Run For the Money 🌻 🌻 🌻 💰 💰 💰

Everything, Everywhere:  Money makes the world go round but only when depositors are convinced that the banks holding their 💰 are solvent so after closing California based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), bank regulators stepped in and closed New York based Signature Bank too.  Simplistically, SVB ran into trouble after the big kahunas in tech investing, whose clients relied on SVB for funding their tech businesses, sounded the alarm about the bank taking bigly losses on what appears to have been a treasury and mortgage security portfolio too long dated and inadequately hedged to withstand this year’s steep run up in interest rates.  Signature Bank, whose client base was made up of Real Estate companies including certain ones run by people named Kushner and Trump, and law and accounting firms had “diversified” by taking on crypto sector deposits just before that sector hit the skids. Whether Signature suffered from the same mismanaged treasury and mortgage portfolio that SVB suffered from became academic when their depositor base, freaked by what was happening at SVB, started heading for the doors too.  To control what was starting to look like a major bank contagion, Federal regulators decided Signature needed to be closed too.  The good news for depositors, even those with deposits above the FDIC $250,000 insurance threshold, is that they will be made whole.  The bad news for equity investors and debt holders is that their positions are circling the drain. Naturally there’s a lot of irony here as many of the tech venture capitalists, people like Peter Thiel who fed the SVB panic by being one of the first to withdraw funds from the bank and by encouraging the firms he had funded to do the same, are the very same people who back political candidates who hate big government and regulation but then again as one Tweeter put it there are “no atheists in a foxhole, no libertarians in a bank run” so don’t expect to hear them squawk too much about regulators cleaning up the mess that may have been partially caused by the loosening of bank regulations for mid-sized banks.  If anything, expect them to blame regulators for not acting sooner.       

Dumb and Dumber:  With so many eyes focused on the banking industry and some others focused on who wore what on the Oscars’ red carpet it would have been easy to miss that former VP Pence told the audience at the annual Gridiron dinner that “history will hold Trump accountable” for the horrible events of January 6. Contradicting the Tucker Carlson narrative, Pence went on to say that “tourists don’t injure 140 police officers by sightseeing, tourists don’t break down doors to get to the Speaker of the House or voice threats against public officials.” Nice words but Pence is still fighting Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena for him to testify in front of a grand jury because hypocrites are going to hypocrite. On the subject of hypocrites, more Fox texts and other communications keep on seeing the light of day as a result of the document dump from the Dominion Voting Machine defamation case against Fox.  In one of my favorites Alex Pfeiffer, a former producer of Tucker Carlson’s nightly diatribe show, called the “delicate dance” of not offending Fox’s viewers “surreal,” “like negotiating with terrorists, but especially dumb ones, Cousin f—king types, not Saudi royalty.”  

And:  Something is cooking over in Texas where a ruling that could overturn the FDA’s 20 plus year approval of abortion drug mifepristone is expected any day now.  Uber-conservative, anti-abortion judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday but over “security” concerns asked lawyers to sit on the notice about the meeting until Tuesday.  Hard to miss that a judge who may be about to upend women’s reproductive choices is “concerned” about the public learning about court schedules.  Reminiscent of SCOTUS getting all bent out of shape about the leak of its shattering Dobbs opinion. Here’s an idea, maybe the focus should be on leaving women’s reproductive choices intact rather than trying to hide?  Just saying.  As to reproduction, Colorado’s 36-year-old Congressperson Lauren Boebert’s 17-year-old son is about to become a father because maybe, just maybe prohibiting sex education comes with consequences.  Boebert, who dropped out of high school when she became pregnant with her first son, professed total glee about becoming a “gigi” saying that children having children is one of the great things that distinguishes rural America from those blue places where heathens can get abortions. Alternative fact or not, that sounds like something the about to become single Kellyanne Conway might say while discussing her made-up Bowling Green Massacre even though we know she’d keel over if one of her children followed the Boebert model.  Kellyanne and her husband George put to rest suspicions that their obvious differences about Trump were just a publicity grabbing act by announcing last week that they are getting a divorce.