The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Monday, March 13, 2023

SVB

A federal government whose only real goal, it seems, is to grow even larger as quickly as possible. 

A political party—the Democrats—whose only real goal, it seems, is to spend trillions on inefficient and unnecessary programs that do little to improve our country or its people, but much to "buy" votes among the constituencies who reliably vote Democratic in national elections. 

Another political party—the Republicans—whose only goal, it seems, is to avoid political blow back from a propaganda media that is nothing more than the marketing arm of their opposition, and therefore quietly acquiesces to the profligate spending that has become the norm.

A federal reserve whose only goals, it seems, are first to print money and flood our system with dollars to support the Democrats profligate spending and then, once inflation accelerates, do the right thing by raising interest rates to combat it.

An administration who only goal, it seems, is to tell us the economy is terrific while it bumbles forward with programs and policies, not to mention a proposed budget, that would put us even further in debt.

The economy is NOT okay and the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) provides an ominous indicator that the goals noted above will lead to heartache. The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment:

The Treasury and Federal Reserve stepped in late Sunday to contain the financial damage from Friday’s closure of Silicon Valley Bank, guaranteeing even uninsured deposits and offering loans to other banks so they don’t have to take losses on their fixed-income assets.

This is a de facto bailout of the banking system, even as regulators and Biden officials have been telling us that the economy is great and there was nothing to worry about. The unpleasant truth—which Washington will never admit—is that SVB’s failure is the bill coming due for years of monetary and regulatory mistakes.

As the administration spent trillions on completely unnecessary bailouts and still more trillions on Covid relief that could have been completely avoided had we not listened to the lies that resulted in lockdowns and closures promulgated mostly by Democrats and their propaganda media, the Fed kept interest rates near zero. Then as 7% - 9% inflation flared (as it invariably would), it raised rates quickly.  The WSJ explains:

In a world of near-zero interest rates, SVB put the money in long duration fixed-income assets in search of a higher return. Regulators after the 2008 crisis had deemed these Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities nearly risk-free for the purpose of measuring bank capital. If regulators say they’re risk-free, banks and depositors may be less careful.

But those securities declined in value as the Fed took interest rates up quickly to break the inflation it helped to cause. SVB had enormous capital losses if it were forced to liquidate those assets before maturity. That’s exactly what happened as SVB customers withdrew their deposits. The San Francisco Fed regulates SVB and somehow missed this rising vulnerability. The Fed and Treasury will try to blame the bankers, but they are as much if not more culpable. The idea of elevating San Francisco Fed president Mary Daly to the Board of Governors seems preposterous after SVB.

It seems that in the 21st century, the federal government does far more harm than good. It is generally incompetent and ineffective at best, and dishonest, duplicitous and totalitarian, at worst. We need to starve it so it shrinks, but that won't happen. The result is a world in which SVBs become a common occurrence, economic displacement becomes the norm, and inflation ($5.00 gas and $7.00/doz. eggs) become commonplace. 

UPDATE (03-14-2023):

Jennifer Sey comments on how SVB is yet another unintended consequence of our disastrous Covid policies:

Lockdowns caused unprecedented disruption to the world’s economy and global supply chain, and the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.

Widespread business closures due to lockdowns caused mass layoffs of, primarily, hourly wage workers with little to no savings. Then the government spent money that we did not have so people could pay their rent and not starve. And then they did it again.

Of course, this caused inflation. Then the Fed raised interest rates to halt the inflation.

And now we are experiencing the ensuing disaster that is unfolding in real time. And the little guy is left holding the bag whether through exorbitant pricing of basic necessities like milk and eggs or small business investors wondering when and if they’ll be able to extract their money from SVB to pay their employees and vendors.

No, I’m not a banker. But it’s easy to see what happened and that’s the rough outline in the simplest possible terms.

You can’t shut the world down and think there will not be consequences. You just can’t.  

And yet, the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the propaganda media want to blame Trump for SVB. In a way, they're half right. Trump has culpability for allowing Anthony Fauci, MD to essentially dictate policy early in the pandemic. His insistence on a national lockdown was accepted by the Trump administration, and all the rest flowed from it.

A bit off topic for this post, but this tirade from the Victory Girls blog reflects my feelings about Saint Fauci pretty accurately:

We still have not seen the “Fauci Files” that Elon Musk said would be coming out in January, but, to be fair, there is a whole lot of Fauci stuff that has come out of Twitter. And, we now know that Dr. Anthony Fauci deliberately suppressed the lab leak theory because he didn’t want the “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab to be traced back to the NIH funding that EcoHealth Alliance had gotten and given to the Chinese. We also know that Fauci and colleagues like Dr. Francis Collins deliberately left other scientists like Dr. Robert Redfield of the CDC out of the information loop, and smeared others like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, all to keep their preferred narrative going. Still, Anthony Fauci doth protest too much. He just doesn’t know WHY people could be THIS mad at him ...

He lied about masks – first saying the public didn’t need them (the “noble lie” to make sure that medical providers had them), then saying the public needed to wear them, maybe even wear two of them.

He lied about schools – and the final straw was when he said it wasn’t safe for kids to return to school UNLESS Biden’s big “relief” package passed.

He lied about the vaccine’s effectiveness – and it cost people their jobs, and sometimes their lives.

When he is confronted about his part in spreading fear and panic, he lies and says that HE IS THE SCIENCE, how DARE you criticize him.

And then Democrats wonder why millions of us think he's a bad guy. No ... not just a guy "who was doing his best in an ever changing situation" ... a bad guy who never, ever should have censored other opinions, lied, and then lied again to suppress the fact that he indirectly funded the very gain-of-function research that made Covid a worldwide problem.