had Japan which was making better products cheaper while consumers were wanting better quality products but still the relatively same price. And finally, the effect of the 1970s oil embargo was still being felt long after the embargo was lifted. And finally, we had our national psyche challenged. We were no longer the top dog in the world in terms of production or business destinations. It was now Europe and Japan. Hence why anti-Japanese sentiment began to have roots again in the 1980s.

I am well aware of what Reaganonomics is. But it was more than just tax cuts. It was regulatory cuts, broad based tax cuts, and government spending cuts, hoping that the cuts in spending will yield to higher spending by consumers once the inflation is on a downward path. Reagan sold it based on a lie, that it will pay for itself. At that time, none of us knew if it would or not. Sounded good on paper, but no economic analysis existed at that time.

I think you missed the point of the whole CBO paper. The CBO pretty much dampened any attempt by the GOP that their spending cuts, no matter where they come from, or how much, will not balance the budget within ten years. And yes, we need to raise taxes, especially income taxes, get more people onto SS and Medicare as well as increase the taxes. Raising the retirement age may slow the death knell on social security, but we need to improve the economic foundation first, namely the inequality in this country.

 

They don't regulate because Trump put his fat thumb on the scale.

What do depositors have to do with bank policy?

The bank took a risk high school accounting and economics students can understand. Anyone who thinks Trump and Biden didn't and don't know what banks have been doing is incredibly naīve.

Read up on interest rate swaps. Then you'll know what the banks could have done. They didn't because hedging costs money. Better to maximize profits, take stock options, sell the shares, and let the bank go under if and when interest rates go up. (Who didn't know interest rates would go up eventually?)

 

Yes, that's the reality. Italians live five years longer than Americans. We have terrible eating habits, particularly in red states (look where fast food is king).

On point.



https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/2020/56516-fig3_spending-detail-vs.png

Social Security is a known expense--we know more or less how long people will live, what they'll get, etc. The true unknown is medical care. Interest on the debt is going up because we keep passing along the bills to future generations (how kind of us!).

We have a Boomer population mode going through retirement and old age. Taxes will have to go up to take care of them or we'll create the nightmare scenario the CBO graph--or worse. That, or we'll have to push the poorest into old age poverty or reform the healthcare system that has a lot of people feeding at the trough.

 

It shows the impact of crushing unions. No, I don't attribute our problems to simply breaking unions, but it does make a significant difference.

I worked as a grocery store clerk (Vons in CA) and made $3.05/hour in January 1964. In today's dollars, that's $29.69 as of January 2023. Grocery clerks, like many low-skill positions, have seen their real incomes drop. That $3.05 was double on Sunday. Does any living, breathing grocery clerk make $59.38 per hour on any day of the week?

They still were in the late 1970s, but we were already seeing manufacturers leaving the northern states for southern states with lower wages and no unions. Over the next few decades, many moved from the South to overseas.

Competitors got over WW2.

They were used technology available to all capitalist societies and had lower labor costs.

Tax cuts don't pay for themselves. The CBO has pointed that out many, many times. No serious economist makes that claim.

Didn't miss it.

We also need to make the economy grow faster. That means we have to reject the environmentalists fighting things like pipelines and expansions to the power grid. Their idea is to do anything they can to get emissions down. They need to deal with actual problems, not public relations symbols. We need to fix public education in low- and middle-income communities. We need to improve our infrastructure. We need to improve the health of our workforce. (Italians live five years longer than Americans, Canadians close to four years.)

We need to increase taxes reduced only by getting serious about improving how government works, including stopping corporations from ripping us off. We don't cut benefits.

 

Yes. We went off the Gold Standard and our money has been depreciating ever since. In 1964 you could buy a gallon of gas with a 1964 silver dime. Today you can still buy a gallon of gas with a 1964 silver dime. The depreciation of our currency since then has been breath taking, and workers have been greatly harmed by the government's new found ability, by going off the gold standard, of creating the dollars they want to frivolously spend.

I'm not saying to go back on the gold standard, but as Alan Greenspan pointed out, it's simple to anchor the dollar to gold, just nudge rates up when gold prices start to rise (because that means the dollar is devaluing) and move them down with gold drops in price (because that means the dollar is appreciating).

Our current Federal Government is never going to allow that because it would prevent them from creating all the dollars they need for graft.

Hear! Hear!

 

1. In the early 1980s, the unions were still highly popular, But we also had high inflation, higher competition, and cost-reducing pressure from more competition in the early 1980s. Yes, there was union busting, but that did not happen until the 1990s. All your graph shows is productivity relative to hourly wages. A decrease in hourly wages can be caused by many factors, but it is not the only or significant factor. Unions are also important, but it is not for everyone and it is not the panacea you think it is.
2. I am not arguing in favor of Reaganomics. I gave an analysis. It did have some benefits, but it also had drawbacks. For an honest discussion, you need to talk about both. But I am no supply-sider which it seems you think I am. I am not.
3. the reason why was cost. We had high inflation, were on the brink of recession, and a few other factors. So, companies were moving to lower-cost areas. That is what businesses do. They try to control costs in which they can control. All employees, both union and nonunion, have had wage suppression since the 1980s, all in an effort to control inflation. That was the cost to keep inflation low and thus interest rates low which increases production, investment, and spending, which improves our GDP.
4. There is no way to grow faster until we take care of the fundamentals, which mainly include housing, education, food, and infrastructure.
5. Italians and Canadians use more preventative medicine than anything else. They have a small breakfast, a relatively large lunch, and late dinners with as little sugar as possible. We are on a sugar rush and still are. All of our foods are sweet or have sugar, even spicy food and more importantly, sweets. And that impacts life expectancy. Our habits are if a major medical emergency comes, then we deal with it and preventative medicine here is more expensive than some medical procedures. But we still have the Star Trek Technology though and are second only to Japan for those on a per capital basis such as CAT scans, MRIs, and other things. We do far more kidney and heart transplants on a per capita basis than any other country. That is both a blessing and a curse.
6. But the CBO pointed out that the GOP cost-cutting plan won't work. The question is what will the GOP do? Double Down or change the argument. It now appears that they are focusing on raising the retirement age, which I agree with in part as long as we can get more people into the system. And we may have to change the Trust fund from Government Securities to a wealth Fund under a life cycle fund through the TSP to increase in value faster.

 

US Studies How To Guarantee All $18 Trillion In US Bank Deposits



'Just how bad is it?'



$18T in deposits

$125 billion in the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund



So, how many times does $125B go into $18T?

'The Chicago Fed wrote in a paper in 1986 - after the deposit runs at Penn Square National Bank and Continental Illinois Bank - uninsured deposits are a source of market discipline for banks. Herbert Baer and Elijah Brewer go further, warning that doing away with insured deposits (i.e. by insuring every deposit as is being considered currently) would actually increase risk in the banking system.'

"While such proposals might reduce the likelihood of bank runs, they would at the same time reduce banks' incentives to control risk."

Figure out what the smart move is for the American People and what the best move is for the Fat Cats and then figure that Biden will do whatever is best for the Fat Cats.