Banking

In What Sense Are Illegals Illegal?

Featured image On Thursday, the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a joint statement that cautions banks and other lenders against “discriminating” against borrowers on the basis of immigration status. These agencies admit that no such prohibition is explicit in the relevant statutes, but nevertheless, banks should beware of federal enforcement action: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Justice (collectively, the agencies) jointly issue this statement1 »

From First Republic to Old Republic

Featured image Well, First Republic Bank finally went down the drain today after circling it for several weeks. I wonder if these kinds of things might have had anything to do with it: The irony here is that First Republic is going to be acquired by J.P. Morgan. And it was Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, who signaled most directly that the move to force banks to stop financing fossil fuel production »

Yellen not sayin’ again

Featured image When Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen toed the administration line on inflation being “transitory,” she exposed herself as a political hack. Why anyone should even believe anything she says is not exactly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. No one should. The Wall Street Journal leads off its editorial today with reference to Yellen: Janet Yellen offered more assurances Thursday that U.S. banks are safe and sound—and we »

Censoring the Panic

Featured image Some Democrats are suggesting that talk about possible bank failures should be censored, lest there be a run on the banks. Jonathan Turley reports: While some rushed to get their money after the collapses, at least one leading Democrat is pushing for censorship of those who do not have faith in the banking industry. *** Subjects from climate change to gender identity to COVID to elections have been gradually added »

Biggest Victim of SVB Collapse? The Climate, Of Course

Featured image You can’t make this up, though of course you can, because everything reduces to climate change these days, except for when it can be reduced to racism, but so far the narrative makers haven’t been able to come up with the racism angle to the SVB collapse. (I predict we’ll see it by the end of the week.) Death of a Climate Bank What hasn’t received as much attention is »

J.P. Sears > J.P. Morgan

Featured image I’m not sure that the proposition in the headline here is literally true, but it occurred to me today that I haven’t caught up with the great J.P. Sears for a long time, and upon checking, I discover, lo and behold, he did a new video just today about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (“Bank Collapse for Dummies”). Worth a look (8 minutes long): “F-dick.” I like that. Also, »

10 Questions About SVB from Barry Ritholtz

Featured image One of the many Wall Street analysts I follow is Barry Ritholtz, who is an annoying liberal on politics, but shrewd about the world of finance. He has a long note out this morning about SVB that says, correctly, that no one knows anything for certain. And here are his ten very good questions: 1. Why did the bank have so much capital wrapped up in long dated Treasuries? Who »

Biden administration’s profligate spending claims another victim, more will follow

Featured image As Warren Buffet once famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.” And last week, that turned out to be the Silicon Valley Bank, whose customers include tech startups, venture-capital firms, and Napa Valley wineries. SVB’s leadership certainly deserves their fair share of the blame. Bankers, more than anyone else, knew that an aggressive interest rate tightening cycle lay ahead. Federal Reserve »

Annnnnnd . . . It’s a Bailout

Featured image The pixels from my previous post had hardly hit the ether before news broke that the Federal government is going to bail out all Silicon Valley Bank depositors in total, which means Harry and Meghan (apparently large depositors) and all the Silicon Valley start-up companies who had their money in SVB will get it all back. So the billionaire venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road won’t have to re-capitalize their »

A Wake-Up for Woke Banks?

Featured image As if this writing (Sunday afternoon), there is high uncertainty about whether the failure of Silicon Valley Bank will spread to other banks this week. There are good reasons to think SVB’s failure was peculiar to Silicon Valley and atypical of most banks. A senior bank analyst of my acquaintance pointed out to me that over 80% of SVB deposits were over the $250,000 limit for deposit insurance (I have separately »

Yellen not sayin’

Featured image At NRO Jim Geraghty documents the quotable quotes of Janet Yellen (not) speaking to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on Deface the Nation this morning: On whether the U.S. government will need to intervene and take emergency measures because of SVB failure: “I’ve been working all weekend with our banking regulators to design appropriate policies to address this situation. I can’t really provide further details at this time.” On »

Why Silicon Valley Bank Failed

Featured image Economist John Phelan offers this succinct explanation of how government policies contributed to the collapse of SVB: On Friday regulators shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and seized its deposits in the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever. We shouldn’t be surprised. Neither should we relax. To recap: Between June 2006 and December 2008, the Federal Reserve’s target for the federal funds rate was »

It’s over for Omarova

Featured image Scott and John have written about Saule Omarova, Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. That office is the chief regulator of America’s banks. Omarova is a graduate of Moscow State University (Russia, not Idaho), where she won the 1988-89 Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. In her current, merely socialist, incarnation, Omarova would like to reimagine banking, as the cliché goes. Along the way, she »

The Omarova omen

Featured image A capable successor to Robert Ludlum might be able to make a good novel out of The Omarova Omen — the Cornell law professor of the lunatic left thought by the minders in the White House daycare operation to be just the right person to regulate our national banks. However, it may be too late for Professor Omarova to constitute an omen. The Omarova omen has already materialized in the »

Oh my, Omarova

Featured image Saule Omarova is the Biden administration’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC is not a well known or well understood agency, but it is the chief regulator of national banks. It is not a bureaucratic backwater or political dumping ground. I got to know it when I worked at TCF Financial Corporation (now absorbed into Huntington Bank). Omarova is of course the proud »

The Omarova Thesis

Featured image There must a Robert Ludlum series lurking in the saga of OCC Comptroller nominee Saule Omarova. One installment of the series would be The Omarova Thesis — the thesis she wrote at Moscow State University on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship: “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.” It must have been a good one — so good that she has scrubbed it from her »

How Crazy Are the Democrats? This Crazy

Featured image Joe Biden has nominated Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency. It is an important position. According to the Comptroller’s web site: The OCC charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. The OCC is an independent bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. So who is Ms. Omarova, whom Joe Biden wants to “charter, »