Monday, March 13, 2023

Something Inauthentic Here

 


While I appreciate the idea that people with money in SVB aren't necessarily bad actors who deserve to lose their savings (above the insured amount) and that the majority should be "made whole", there is something that feels inauthentic about the collapse of this bank and Signature Bank (which has a lot of crypto money in it).  I don't trust what I'm looking at because of the people I'm looking at. There are people wealthy enough to lose some portion of their vast fortune and still be fine--a bank run is just an investment in fuckery.

I remember back in December I was snarky about a Russian bank run. These things can be precipitated by rumors. I feel like the bank management and certain investors need to be looked at. This bank run has nothing to do with "wokeness" specifically (how do you even connect the dots on that one? A bank certainly could do woke shit and be responsible enough to have a risk assessment officer--these guys didn't) so much as deregulation and gambling in the old savings establishment again. In the meanwhile, the people who served us junk bonds and the dot com and housing bubbles really don't have anything they need to be telling us about moral hazard right now. 

There is no good reason there should be any "contagion" from this thing. Doom-saying about it...feels inauthentic. 


3 comments:

JustMusing said...

Definitely "inauthentic".

Ali Redford said...

Spot on, as usual-thanks!
Sometimes I worry that I worry too much. Then I come here, and frequently you've written that you had some thoughts I have about some thing or another in current events.

Vixen Strangely said...

Sometimes I think I may have made myself a little paranoid, and other times, I think I'm not paranoid enough! But the thing with the bank run is libertarians aren't loyal and there seems to be a certain quadrant of folks who are rooting for some kind of collapse--like the debt ceiling challenge posed by House Republicans. Am I saying the top .01% ers would go that hard? Yeah. Anti-democratic action could reasonably entail taking a moderate short-term haircut while creating a disaster that radicalizes folks that are more economically vulnerable--either knocking them off the table of political participation by wiping them out financially or causing them to become pro-US regime change.

A dozen years ago, I was deeply pro-Occupy. Since, with the revelations that Occupy was seeded with Russian influence, I am suspect of any supposed economic divisive movements on either side. Someone wants a color revolution here. (If not a civil war or "national divorce" in the MTG parlance.)

The Founders knew what was up. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I don't trust people who want to politicize the cause and effect of a business failure. There are real causes and real faults. The rush of the Right wing media to go to "wokeness" is gross and unhelpful. They want to encourage the opposite of vigilance--to distract from reality.

That's simply no way to manage anything. You must acknowledge reality in order to correct something going wrong. What is the color of the sky in their world?

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