SVB

Sorry, Joe. A bailout is a bailout is a bailout. President Biden is old enough to remember the 2008 financial crisis when the word “bailout” was associated with saving the hides of Wall Street banks and their highly paid executives on the dime of taxpayers.

The term became somewhat of a cuss word.

That’s why the White House is desperately trying to spin the shutdowns and reorganizations of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank as anything but bailouts.

The president on March 13 noted that investors in SVB and SB will not be “made whole” like the people who had accounts at the banks.

“They knowingly took a risk, and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lost their money,” he said. “That’s how capitalism works.”

But the Federal Reserve, Treasury Dept. and the FDIC are bailing out the high-rolling venture capitalists and their portfolio companies that deposited their money at SVB.

SVB rode the Silicon Valley gravy train for as long as it could. [The cryptocurrency crowd banked at Signature.]

It amassed $157B in assets from only 37K accounts. Those high-worth individuals pulled $42B of their money after word spread of SVB’s financial duress.

Those are the people that Scranton Joe is bailing out. It’s not going to play well on the campaign trail when the president is attempting to woo blue-collar voters in industrial states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Sheila Bair, who headed the FDIC during the 2008 financial crisis, is puzzled about how those financially sophisticated customers at SVB “missed those prominent disclosures on the bank’s websites and teller windows that FDIC insurance is capped at $250,000.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen cited the “systemic risk exception” to justify the bailout of the banks.

Bair says that’s nuts. SVB and SB have $300B in combined assets in America’s $23T banking sector. It's a minnow swimming in the ocean of America’s economy.

If they truly posed a systemic risk, the US banking system is in really bad shape.

Team Biden has to step up its PR. It’s time for straight talk, not spin.

Josh “Hightailing It” Hawley blames “woke” bailout. The Missouri Republican Senator, who was last seen racing from the Capitol Hill rioters, believes wokeness ruined SVB.

The graduate of Yale University and Yale Law tweeted: “If these SVB guys spend all their time funding woke garbage (“climate change solutions”) rather than actual banking and now want a handout from taxpayers to save them.”

Of course, Hawley sees wokeness everywhere.

Last year, he introduced a bill to strip special copyright protections enjoyed by Walt Disney Co. in his reaction to its opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. Mickey Mouse was not amused.

Jeff Sonnenfeld, professor at Yale School of Management, blames the Federal Reserve for setting up the conditions for SVB to fail.

Though Sonnenfeld respects Hawley’s education but feels blaming wokeness for SVB’s failure is completely delusional.

He told the St. Louis media: “It makes no sense. It isn't related. His use of [woke] is as related as somebody's weight loss programs if they had to replace the tire on the car. It's just completely irrelevant."

Is he serious? Florida governor Ron DeSantis must be pretty tuckered out from his book tour because he is completely out-of-touch tossing bouquets at Vladimir Putin.

Does he think the way to prevent Donald Trump from getting the Republican presidential nomination is to position himself as a bigger patsy of Vladimir Putin.

DeSantis has criticized the Biden administration’s “blank check” policy toward Ukraine and ruled out supplying Ukraine with F-16s and long-range missiles because he fears that could trigger a nuclear war with Russia.

Though Biden has never advocated for regime change in Russia, DeSantis said new leadership in Moscow would not produce “a pro-American, Madisonian constitutionalist in the Kremlin.”

C’mon, Ron. Those supporting Ukraine don’t expect Russia to be led by the reincarnation of George Washington or even James Madison.

We just somebody who doesn’t invade neighboring countries, or fashion himself/herself as Peter the Great’s ghost.