The Weather Report
Plus jokes about bank failures, which ought to compound your interest…
Due to unavoidable delays I have neglected to post any of my recent cartoons and by “unavoidable delays” I mean my desire to watch as many World Baseball Classic games as possible because where else do you get to see Israel play Puerto Rico or a neurologist manage a team from the Czech Republic or a guy who’s a real life firefighter get a chance to pitch to Major Leaguers?
But there are no WBC games scheduled until tonight, so for now I’ll kill time by posting a bunch of cartoons and as you can see from the one at the top of this post, decided to start with a cartoon about storms and flooding in California.
As you’ve probably already heard unless you’re living on a desert island with Tom Hanks and bad cell phone reception, the Silicon Valley Bank failed and I’m about 92% sure there’s a joke about breast augmentation in there somewhere, but I’m also about 93% sure it’s a lame joke, so we’ll move on to the following article from the Poynter Institute’s Politifact website which says:
There was a run on the bank (too many people trying to withdraw their money at once) after SVB announced it had sold $21 billion of its investments at a $2 billion loss because it needed to free up some cash to meet withdrawal demands.
SVB has a lot of tech companies’ money, which the tech companies couldn’t access, which meant a lot of tech workers were worried about their paychecks and that led to the cartoon you just looked at.
Liberals blamed the bank’s collapse on deregulation, weakening of banking rules and politically-incorrect use of “he/she” pronouns; Conservatives blamed “woke” policies like worrying too much about diversity and equity and the bank adhering to environmental, social and corporate governance and allowing Casual Friday Drag Shows.
(I made up at least two of those items because the rest of the sentence seemed really boring and vague, probably because I lifted most of it from the article and when you’re writing for the Poynter Institute I’m guessing you don’t get too many requests to throw in a few good jokes while explaining bank failures.)
Anyway…
The people at the Poynter Institute asked “banking experts” what they thought caused the collapse and the banking experts said rolling back some banking regulations in 2018 probably made the SVB’s collapse more likely, but you couldn’t say it was the only reason it happened.
The article also pointed out that 33 Democrats in the House and 17 Democrats in the Senate voted for the bill which rolled back the regulations, so if weakening banking regulations was a screw-up, the Republicans didn’t screw things up by themselves.
According to the banking experts, the Federal Reserve raising interest rates also didn’t help because SBV had substantial holdings in bonds, which are usually considered safe, but those bonds lost value when interest rates were raised because investors were more interested in buying newer bonds with higher interest rates, so SBV had to sell the old bonds at a loss.
(See? Sentences like that last one are exactly why I try to keep things entertaining by throwing in the occasional sophomoric joke and if I were more mature I’d throw in the occasional “senioric” joke.)
Just in case you were worried that social media wasn’t causing enough trouble already: it helped rumors of SBV’s problems spread even faster which helped turn the run on the bank into a stampede.
The banking experts also said the Conservatives blaming “woke” policies for SBV’s collapse are full of shit, although they said it in much more polite and much less direct language and if you want to read the Politifact article for yourselves, here’s the link:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/mar/13/what-caused-silicon-valley-banks-downfall-rewritte/
After SVB collapsed, President Biden came out and announced we didn’t have to worry because the banking system was safe and I used the occasion to point out maybe we should keep right on worrying because so many things aren’t.
And now back to the Woke-Policies-Made-SVB-Collapse argument.
Did SBV give $73 million to Black Lives Matter?
That’s the latest story from Fox News and Tucker Carlson – the Oracle of Truth that said the Jan. 6 insurrection actually didn’t happen – and apparently Fox and Tucker got that bit of information from the right-wing Clarendon Institute which has compiled a list of investments major corporations have made to Black Lives Matter groups and Clarendon claims it’s billions of dollars.
But some people who don’t trust Fox News or Tucker Carlson, and recent events indicate you shouldn’t, looked into Clarendon’s claims and it turns out they were counting money given to “organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda.”
So money corporations gave to Wild-Eyed-Radical Organizations like the NAACP, the ACLU, the National Urban League and the United Negro College fund was being counted as donations to BLM to score political points and it’s just this kind of crap that makes Fox News and Tucker Carlson untrustworthy and if you want to read more about it, here’s the link:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/silicon-valley-bank-black-lives-matter/
Atlanta is building a police training center which some protesters attacked because they oppose police violence and it seemed to me anytime you show how much you oppose violence by throwing rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails, maybe you haven’t thought things all the way through.
Semi-recently Russia launched a missile attack on cities across Ukraine with a new mix of weapons and Ukraine said they shot down 34 of the 81 missiles launched, which is apparently a low percentage and that’s because the Russians used three classes of weapons for which Ukraine has no defense.
The We-Got-No-Answer-For-That weapons included six hypersonic Kinzhal missiles which is a high-end expensive weapon and that’s the most Kinzhal missiles Russia has used in one attack and people were asking why now and I don’t actually know, but it seems like things haven’t been quite as easy as Russia and Vladimir Putin hoped and it looked like Russia was doubling down on a bad idea: targeting civilian structures like the energy grid, hospitals, schools and residential buildings.
And as fate and the Kansas City Star would have it, not long after reading about the missile attack, I read about the NCAA basketball tournament known as March Madness and made the connection you see in the above cartoon.
According to the Associated Press, someone created thousands of fake automated Twitter accounts that praise Donald Trump and criticize his enemies which Donald would normally do himself, but he’s too busy cheating at golf.
The fake accounts (called “bots” because people who are into this stuff want to sound cool and have their own slang and are too hip to say “ro-bots”) were discovered by an Israeli tech company (because I’m too hip to say “tech-nical”) which kinda makes me wonder what the Israelis were up to, but whatever it was they shared their findings with the AP who shared them with us.
I used the news that Joe Biden had a cancerous lesion removed from his chest to point out that the Republican Party might want to have one removed from their back.
OK, that’s it for today and I should probably stop writing now because I wrote a looooong piece about banking regulations and the Glass-Steagall Act (and for a while I thought it was the Glass Seagull Act, which sounds like a play co-written be Tennessee Williams and Anton Chekov), but subsequent research revealed I might not know what the hell I was talking about, so I really can’t believe Fox News hasn’t offered me my own show.
If I do some more reading and figure out what to say I might post that piece in the future, but right now I need to get going because I just realized it’s St. Patrick’s Day and I’ve got some drinking to do before Puerto Rico plays Mexico at 6 PM.
Have a good St. Patrick’s Day.
The "oracle of truth" dig against Faux News made me spit my morning tea all over myself. :😜
My wife and I so enjoy your semi-dopey essays