RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/silicon-valley-bank-who-is-to-blame

Last year, when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried lost control of the massive cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme he had allegedly created, he ran home to mom and dad. A federal judge granted him bail on the multiple criminal charges he faces after his professor parents promised to keep an eye on their mischievous boy in their Palo Alto house. Now, all of move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley is running home to mom and dad because the Valley actually broke something that it needed. The only thing keeping hundreds of start-ups, as well as some more established tech firms, afloat right now is the fact that the federal government has bailed out all large depositors in the West Coast tech industry’s favored financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). This state of affairs seems ironic, but it’s not. The trillions in easy money the federal government has pumped into the economy since the 2008 financial crisis in turn created the undisciplined tech sector.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last Friday isn’t particularly interesting. A financial institution created 40 years ago to serve the emerging California tech world, SVB failed for the same reason that failed banks typically fail: it borrowed short-term, taking in money from depositors, and lent long-term. This strategy works—all banks do it—but SVB took it too far, too fast, with zero room for error. The bank’s deposits had tripled in just four years, the Financial Times reported, to nearly $200 billion. The bank took advantage of its status as being just under the threshold for heightened federal regulation to take enormous risk. It invested its short-term deposits—that is, money that customers could withdraw at any time from their checking and savings accounts—in long-term Treasury bonds, at a time when doing so was dangerous. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates, meaning that the value of older Treasury bonds issued at lower interest rates—the bonds that SVB held—was falling.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/16/theres-no-liar-like-a-biden/

How do we know when Joe Biden is lying? When he says he gives us his word as a Biden. But that’s not the only time he spins a whopper. He says something untrue quite regularly, the most recent instance a tall tale about his “epiphany” regarding gay marriage.

When asked about his “evolution on marriage equality” during an interview on Monday night’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Biden radically revised his personal history so that he would appear to have been woke for more than a half century. Our president (how did such a thing ever happen?) said he “hadn’t thought much about” same-sex marriage until his “senior in high school.” But one day as his father was dropping him off, he saw “two well-dressed men in suits” kiss each other.

“I mean they give each other a kiss. … And I’ll never forget, I turned, looked at my dad, he said ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other. It’s simple.’ No, I’m not joking. ‘It’s simple. They love each other.’  … It doesn’t matter whether it’s, whether it’s same-sex, or heterosexual couples should be able to be married. What is the problem?”

Here, thanks to PJ Media’s Matt Margolis, is the truth behind another pathological lie from the “Big Guy”:

So Biden claimed he had his epiphany on same-sex marriage as a teenager, yet, in 1973, during his first year in the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden opposed homosexuals working in the federal government, insisting they were a security risk. ‘My gut reaction is that they [homosexuals] are security risks,’ he said, ‘but I must admit I haven’t given this much thought … I’ll be darned!’ He would later support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy concerning gays in the military, in 1993, and voted in favor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. In fact, Biden defended his vote on DOMA years later and argued that the issue of same-sex marriage should be left to the states. … As vice president, he even opposed civil unions for same-sex couples.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19490/data-privacy-collection

[T]he NSA’s surveillance network “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic”… the NSA, working with the FBI, engaged in the bulk collection of phone records of U.S. citizens’ phone records. Other programs may allow for data collection from Google, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms. These are the alleged capabilities that have been leaked to the media and government watchdog groups. One can only imagine what the federal government’s more secretive and advanced programs might be capable of collecting.

We also must consider data collected by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and from our constellation of spy satellites.

Then there are the other federal security and surveillance agencies such as the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service, to name but a few.

[I]t is time for Congress to fully update the laws surrounding data collection and privacy. This also would give us the ability to see what still works, determine best practices to protect American security and civil liberties, and to end the things that do not — especially those that leave open a backdoor for abuse.

[W]e must examine whether the government has deferred to the rights of American citizens, or has utilized perceived openings to expand its reach and power.

Law enforcement has acted in a way that enhances its capabilities and erodes the rights of American citizens. Three examples include the FBI’s use of Section 215, where the FBI can get secret court orders for business records.

A second example is the use given the FBI of National Security Letters (NSLs). These can be issued by the FBI without a court order. The use of NSLs has expanded massively. In 2000, about 8,500 NSLs were issued. From 2003-2006 that number increased to 192,000. “Sneak and peek” warrants are also now being used more extensively. Without any notification, these allow law enforcement to raid and search someone’s home and computers, among other private property. The target may not be notified of the search for months.

In an investigation involving conservative attorney Victoria Toensing, the FBI used the sneak and peek authorization to gain access to personal records without notifying her, even though she was not a target of any investigation. After 18 months, the Justice Department notified her the case was being closed without ever identifying who was being investigated or even what the issue being investigated was.

With the advent of new technologies, and passage of legislation after 9/11 that possibly has not aged well, the legal framework protecting American citizens’ rights has been shredded. It seems abundantly clear that our government at multiple levels likely abused its powers, and the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization has a tremendous opportunity to set things right.

Recently the U.S. House of Representatives created the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Congressman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio. There are at least three areas where this Subcommittee needs to do extensive research. They include but are not limited to:

The scope and extent of the information that the various federal government agencies collect and store.
The restrictions and their effectiveness that are built into the process to protect the rights of American citizens.
Evidence that government policies may have been broken and individuals or organizations may have been targeted inappropriately by the federal government.

https://www.racket.news/p/in-fbi-case-the-first-amendment-takes

Racket readers may recall that in November, shortly before the Twitter Files began, I ran an interview with Steve Friend, a onetime FBI agent who lost his career after blowing the whistle on the Bureau.

Friend refused to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to put local agents across the country in charge of J6 cases that were really being run out of the Washington office, a plan that made one Washington-based case look like a national map full of domestic terror cases popping up everywhere. He also objected to heavy-handed tactics like the use of S.W.A.T. teams for a suspect communicating voluntarily through an attorney, and the questioning of people in connection with J6 in cases where the state had little to no evidence. From that story:

Friend didn’t think the interview was warranted, and worried the feds showing up at someone’s door without cause “might do more harm than good” in a part of the country where government was unpopular already. He sucked it up and did the “knock and talk” anyway.

“I said, ‘Hey, were you at the Capitol?’” Friend recalls. “And he said, ‘No, that was my son’s funeral that day. I wasn’t there.’”

He shakes his head. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, I can’t believe I just made this guy relive that. And for what? Even if he’d admitted to being there, if he said, ‘I was there, I don’t wanna talk about it,’ I couldn’t even charge that.”

But even though Friend had reservations about some of the cases, his main concern was procedural — that by playing bureaucratic games with who was running these investigations, and putting locals nominally in charge of cases where they were really in supporting roles, they put all of the court cases in jeopardy. “A lot of these guys are bad dudes, and they should go to jail,” he said, about the Oath Keepers. But if “we didn’t follow our rules… we set ourselves up to get crushed at trial,” adding, “I want to win.”

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

Today’s inflation news will be something Joe Biden crows about, but only if you don’t need to eat.

As per its schedule, the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its monthly report on the February 2023 Consumer Price Index (CPI) at 8:30 a.m. (EDT) this morning, confirming what most of us have noticed.  

CPI for all items rises 0.4% in February as shelter increases

In February, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers increased 0.4 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 6.0 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.5 percent in February (SA); up 5.5 percent over the year

“…less food and energy…” 

Oh.

Food, which all living things need, jumped on an annual basis to 9.5%.  For those who eat at home, food prices zoomed up 10.2 %.  If that is too much for some, be reassured that “food away from home” in the past 12 months gulped up “only” 8.4%.  

Yeah, yeah…I know.

But there was some better yearly news on energy; really.  Energy costs (only)  increased 5.2% as energy commodities (oil, gas) dropped 1.4%. 

Drill, drill, explore, and drill some more.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/15/this-is-good-inflation-news-not-if-you-need-food-heat-or-a-place-to-live/

Inflation eased again.” “CPI inflation rate slows to 6%.” “Inflation fell for the eighth straight month in February.” Those are the headlines that greeted the latest Consumer Price Index Report. Why aren’t those ungrateful families celebrating?

Prices in February climbed 0.4% from the month before and 6% from the year before. Both are down slightly from January.

President Joe Biden cheered the news, saying that “today’s report shows annual inflation is down by a third from this summer” and is “the slowest annual increase since September 2021.”

Huzzah!

OK, sure, that 6% year-over-year bump is still three times the average inflation for the past three decades. And sure, it comes on top of the 7.9% jump in prices in February 2022. And, yes, it means that the Consumer Price Index has now risen 15% in the short time Biden has been in office.

But fear not! Because Biden is on top of the situation, and his “inflation reduction act” is clearly working. Right?

The problem with the focus on the overall CPI – which measures cost changes in a “basket of goods” – is that people aren’t buying this basket every month. Most are just trying to make ends meet. They’re trying to feed their families. Keep the lights on. Avoid eviction.

https://asiatimes.com/2023/03/feds-try-to-stop-bank-crisis-of-their-own-making/

NEW YORK – US bank regulators on Sunday announced a massive response to last week’s run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the risk of copycat runs against other regional banks.

The Federal Reserve will provide one-year loans against banks’ security portfolios through a new Bank Term Funding Program, eliminating the risk that banks might be forced to sell their US$4.4 trillion in government securities at a loss.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), meanwhile, will make whole all SVB depositors, as well as those of the Signature Bank of New York, closed by New York state authorities on “systemic risk” grounds.

Federal regulators have slapped a rather large bandage on a gaping wound that they cut into the banking system. By tightening credit to control a wave of inflation that had nothing to do with credit in the first place, the Treasury and Federal Reserve have created a credit problem where none existed before. There are few comparable instances of self-sabotage in the annals of bank regulation.

Although depositors won’t lose money, holders of bank bonds may take substantial losses. That augurs poorly for a recovery in credit markets already stressed by Federal Reserve tightening.

Sunday’s announcement will ease market fears that the run on SVB, which saw $45 billion in deposits leave the bank in little more than a day, might spread to other regional banks. The value of regional banks’ stocks collapsed on March 10 in response to the fear of a general run.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-bank-coverup-and

Last Friday, when the Silicon Valley Bank quickly imploded and rocked the U.S. financial sector, it was taken over by federal regulators. The bank was known for backing tech start-ups, and had come under fire for prioritizing investments into climate change and social ventures rather than those that could make a predictable return.

The executive roster of the bank had a questionable track record. For example, SVB’s Chief Administrative Officer, Joseph Gentile, was the CFO of Lehman Brothers investment bank when it collapsed. SVBs Chief Risk Officer position was left vacant for nine months through January 2023.

The CEO, Greg Becker, was a director at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank from 2019 until termination on Friday. Becker’s also under investigation for selling $3.6 million in bank stock during a period when SVB was in the markets to raise $2 billion from investors— an effort to keep the bank solvent.

Silicon Valley Bank’s “Behested” $100,000 Gift To Newsom’s Nonprofit

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that California Governor Gavin Newsom, through a nonprofit organization his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom founded, the California Partners Project, has very close ties to the bank.

In 2021, SVB gave $100,000 in corporate gifts to the Newsom nonprofit. These gifts are so intertwined with the Newsom’s that they are listed as a matter of California ethics law on a state government website, California Fair Political Practices Commission.

https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-ghost-of-ancient-rome-haunts-america/

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands of cities have been built. And yet, as Rome’s greatest chronicler Edward Gibbon warned in 1776, a similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times‘s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

Yet even before the current downturn, the data defied the bravado. For decades, the ultra-tall towers that once symbolised urban greatness have been as anachronistic as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, along with the construction of new space. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.

More serious still has been the movement of people. Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-biden-bank-failures-silicon-valley-bank-signature-bank-markets-white-house-fdic-deposit-insurance-fund-a5538900?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden tried to reassure Americans early Monday morning that the banking system is safe and not to worry about the failures of Silicon Valley (SVB) and Signature banks. Markets didn’t believe him because bank stocks took another plunge, with some down 60% or more.

Perhaps investors don’t believe the Administration’s Sunday interventions solve the problems. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says it couldn’t find a private buyer for SVB, though a source tells us Treasury and the Federal Reserve favored one. FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg nixed it owing to hostility to bank mergers.

Instead the regulators offered solutions that bail out even uninsured bank depositors and other banks at unknown costs that Mr. Biden isn’t acknowledging. Take Mr. Biden’s pledge that “no losses will be borne by the taxpayers.” He said “the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund.”

***

That’s not nearly the full story. The FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund normally guarantees up to $250,000 in deposits, which protects small retail customers including mom-and-pop businesses. Banks pay for this guarantee with insurance premiums, but the insurance fund isn’t intended to backstop deposits of bigger customers with more capacity to weather losses if a bank goes under.

Yet after venture capitalists (Democratic donors) and Silicon Valley politicians howled, the FDIC on Sunday announced it would cover uninsured deposits at SVB and Signature Bank under its “systemic risk” exception. Apparently, Silicon Valley investors and startups are too big to lose money when they take risks. They benefited enormously from the Fed’s pandemic liquidity hose, which caused SVB’s deposits to double between 2020 and 2021. SVB paid interest of up to 5.28% on large deposits, which it used to fund loans to startups.