France’s Existential Crisis

March 20th, 2023

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” – Charles de Gaulle (attributed)

Ah, France! [Insert lazy paragraph describing France in in terms of classic cliches including food, wine, cheese, sex, cigarettes and surrender.]

Yes, you’ll do nicely, Cliched French Guy Clip Art

In addition to those classic French attributes, another time-honored French tradition is “widespread rioting,” which they’ve been celebrating over the last few weeks. What they’re protesting is French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to force through an unpopular bill to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.

French President Emmanuel Macron ordered his prime minister to wield a special constitutional power Thursday that skirts parliament to force through a highly unpopular bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 without a vote.

His calculated risk set off a clamor among lawmakers, who began singing the national anthem even before Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne arrived in the lower chamber. She spoke forcefully over their shouts, acknowledging that Macron’s unilateral move will trigger quick motions of no-confidence in his government.

The fury of opposition lawmakers echoed the anger of citizens and workers’ unions. Thousands gathered at the Place de la Concorde facing the National Assembly, lighting a bonfire. As night fell, police charged the demonstrators in waves to clear the elegant Place. Small groups of those chased away moved through nearby streets in the chic neighborhood setting street fires. At least 120 were detained, police said.

Similar scenes repeated themselves in numerous other cities, from Rennes and Nantes in the east to Lyon and the southern port city of Marseille, where shop windows and bank fronts were smashed, according to French media. Radical leftist groups were blamed for at least some of the destruction.

The unions that have organized strikes and marches since January, leaving Paris reeking in piles of garbage, announced new rallies and protest marches in the days ahead. “This retirement reform is brutal, unjust, unjustified for the world of workers,” they declared.

Macron has made the proposed pension changes the key priority of his second term, arguing that reform is needed to keep the pension system from diving into deficit as France, like many richer nations, faces lower birth rates and longer life expectancy.

Macron decided to invoke the special power during a Cabinet meeting at the Elysee presidential palace, just a few minutes before the scheduled vote in France’s lower house of parliament, because he had no guarantee of a majority.

Some background on the maneuver.

French President Emmanuel Macron chose on Thursday to shun parliament and impose his unpopular pension reforms via a special constitutional power, the so-called “Article 49.3.”

The procedure has been regularly used in the past by different governments. But this time it’s drawing a lot of attention and prompting much criticism because of the massive public opposition to the increase in retirement ages.

Here’s a look at how and why the special power is used.

WHAT’S ARTICLE 49.3?

Article 49, paragraph 3 of the French Constitution provides that the government can pass a bill without a vote at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a deliberation at a Cabinet meeting.

In response, lawmakers can file a no-confidence motion within 24 hours. If the motion gets approval from more than half the seats, the text is rejected and the government must resign.

If not, the bill is considered adopted and passes into law. Since the Constitution was established in 1958, only one no-confidence motion was successful, in 1962.

Charles de Gaulle (him again) rammed through the Constitution of the Fifth Republic because he wanted a stable central government and, compared to some other European states (I’m looking at you, Italy), it’s largely achieved those goals.

The thing is, Macron is probably right in that the French welfare state needs an older retirement age for the entire system to stay solvent (at least for a while longer). But the way his proposal was passed also emblematic of the deficit of democracy in the EU generally and France specifically. That old saw about democracies only lasting until people figuring out they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury is largely right, and in this, as in so many, many things, Eurocratic elites have decided the peasants simply can’t be allowed to derail the plans of their illustrious betters.

As of this writing, Macron just survived a no confidence vote over the issue. So France may well have bought itself a little more time before inevitable national bankruptcy. But every maneuver like increases French anger over the obvious democracy gap, and, as the Grand Tour lads have noted, the French can be exceptionally bloody minded over expressing their disapproval of laws they hate.

1911 vs. 2011

March 19th, 2023

With John Wick: Chapter 4 due in theaters soon, there’s been a lot of talk of 2011 model semi-auto pistols. The biggest difference between it and the classic 1911 design seems to be a separate polymer grip that better isolates the shooter’s hand from perceived recoil.

Here’s Joe Rogan shooting a Pit Viper, which is evidently the 2011 model Wick shoots in the film:

“That is the smoothest gun of all time. It doesn’t move. Like it literally doesn’t move, there’s no recoil.”

It does indeed look pretty cool and easy to shoot, but before you rush out to buy one, keep in mind that: A.) It’s not going to be available for sale until May, and B.) It’s going to set you back about seven grand.

Here Colion Noir interviews a rep for Staccato about the differences between the 1911 and the 2011.

Staccato is in Texas, and their 2011 models start at a somewhat more reasonable $2,499.

(Aside: I like Noir, but he does the “yeah,” “uh-hu” noise thing that tells the person he’s talking to “Yes, I’m following you,” which he needs to learn not to do for filmed interviews.)

Is there significant enough difference between a 1911 and a 2011 to justify the nomenclature change? I’m slightly skeptical, but I’ve never fired a 2011. Maybe the difference is night and day.

Would I buy a 2011? Not right now, mainly because I just picked up a Sig Sauer P365 Micro Compact 9mm as a carry gun last year, and even $2,500 is considerably more than I want to spend on a gun right now. But if the prices drift down to around $1,000 over the next few years, I’d definitely give them a more serious look.

Something About Credit Suisse

March 18th, 2023

I meant to mention something about the Credit Suisse situation in Friday’s LinkSwarm but ran out of time. I’m not an expert on European banking in general or Swiss banking in specific. (As opposed to being a squinty, one-eyed, myopic man in the land of the blind sort of expert on American banking, which is not very.) But it’s a big story, so I suppose I should post something about Credit Suisse.

So here’s something.

  • First, as of this writing, it appears that fellow Swiss bank UBS is about to take over Credit Suisse, probably with the financial backing of the Swiss National Bank (SNB)

    Late on Thursday, just hours after the SNB had launched the first (of many) bailout attempts of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse, Bloomberg blasted the following headline:

    *UBS, CREDIT SUISSE SAID TO OPPOSE IDEA OF A FORCED COMBINATION

    This lack of enthusiasm by UBS to acquire its struggling rival of course forced the Swiss National Bank to front CS a CHF50 billion credit line to hold it over for the next four days amid a furious bank run, one which we said would be woefully insufficient to restore confidence in the collapsing lender, and which we probably used up in just a few hours.

    Then, late on Friday, both banks “unexpectedly” changed their minds and we got the following 180 degree U-Turn report from the FT:

    *UBS IN TALKS TO ACQUIRE ALL OR PART OF CREDIT SUISSE: FT

    So a deal is inevitable after all… but as always, there is a footnote one which we predicted yesterday when we said that a deal would only happen if the acquiring bank – in this case UBS – got a full central bank backstop.

    That now appears to be the case with Bloomberg, Reuters and the WSJ all reporting that UBS is asking the Swiss government for a backstop to cover future risks if it were to buy Credit Suisse Group AG, after the Swiss National Bank and regulator Finma have told international counterparts that they regard a deal with UBS as the only option to arrest a collapse in confidence in Credit Suisse. The FT reported that deposit outflows from the bank topped CHF10bn ($10.8bn) a day late last week as fears for its health mounted.

  • Here’s Patrick Boyle on how Credit Suisse brought itself low:

    One big take-away: It wasn’t bad investments per se that wrecked confidence in the bank, it was involvement in a series of scandals, as they have “a strong, liquid balance sheet.” “Credit Suisse has instead been plagued by repeated scandals. From spying on a former employee, a criminal conviction for allowing drug dealers to launder money, a massive leak of client data to the media, Archegos, Greensill, Mozambique ‘tuna bonds,’ the list is too long.”

    Wait, Mozambique Tuna Bonds? Yeah, it’s a real scandal.

    UK courts are at the heart of a spate of litigation arising out of the Mozambique “Tuna bond” or “hidden debt” scandal. The scandal involved $2 billion of bank loans and bond issues from Swiss bank Credit Suisse and Russian bank VTB. The bank loans were taken out in secret by Mozambican state-owned companies, without the legally required approval of the Mozambique Parliament and backed with hidden government guarantees.

    The loans were intended to finance contracts between the state companies and a Lebanese-UAE based ship builder, Privinvest, between 2013-2016 for three maritime projects. These projects were intended to boost maritime security and develop the country’s fishing industry. However, a 2017 audit by Kroll found that $500 million of loans could not be accounted for and that Privinvest may have over-inflated prices by $713 million. The audit also found that $200 million of the loans were spent on bank fees and commissions.

    So it turns out that Mozambique’s political and business elites are at least as corrupt as our own political and business elites.

    Good to know.

    Ironically, according to Boyle, the reason European banks may be in better shape than our own is because they had to deal with the fallout of the Euro crisis. “This is not because European banks are very good — it is precisely because they have historically been quite bad.”

    Practically every banking regulation in existence commemorates a time when things went badly wrong, and Europe spent a decade toughening up banking regulation because it went through a rolling multiyear euro crisis. The European regulators have a detailed set of standards for testing interest rate risk, with the idea that they will be applied to every significant bank in Europe. Unrealized losses are not ignored under this regime and the global Basel standards on stable funding are applied across the entire banking sector. This is quite different to the regulations applied to community banks in the United States who lobbied the government for regulatory exemptions over the years.

    “The economist Matthew Klein argued in a blog post that banks today can be seen as speculative investment funds grafted on top of critical infrastructure, and that this structure is designed to extract subsidies from the rest of society by threatening civilians with crises if the banks’ bets are ever allowed to fail.”

  • Was Credit Suisse infected with the radical transexual social justice warrior madness as the rest of our elites? Of course they were:

    

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Finally, it’s a chance to embed the Swiss Banker Song from Making Fiends.

    LinkSwarm For March 17, 2023

    March 17th, 2023

    Another packed week with no time for a big LinkSwarm!

  • “Biden Family Members Paid by Chinese Firm with Ties to CCP.”

    A Chinese company based out of Hong Kong which paid at least $3 million to several members of the Biden family has since been revealed to have ties with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

    According to the Daily Caller, State Energy HK Limited sent $3 million via wire transfer to Robinson Walker LLC, a company run by an associate of the Biden family named John Robinson Walker. The wire transfer took place in March of 2017, shortly after Joe Biden’s term as Vice President came to an end, according to a report released on Thursday by the House Oversight Committee.

    One of the direct subsidiaries of State Energy HK is State Energy Group International Assets Holdings Limited (SEIAH). At the time of the wire transfer, SEIAH’s chairman was Ren Qingxin, who previously worked for the CCP as a representative at a business organization.

    Shortly after the $3 million transfer, Ren was succeeded in his leadership position by Lei Donghui, who had been a member of the CCP since 2002, where he served as Secretary General of the International Engineering Business Bureau of China State Construction (CSC). CSC has since been designated by the Department of Defense as a “Communist China military company.”

    Subsequently, the $3 million sent to Robinson Walker was then transferred to four different members of the Biden family: Joe Biden’s son Hunter, brother James, daughter-in-law Hallie, and a fourth unidentified family member, the Oversight Committee reports. The transfers were sent in several transactions, both to the family members directly and to several of their companies, including Owasco PC, JBBSR Inc, and RSTP II, LLC.

    The previously-unknown involvement of Hallie – the widow of Biden’s elder son Beau, who later became Hunter’s girlfriend after Beau’s death – has proven to be one of the biggest bombshells yet in the GOP’s investigations into Biden family corruption.

  • Arrest Warrant Issued For President Putin By Hague-Based ICC.” Maybe ICC can hire Dog the Bounty Hunter…
  • Truth:

    (Hat tip: Not The Bee.)

  • DeSantis administration revokes Hyatt Regency Miami alcohol license after it hosted “A Drag Queen Christmas” in front of children.
  • Dutch Farmer’s Party poised to win 16 or 17 seats in parliament thanks to opposing that country’s mad global warming anti-meat mandates. “The Boer-Burger Beweging (BBB), or Farmer-Citizen Movement, is set to become the largest party in the country’s senate, winning more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling conservative VVD party.”
  • Baltimore Democrats want to decriminalize murder for anyone under age 25. Evidently they’re jealous that New Orleans took their crown as murder capital…

  • Red Guards come to Maine. “Kristen Day said students affiliated with one of RSU 14’s Civil Rights Teams harassed her daughter. When her daughter refused to speak about her sexuality, two students affiliated with the club began to bully her and call her homophobic.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Oklahoma State Rep. Regina Goodwin: “‘DEI’ as in ‘deity.’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is god!”
  • Roy McGrath, the ex-Chief of Staff for former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, is evidently still on the run after an indictment on wire fraud charges. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan about what really happened with Kayne West. He suggests that West’s Hitler comments were simply him trying to channel Thomas à Kempis.
  • Tiger Woods’ girlfriend is told to pack for a short vacation…at which point he locks her out of his mansion and said she’s not allowed to return. Cold. Also effective.

    Cue up the Bill Burr rant about “gold digging whores.”

  • The first rule of cemetery machete fight club is you don’t talk about cemetery machete fight club. The second rule is you don’t drive over the headstones.
  • Man lives in a tiny house in a dumpster in London. Sadly, his name’s not Oscar.
  • Cockatootle doo.
  • The Nightmare Before St. Patrick’s Day.
  • More On How SVB Screwed The Pooch

    March 16th, 2023

    I wasn’t planning on writing more about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but too much info has been coming down the pike to ignore. Plus, I found the video below, and felt I had to share it.

    First up: Silicon Valley Bank donated nearly $74 million to #BlackLivesMatter and associated causes.

    A newly published database from the Claremont Institute has revealed that the since-collapsed Silicon Valley Bank donated or pledged to donate nearly $74 million to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.

    In an August 2020 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion report, SVB declared “we are on a journey committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in our workplace, with our partners and across the innovation economy.”

    The bank revealed that they had donated $1.6 million to “causes supporting gender parity in innovation,” as well as $1.2 million to support “opportunities for diverse, emerging talent in innovation.”

    In SVB’s 2021 Proxy Statement, the bank wrote in relation to racial and social equity that “the calls to end systemic racial and social inequities following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 had a profound global impact.”

    “We responded by expanding opportunities for dialogue, including hosting over 40 small group ‘Conversation Circles’ in which over two thirds of our employees participated in discussions about racial equity issues.”

    The statement continued to say that the bank’s “DEI-focused ‘town hall’ meetings for employees were in response to our recognition of the need for greater transparency and dialogue around the racial representation of our workforce and the innovation ecosystem.”

    In addition, the bank, provided “opportunities for action, mobilizing our employees and clients to join in community service through Tech Gives Back, a week of volunteer events focused in part on racial equity, social justice and access to the innovation economy,” and partnered with “Act One Ventures to launch The Diversity Term Sheet Rider for Representation at the Cap Table initiative, which advocates for venture capital firms to include in all of their term sheets a pledge to bring members of underrepresented groups into deals as co-investors.”

    A 2020 letter from CEO Greg Becker stated, “In recent months, we’ve expanded our philanthropic giving through corporate donations and employee matching programs. These programs focus on pandemic response, social justice, sustainability and supporting women, Black and Latinx emerging talent and other underrepresented groups. You’ll find examples of these programs in this report, ranging from workforce development to affordable housing.”

    In 2020, the bank launched its Missions program, “a software platform designed to engage employees to act in support of the causes they care about most such as voter education and racial justice and equity,” which saw employees donate $400,000 for “justice and equity for Black Americans.”

    According to the Claremont Institute, an additional $250,000 was allocated by the SVB Foundation to support grants for social justice organizations including the NAACP, ACLU, and National Urban League.

    SVB additionally partnered with 44 organizations focused on furthering DEI in innovation and invested in relationships with historically black colleges and universities, and hosted internships and provided tuition assistance for students from “underserved communities.”

    In a Corporate Responsibility Report from 2021, SVB pledged to donate $50M in its diversity and inclusion programs and partnerships, “with a focus on women, Black and Latinx individuals.”

    In May of 2021, SVB announced a proposed five-year, $11.2 billion community benefits plan in collaboration with The Greenlining Institute, an M4BL, or Movement For Black Lives, member. The Claremont Institute wrote that “that plan includes $75M in unspecified charitable contributions (also not included in our total).”

    Social Justice is bad enough by itself, but it’s also a marker for those incapable of thinking clearly enough to focus clearly on their main jobs.

    And now this video, which slams “Stupid Valley Bank” for its egregious stupidity and slams It’s Pat, which is these days is almost like a Hispster move (“It’s a pretty obscure bad movie, you’ve probably never heard of it”).

    He also thinks the crisis is just beginning…

    Important Safety Tip

    March 15th, 2023

    Don’t attempt to steal a helicopter unless you can actually, you know, fly a helicopter.

    Multiple helicopters were broken into and one was operated before crashing on Wednesday morning at the Sacramento Executive Airport, according to the Sacramento Police Department.

    Police say that they received several reports of multiple helicopters being broken into early Wednesday morning.

    Officers that responded found a helicopter with major damage that “appeared to have been operated,” police said in a statement.

    The damaged helicopter was left on its side and is a Bell 429 model, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

    A further investigation showed that when the helicopter crashed it also damaged several other helicopters.

    Yeah, I’d say there was some serious damage.

    I have so many questions about this. Like: What did they think they were going to do with the helicopter after they stole it? Take it for a joy ride and return it? Try to sell it? Just how do you go about selling a stolen helicopter? Did they think regional air traffic control was just going to ignore it? (“Hey, stray helicopter! No biggee!”) Did he not realize Sacramento Police have helicopters to chase you with? (Oh yeah: There was an alert.)

    No suspect in custody, so police are looking for a doubly lucky dumbass…

    Oopsie! Russian Su-27 Crashes into U.S. Drone over Black Sea

    March 14th, 2023

    Somebody miscalculated.

    A Russian military plane collided with a U.S. drone in international airspace over the Black Sea on Tuesday, prompting U.S. forces to land the unmanned aircraft in international waters.

    U.S. European Command confirmed that a Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of a U.S. MQ-9 drone, which was on a routine mission in international airspace when two Russian jets attempted to intercept it.

    “Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner. This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional,” a spokesman for the U.S. European Command said in a statement.

    The Russian jets’ recklessness almost caused one of the fighter jets to crash, the statement added.

    Sounds like a pretty stupid thing for the Russians to do, as an Su-27 is obviously a lot more expensive to replace (including the pilot) than an MQ-9 Reaper drone. For one thing, the MQ-9 is over 15 years old and we have more than 300 of them, so losing one isn’t going to deter the American military in the slightest. But they’re not building any more Su-27s (a 1980s Soviet attempt to rip off the F-14 Tomcat), and Russia only had some 100 of them when the war started. (No documented losses on Oryx as of this writing, but Russia became ultra-conservative about committing manned airpower to the arena after the opening phases of the war.)

    Russia continues to be annoyed at NATO in general, and America in specific, using technologically superior surveillance and communications assets to effectively provide the entire killchain for Ukrainian forces. Indeed, it appears that those assets are far more effectively integrated into Ukrainian forces than Russian assets are integrated into their own military and/or Wagner Group.

    I can understand their frustration, but directly attacking American assets (over international water or otherwise) is only going to make things much, much, much worse for them…

    Huge Brawl At Social Justice Warrior Middle School

    March 13th, 2023

    I was involved in the occasional fight in middle and high school, but it never involved more than one other person. When a fight broke out, a circle would gather to watch it, but it never occurred any of us to wade in and join the melee. Widespread brawls with multiple combatants just never happened.

    Well, that was then, and this was now. Every year, people post videos of large brawls to social media, and not all of them of them happen at Waffle House. On March 8, a huge brawl broke out at EBR Readiness Alternative School in Baton Rouge, which happens to be a middle school.

    How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had to break up the fight:

    I can honestly say that I never considered “brawling with police” to be a viable life strategy in middle school. (Or any time.)

    I know very little about “Alternative” schools in Louisiana, but this one appears to be majority black.

    Oh, they also practice “Social Emotional Learning.”

    Remember, “Social Emotional Learning” is a codephrase for “Critical Race Theory.”

    Yet more evidence that “social justice” (no matter the disguise) destroys the bonds that hold society together rather than strengthening them.

    SVB: “An Extinction Event For Startups”

    March 12th, 2023

    The more I hear about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse mentioned in Friday’s LinkSwarm, the worse it sounds.

    I saw a snippet of Gary Tan, CEO of startup fund Y Combinator, talking about how bad it is. I can’t find a video of the full interview online, but evidently it was excerpted on Bannon’s War Room podcast and there’s a transcript.

    [Interviewer]: How many of these startups that have been through Y Combinator, for example, have their cash tied up at Silicon Valley Bank? And over this weekend, I’m gonna try to figure out how they’re gonna make payroll next week. Do they have to go to investors and say, can you front me some cash so that we can stay alive?

    [Tan]: We have funded about 3,000 active startups right now. I would guess that this affects more than 1,000 startups. And about a third of those startups will not be able to make payroll in the next 30 days in the current configuration. As of this morning, RIPLING, which many startups use to manage payroll and benefits, transfers were not being processed by SVB for payroll.

    And so that’s a really existential threat for companies broadly. These are founders who are texting me and calling me saying, do I need to furlough my workers next week? Because I do not have other bank accounts, you know, a Google or a Facebook or even companies farther along with a Treasury Department. They’re going to be able to weather this, but if SVB is your only bank, it’s actually an existential risk. You’re going to go out of business if you can’t pay payroll. And that starts Monday.

    That transcript also has this sobering figure: “97% of the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. 97% are not insured by FDIC because they’re in accounts over $250,000. These company accounts that would be $169 billion.”

    So what was Silicon Valley Bank doing rather than properly managing their risk profile? Banks have Chief Risk Officers whose job is to make sure their risk exposure ratios don’t get out of whack. Well, guess what? SVB didn’t have one for some nine months. “SVB’s former head of risk, Laura Izurieta, who formerly performed a similar role for Capital One, left the bank in April 2022. She wasn’t replaced until January 2023 when the bank hired Kim Olson, formerly of Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui.”

    But don’t worry: SVB had CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East who was entirely focused…on Social Justice and ESG.

    Jay Ersapah, who acts as CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and who describes herself as a ‘queer person of color from a working-class background’ – organized a host of LGBTQ initiatives including a month-long Pride campaign and implemented ‘safe space’ catch-ups for staff.

    In a corporate video published just nine months ago, she said she ‘could not be prouder’ to work for SVB serving ‘underrepresented entrepreneurs.’

    Professional network Outstanding listed Ersapah as a top 100 LGTBQ Future Leader.

    ‘Jay is a leading figure for the bank’s awareness activities including being a panelist at the SVB’s Global Pride townhall to share her experiences as a lesbian of color, moderating SVB’s EMEA Pride townhall and was instrumental in initiating the organization’s first ever global “safe space catch-up”, supporting employees in sharing their experiences of coming out,’ her bio on the Outstanding website states.

    It adds that she is ‘allies’ with gay rights charity Stonewall and had authored numerous articles to promote LGBTQ awareness.

    These included ‘Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness week.’

    Separately she was also praised in a Facebook post by the group ‘Diversity Role Models,’ a charity which campaigns against homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in UK schools.

    Being in Silicon Valley, I’m betting that the entire company was whole hog backing DEI, ESG, Transwhatever and the entire rainbow of victimhood identity politics acronyms.

    In a strong economy, you can get away with a bit of shareholder-value-destroying, virtue-signaling luxury goods as long as your core business is strong. But with rising interest rates, Biden Inflation, the Biden Recession and the gale winds of deglobalization, taking your eye off the ball to focus on anti-reality SJW garbage is a recipe for disaster.

    And all the startups that relied on SVB for their banking are well and truly screwed.

    Update: Uncle Sugar is evidently going to make all depositors whole at both SVB and newly insolvent Signature Bank. This relatively early intervention may indeed be the best move to prevent bank runs at other institutions, and may reflect a change in philosophy since 2008. (It’s a thorny subject.) But it does make me think that a lot of well-connected depositors were screaming in the ears of Washington to be made whole at the taxpayer’s expense. What do you think the odds are that the same consideration wouldn’t be given to, say, a Texas bank that specialized in underwriting oil and gas ventures?

    Why Silvergate Failed

    March 11th, 2023

    Yesterday’s LinkSwarm talked about the collapse of crypto-linked Silvergate bank.

    Here’s hedge fudge manager/university professor Patrick Boyle goes into detail of just how it went down.

  • “Silvergate’s importance in the recent crypto boom is possibly best described by a now-deleted testimonial from the bank’s website: ‘Life as a crypto firm can be divided up into before Silvergate and after Silvergate.It’s hard to overstate how much it revolutionized banking for blockchain companies.’ The testimonial was written by a millennial who still lives in his parents’ basement playing video games and has had some recent run-ins with the law. His name is Sam Bankman Fried.”
  • “If we go back ten years, Silvergate was a small San Diego based real estate lender that transformed itself into the go-to bank for the crypto industry.”
  • “Silvergate invited in crypto entrepreneurs and asked them what problems they were trying to solve and how the bank could be helpful. After this, the bank transformed itself and grew rapidly. It went public in late 2019 at a share price of $13, and a year later the stock price had risen by 1,580% as it became a key interchange point between dollars and cryptocurrencies.”
  • “Major Silverlake clients included Paxos, bitFlyer, Kraken and also innovators in atonal rock music – Mars Junction…” [This is an inside joke. Mars Junction is the band of Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss, AKA the WInklevoss Twins of Facebook investing controversy] “…who also had some involvement in the Crypto industry. FTX and Alameda were also big customers.”
  • “The bank’s growth mirrored the growth of the crypto industry, and it declined alongside that industry too, announcing in a regulatory disclosure earlier this week that it plans to wind down operations in the face of ‘turmoil in digital currency markets.'”
  • Last week Silvergate had announced that they would be unable to file an annual report with the SEC on time due to a weakening in their capital position. They announced that they might be forced to close at that time, blaming growing problems, in part on pending investigations into their operations. The filing confirmed that Silvergate is being investigated by the US Department of Justice.”
  • “Customers rushed over the last few months to pull money out of Silvergate. In January they reported that customers had withdrawn more than $8 billion, forcing them to sell held-to-maturity assets to fund the run, accruing losses on the sale of those securities of $718 million dollars.”
  • Why was Silvergate so important in the world of crypto? Well, people who trade cryptocurrencies often want to use dollars to buy crypto, or they want to sell crypto and receive dollars and the dollar side of those transactions is where things get bogged down. If you are transferring large sums of money to buy crypto, you need to deal with the US banking system, who might ask you a lot of questions relating to anti money laundering regulations. Crypto people hate questions like this. Similarly, if you just sold some crypto and want to deposit the dollars you received, most banks will have a long list of questions about the source of your funds, and there is a really good chance that they will simply refuse to do the transaction. It is going to be a struggle for a US regulated financial institution to show their regulator that they have done enough due diligence to be sure that your funds are not the proceeds of crime. And the last thing a bank needs is to be accused of money laundering; they would rather just simply not deal with suspicious transactions.

  • “For this reason, stablecoins like Tether and Terra exist – or existed.” If you weren’t paying attention, the value of theoretically stable Terra crashed hard last year.
  • “If you can convert your dollars into crypto once, you can then buy stablecoins that are supposed to always be worth a dollar, and then instead of buying and selling crypto, with actual dollars you buy and sell crypto with dollar-denominated stablecoins, your money can stay ‘on chain.’ The problem with that, is that you have to trust the stablecoin issuers, and they, for some reason, don’t always seem trustworthy. They won’t really tell you where the money is.”
  • “They’ll sometimes announce that they are going to be audited by a top 12 auditor (I’m not really sure what a top 12 auditor is – but when you hear that – you know you are getting number 12 on the list), and you start to wonder if Friehling & Horowitz made that list.” Friehling & Horowitz were Bernie Madoff’s auditors.
  • “If you have deposited your dollars with a crypto exchange or a stablecoin provider, they still need to deposit them somewhere. They need a bank too. Now (of course), another way of dealing with this banking issue, might be to lie to your bank about what your account is being used for (SBF and the team at FTX did that), but the technical term for ‘lying to your bank’ is Bank Fraud (as Sam Bankman-Fried just found out) – and you can get in trouble for that.”
  • “There was significant demand for a “crypto friendly bank” and Silvergate was willing to fill that role, when no other bank was willing to take that risk. Silvergate weren’t just crypto friendly either, they built their own payments network called the Silvergate Exchange Network to (according to their marketing documents) enable the efficient movement of U.S. dollars between participants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.”
  • “As you might imagine, Silvergate (being the only bank that would deal with them) attracted a lot of big crypto customers, as these customers were able to open up accounts without lying too much.”
  • “Silvergate dealt with most of the big players in the industry and they were an actual US regulated bank with excruciatingly detailed audited financial statements and capital regulation. This meant that your money was safe at Silvergate, unlike at the other venues we just went over.”
  • “The beauty of dealing with these crypto customers, crypto exchanges, [was] that because you don’t have any real competition in this space, you don’t really have to pay them any interest on their deposits. You could take the billions of dollars they deposit with you, put it all in treasuries, and you get to keep all of the interest. You’ll probably have to spend some of the profits on lawyers to keep the regulators at bay, but overall you might have a profitable business. But that’s boring right? And no one gets involved in crypto for a boring life…”
  • “They had a product called SEN Leverage direct lending, where they would lend people money collateralized with bitcoin. Exchanges could also borrow dollars collateralized with bitcoin for corporate treasury and other business purposes. In January, they announced that total SEN Leverage commitments were $1.1 billion dollars and that all of their SEN Leverage loans ‘continued to perform as expected, with no losses or forced liquidations.’ So, as crazy as that business might sound, it was not really the source of their problems.”
  • “As of September, 2022 their balance sheet showed about $11.4 billion of ‘securities,’ meaning bonds: Treasury securities, mortgage-backed securities, agency bonds and so on and $1.4 billion of ‘loans,’ meaning the Bitcoin loans and some other real-estate lending. They had $13.2 billion worth of deposits at the end of September, most of them being from crypto companies – so non-interest paying deposits, the best kind.”
  • “The problem for Silvergate was that when FTX was exposed as being insolvent, crypto investors were considerably less willing to leave their cash on exchanges.”
  • “They asked for their money back from the exchanges, meaning that the crypto companies had to ask for their money back from Silvergate, so Silvergate was faced with a good old fashioned bank run – driven not by a loss of faith in Silvergate, but by a loss of faith in crypto exchanges. By the end of December, noninterest bearing deposits at Silvergate fell from $13.2 billion dollars to just $3.9 billion dollars.” Yowzers! It’s hard to expect any bank to survive an outflow of 2/3rds of their deposits in such a short period of time.”
  • “There is a good chance that if you had an account at a crypto exchange, that exchange banked with Silvergate, and if you closed your account and cashed out, the cash came from a deposit at Silvergate.”
  • “There were other FTX related problems too. When prosecutors started looking into the collapse of FTX, their attention was drawn to their banker – Silvergate, for hosting accounts connected to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, a big problem for Silvergate, was that – with their money all tied up in bonds or lent out, Silvergate had to come up with around 9 billion dollars to pay out these withdrawals.”
  • “Their accounts show that by the end of December they had sold half of their bonds and had controversially borrowed $4.3 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, a government institution that is in place to give short-term secured loans to banks that have a short-term liquidity problem.” That, and the FTX connection, attracted the attention of Washington D.C.
  • In September Silvergate had shown 3.1 billion dollars’ worth of bonds as being “held to maturity” and 8.3 billion dollars’ worth of bonds as being available for sale. The difference between these two classifications (from an accounting perspective) is that the available for sale bonds have to be marked to market – or held on the books at their fair market value, while the “held to maturity” bonds could be marked at their cost price. By the end of December there were no “held to maturity” bonds left on the balance sheet, meaning that they had either been sold, or reclassified as available for sale. One way or another, interest rates had gone up a lot in 2022, and these bonds were worth a lot less than they were being carried on the balance sheet at.

    So they might have skated by if rising interest rates hadn’t wrecked their mark-to market.

  • The sale resulted in a loss of $751.4 million during the fourth quarter of 2022 and in addition, the company recorded a $134.5 million dollar impairment charge related to an estimated $1.7 billion dollars of securities it “expects to sell in the first quarter of 2023 to reduce borrowings.” This is because reclassifying some of the bonds to “available for sale” meant that they now had to be marked to market and that the loss had to be recognized under GAAP accounting rules. Silvergate also had to write down a $196 million dollar investment in “certain developed technology assets related to running a block-chain-based payment network” that it had bought in January 2022. So, all in, there was a net loss of over a billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022.

  • “Bank capital requirements are ‘risk-based’ and need to be kept above 4% to be ‘adequately capitalized’ and above 5% to be considered ‘well capitalized.’ Different types of assets have different risk weights, and this is done to keep deposits safe.”
  • “A bank that makes a lot of mortgage and business loans might have a capital requirement of around 8%, and assets like bitcoin have a 100% capital requirement, meaning that a bank would need to have $100 of capital for every $100 of bitcoin on its books.”
  • “In September Silvergate was fine, as despite the Bitcoin loans, most of their money was in high quality bonds that had zero risk weights. But when their deposits went out the door and they had to sell assets and realize a billion-dollar net loss, they were left in a situation where an additional $19 million-dollar loss would but their capital below 5% and they would no longer be considered well capitalized.”
  • “Last week Silvergate announced that they had sold additional debt securities in January and February to repay the company’s outstanding advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and that they ‘expect to record further losses related to the other-than-temporary impairment on the securities portfolio.’ These additional losses they said would ‘negatively impact the regulatory capital ratios of the company and could result in the bank being less than well-capitalized.” And that’s when Brunhilda strode on stage to give her farewell.
  • “This announcement caused the stock price to half that day and according to Bloomberg caused Coinbase, Galaxy, Paxos and other crypto firms to announce that they would stop accepting or initiating payments through Silvergate. These customers leaving were the final nail in the coffin, as they reduced deposits even further.”
  • “A bank run, on a real bank, caused by crypto related losses and crypto volatility.”
  • “Matt Levine at Bloomberg argues that one way to think about the rise and fall of Silvergate is that the crypto boom was at its heart a low-interest-rate phenomenon. People started speculating in crypto because interest rates were below the rate of inflation, and so Silvergate was hugely exposed to interest-rate risk simply because of its exposure to its crypto customers.”
  • “Rising interest rates caused the deposits to evaporate at the same time as the assets backing those deposits fell in value. Levine argues that (with hindsight), Silvergate’s risk management – a year ago – should have been laser-focused on the risk of rising interest rates crushing both its assets and its customers, and it should have hedged that risk one way or another.”
  • I know all this is long and a bit detailed and technical, but I wanted to point it out as an example of how a cascading chain of events (much like the Piper Alpha disaster) caused a failure, mainly how massive fraud on the basis of one crypto space player and rising interest rates ended up bankrupting a real bank in the real world.