RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/great-comeuppance-economy-silicon-valley-bank/

You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in the café car. So the train is always full of strivers, working their cell phones. On Tuesday morning, the phone chitchat was anxious. Even in Washington, where analysts and economists had been working all weekend to contain the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the reeling of the financial system when markets opened on Monday caught people by surprise.

It shouldn’t have. The last time bankers ran off with the savings of their compatriots was only fifteen years ago. A lot of people at the time asked: “How could we have been so gullible?” But really, Americans, Englishmen and other finance-dependent peoples had reason to be trusting. The young bankers in all those photos from the time may have looked ridiculous — standing with their backs to the plate-glass windows of a Lehman Brothers conference room to receive their walking papers, or lined up with cardboard boxes to cart their office possessions home. But what strikes us now is that they were so numerous. There were whole skyscrapers full of them, devising their multivariable hocus-pocus and bragging about their sailboats to young women in wine bars after work. Few liked them as a group. But they seemed the product of a real, stable, indispensable service industry. By contrast, whenever SVB has been mentioned in recent days, you see a lot of B-roll of automatic teller machines. You wonder if they have any employees. Whenever the cryptocurrency-focused Signature Bank is mentioned, you see empty shop fronts in malls. You wonder if they have any customers.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/money/2023/03/risky-and-risque-banking-business/

” A $100 five-year bond paying 1 percent becomes worth much less than $100 (about $80 I think) if interest rates rise to 5 percent. Thus SVB realised steep losses when forced to sell bonds. Makes no sense unless you’re incompetent, hired to satisfy DEI requirements. Or distracted, occupied by the skin colour and sexual wotnots of you and your colleagues.”

Tucker Carlson of Fox News enjoyed himself the other day (15 March), making fun of the very woke Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The risk manager of the UK arm of the bank – which sold for £1 to HSBC – described herself as a “queer person of colour from a working class background.” What has that do with banking or risk management, Tucker queried; as he did other woke performances from both SVB and, its fellow failed bank, Signature Bank. Apropos dancing bankers. Apropos a seminar on gender-neutral pronouns hosted by Signature Bank’s president Scott Shay, and featuring Finn Brigham, who identifies as a ”genderqueer trans male.” I can’t define that for you.

I worked in the second half of the 1980s for State Bank Victoria (SBV not SVB) as chief economist. You can’t imagine a set of people less woke. Yet the bank failed in 1991. So it isn’t wokeness per se that brings down a bank. It’s inattention to risk management. However, wokeness, particularly when exhibited in the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), surely doesn’t help. It can mean that focus is taken away from the main game. And it can mean that people are employed and promoted on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as skin colour, sex, sexual preference and having gender-bending proclivities.

Risk management is a serious business. In fact you can say it’s the only game in town when it comes to commercial banking. At its core, banking itself requires few skills. Money is accepted on deposit at one rate of interest and then lent at a higher rate. Costs are paid and profit is earned. In normal times, it’s hard to make a mess of that. Thus bankers on the whole are not the brightest kids on the block. They don’t need to be.

A true story. Waiting in line to get the bad news of my redundancy, following the failure of SBV, a fellow executive, older than me and also for the chop, spoke to me in his distress. He told me of his father saying to him, “you’re not that good at schoolwork son, a bank’s the place for you.” He wasn’t at all sure what he would or could do next.

Run of the mill banking is one thing, when it comes to bank risk management, bright people are needed.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Sustainability is an over-used word. Or is it? Googling the word generates over three billion hits, almost three times the number of hits generated by its parent, sustain. It is a relatively new word, first appearing in the United Nation’s 1987 Brundtland Report, which defined sustainable development as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It generally refers to climate and the environment and what man is doing (or not to doing) to sustain it, along with racial, gender and equity issues. Wikipedia defines sustainability as “a societal goal that relates to the ability of people to safely co-exist on Earth over a long time.” (Sustain is defined: to support, uphold, or strengthen.)

In 2015, the United Nations adopted a collection of 17 interlinked objectives called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include: the elimination of poverty, reduced inequalities, climate, peace, justice, decent work, responsible communities, and strong institutions – all goals with which no reasonable person would disagree, but also words whose definitions are amorphous, and which can vary with user. Nevertheless, woke universities and colleges have been quick to add “Sustainability Institutes.”

But might the word be more inclusive? We must harbor our resources and protect the environment. But we must not constrain man’s propensity to create and adapt. It was underestimating man’s capacity to innovate that led to Thomas Malthus’ faulty prediction in 1798, that population growth would exceed resources. People need the freedom to express ideas, and the freedom to go where aspiration, ability and dedication take them. For that they need a sustainable political environment, which allows for individual freedom, functions under the rule of law, includes property rights, and provides access to free markets.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/17/feds-foreign-corruption-double-standard/

At the same time Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, Justice Department documents and federal court records reveal.  

In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, a Chinese national suspected of espionage even as he was negotiating business deals with former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James. 

The Justice Department later used information obtained from the searches and wiretaps—which included conversations with the current president’s son and brother—to convict Ho of bribery and money laundering, as part of a separate corruption case involving United Nations officials. But it declined to tap into its trove of evidence—including “over 100,000 emails”—to explore the connections between Ho and the Bidens, who received millions of dollars from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front and discussed sharing office space. 

At Ho’s 2018 trial, prosecutors hid Hunter’s connection to Ho, redacting his name from court exhibits (see here) while describing Ho as “the person who flies around the world paying bribes to advance the interest of the oil company [CEFC China Energy],” according to hearing transcripts. 

A federal database shows the Bidens failed to register as foreign agents while engaged in activities on behalf of CEFC, a state-owned entity suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence. Federal anti-spying laws require anyone acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).  

The Justice Department did not prosecute either Biden family member for potential violations of FARA for representing the interests of the Chinese.  

This stands in stark contrast to the Justice Department’s aggressive pursuit of alleged FARA violations involving no fewer than six Trump campaign officials. In August of 2016, shortly after receiving a tip that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had allegedly been told that the Russians might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the bureau opened FARA investigations into Papadopoulos and three other Trump associates with no clear ties to Papadopoulos: national security adviser Michael Flynn; campaign manager Paul Manafort; and campaign adviser Carter Page. The FBI subsequently investigated Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates and Trump’s Mideast adviser Walid Phares under the same statute.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/a_visit_to_the_national_world_war_ii_museum_is_both_sad_and_uplifting.html

Some of you may have noticed my absence over the past week. That is because I made my first visit to New Orleans. The city is beautiful, although a bit overwhelming, because it hits every one of your senses. However, what I want to write about here is not New Orleans generally, but, more specifically, a visit to the National World War II Museum.

When it comes to the museum itself, it’s a well-designed, thoughtful museum. A friend of mine who is an avid historian usually fulminates against what the government does to American history. His oft-repeated line is “The National Park Service is where history goes to die.” However, although he had a few quibbles with the museum, especially the minimal focus on General Patton, he also thought it was excellent.

The museum’s exhibits are broken down into three sections. In the older building, through which one enters, there are movies, a gift store, and an entire exhibit dedicated to D-Day. In the larger, newer building, the exhibits are broken into the European theater and the Pacific theater. There is also a moving exhibit of the merchant Marines, who turned out to have one of the most dangerous jobs in World War II as they fought to keep the military supplied with food and equipment.

In each section, the museum designers tried to create a feeling of “you are there.” For Europe, the rooms felt like burned-out towns or, for the Battle of the Bulge, a forest in Belgium. In the exhibit on the Pacific, you felt as if you were entering a ship, and then you found yourself in tropical jungles. Of course, nothing could create the feel of actually being there, in the freezing cold of Europe or the tropical heat of the Pacific, all the while see-sawing between fear, boredom, and exhaustion. Still, it raised the museum above being sterile.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/the_truth_about_parental_rights_legislation.html

Considering how egregiously parents’ rights have been trampled in recent years, federal parental rights legislation recently reintroduced in Congress sounds promising, but its premise is dangerous. In fact, it could result in eroding parents’ God-given rights to direct the upbringing of their children.

The precedent for parental rights legislation was initiated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose bill was dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. A noteworthy feature of the DeSantis law is that it prohibits sexuality education in kindergarten through third grade (five through nine-year-olds). It is hard to believe that we need a law to prohibit sexuality education for children who, at these young ages, aren’t even thinking about sexuality, but nonetheless it is necessary.

Governor DeSantis has done more for protecting children and our country’s freedom than any governor I have observed in my lifetime. He has been right on education policy on many fronts and continues to take the lead on common sense education policy. But the reality is that parental rights are determined by our Creator, not the government. Despite such good intentions from leaders like DeSantis, any parental rights legislation is flawed at its inception, suggesting parents’ rights are determined by government rather than the fundamental, inalienable rights of parents afforded by their Creator.

Prominent conservative legal scholar Joanna Martin, JD, recently published an article titled “A Massive Transfer of Power Over Children from Parents to Governments” where she discusses similar concerns with parental rights legislation. She writes specifically about the bill passed by the North Carolina Senate, saying, “…what SB 49 does is to transfer power over children from parents to governments. Parents’ ‘rights’ consist of the privilege of being notified of decisions made respecting their children by governments; and they are granted certain rights to challenge some of the decisions.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3906121-the-law-of-unintended-consequences-how-federal-judges-may-be-driving-up-crime-rates/

Despite the fact that tough-on-crime rhetoric may have cost them votes in the midterms, prominent Democrats continue to double down on calls to roll back bail reform. Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) doubled down on her calls for bail reform efforts to be walked back, urging legislators to expand judges’ ability to lock up the accused while awaiting trial.

She’s not alone. New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been beating the drum against bail reform for months — and New Jersey lawmakers recently introduced a bill to scale back the state’s landmark bail reforms. Amid growing concerns about violent crime, politicians have seized on the idea that locking people up before trial leads to safer streets.

The problem is that decades of research show that mass pretrial incarceration actually undermines public safety. And a new study from Professor Siegler’s Federal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School suggests that judges are making the problem worse.

According to one well-known study, locking even low-risk arrestees in jail for just two or three days increased the likelihood that they are arrested for a new crime by 40 percent. What’s worse, people jailed pretrial often lose their jobs, homes, and custody of their children. 

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/16/americans-oppose-corporate-diversity-quotas-poll-crc/

The vast majority of Americans believe U.S. companies should hire executives based solely on merit, character and quality, according to a CRC Research poll shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Among respondents, 87% supported a merit-based approach, compared to 8% who supported a quota system for race and gender and 5% who were unsure or refused to answer, according to the CRC Research poll conducted for the 85 Fund. The pattern held true across political affiliations, with most Democrats, Republicans and independents favoring a merit-based hiring approach for executives.

At 93%, Republicans were only slightly more likely to oppose racial and gender quotas in corporate hiring compared to other groups: 90% of independents and 86% of Democrats supported a merit-only hiring approach, according to the poll.

“Instead of simply finding the best people to serve their customers, companies utilizing these quotas admit that they are prioritizing catering to extreme Leftists over the people who actually purchase and use their products,” Will Hild, Executive Director of Consumers’ Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As we have seen with SVB, there are real-world consequences when businesses focus on identity politics over their core business.”

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed Friday in one of the largest bank failures in history, and some have linked the failure to the bank’s massive spending on left-leaning initiatives.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/17/why-woke-frisco-fed-chief-missed-silicon-valley-banks-warning-signs/

Wokeness has replaced competence and merit across the banking sector, and San Francisco Fed Chief Mary Daly is the poster child of this pernicious trend.

A protege of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and short-list candidate for Federal Reserve vice chair, Daly was supposed to be supervising Silicon Valley Bank but apparently was too busy playing politics and pushing woke agendas to regulate rogue banks like SVB, the second-biggest bank failure on record.

Daly had other priorities, including climate change, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, inequities between blacks and whites, LGBTQ+ rights and a host of other woke social-justice issues that had nothing to do with banking and finance.

Daly’s Fed bio gushes she’s committed to “understanding the economic and financial risks of climate change and inequities.” Never mind the more existential threat of banks in her jurisdiction amassing mortgage bonds with longer maturities that exposed investors to greater interest-rate risk.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed rapidly within 48 hours. 

In a recent LinkedIn post, Daly appeared sidetracked by racial justice, writing: “What Black voices have I lifted up? Equity & inclusion begins with me. #GeorgeFloyd.” She also posted selfies with local Black Lives Matter activists.

Meanwhile, Daly missed all the warning signs of runaway inflation, which led to the steep interest-rate hikes that made SVB’s investments worthless.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/how_leftists_help_you.html

Make problems. Solve problems with other problems. Repeat

Progressivism’s response to issues of concern to the proletariat:

Since 2010, GDP has increased 53%, from $15T to $23.4T.  Since 2010, total government debt has increased 157%, from $14T to $36T.  Government debt has increased three times faster than national productivity.  Not to worry…we handle that by raising the debt ceiling, selling treasuries, and printing money.

Household debt is $17T.  We’ll help by canceling student loan debt ($1.8T).  You can show your appreciation at the ballot box, or by early or absentee voting.

Inflation persists, triggered in large part by the post-COVID fiscal stimulus programs the government cavalierly infused into the economy after shutting it down in homage to “science.”  Maybe, but we can blame it all on Russia.

Recent bank failures have occurred, due in part to Fed-mandated interest rate hikes instituted to combat the inflation it helped start in the first place.  We’re on it.  We’ll bail them out, probably with your money, especially if they funded the Tech industry…big Democrat donors.

Middle-class share of the U.S. aggregate income has fallen from 62% in 1970 to 43% in 2018.  Yes, but we’ll continue to send blue-collar manufacturing jobs to Asia.  Let them be responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, not us.  And since most of the ultra-wealthy in the nation are now of the left, we’re no longer too concerned with income inequality.

Health care costs amount to 18% of GDP, due largely to drugs, devices, and end-of-life care.  Assuring universal access to health care through Medicaid expansion will somehow take care of that.

We have no border security…but lots of new potential Democratic voters.

College dropout rates are around 40%.  A lot of degrees now awarded don’t have any marketplace relevance anyway.  It’s all about indoctrination.

Male labor force participation rate has fallen from 86% in 1950 to 68% in 2022.  Only natural.  As we have evolved from a manufacturing-based to an information-based society, we now have a female-based workforce.  A man’s place is now in the home.