The manufactured banking crisis is underway
I have interest in SVB
I had to eat a little crow this week on my Loos Tales radio program. On Monday morning I learned from a friend that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) had been acquired by the UK-based HSBC. He knew that because he is a customer of the SVB and he had received an email with details. In looking up more information, I learned something that I did not know. HSBC, the bank based in London, is actually the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation, a bank wholly owned by Chinese interest. On my Tuesday broadcast, I went to the air waves explaining how the FDIC had partnered with a China-owned bank to acquire SVB and no big deal was made about it. State by state there is an effort to prevent China from owning farmland but here they are acquiring our lending institutions!
After that aired, I quickly learned that HSBC had only acquired the UK division of the SVB and the assets in the United States are still (at the time of this writing) unknown as to their future ownership. So that sent me digging for more information and I learned the crow I was eating actually had a different bird of feathers involved.
It turns out the SVB had 2000 investment firms from China as customers. In fact, it appears that the tie to China was quite extensive. Last week Quartz Magazine reported that:
The crown jewel of its global operations was China, where it served more than 2,000 clients and advised government regulators eager to make their banking system more innovation-friendly.
“We’re a model bank for China,” Dave Jones, a 23-year SVB veteran who served as chief credit officer before being dispatched to run the bank’s China operations, said in a 2019 interview.
“There have been times when [the Chinese government] has specifically referenced us” in regulatory documents, he added.
I then learn that California Gov Newsome and his wife have ties to the SVB beyond that of a basic customer. They run a non-profit that his wife started with an infusion of $100,000 from SVB and they share board members.
In addition, Peter Thiel who I have written about before regarding the financial games he plays, was the very first person who withdrew a large sum of money from the bank leading to the rush of others demanding their money. Now Thiel says that he had $50 million of his own cash tied up in the bank, so none of this really makes any sense to me.
The Wall Street Journal has reported some other troubling information about the shady actions in the days leading up to March 9, 2023 shut down of the bank by the FDIC:
SVB turned to plan B, asking the San Francisco FHLB to move $20 billion of collateral to the Federal Reserve’s discount window, where it could get emergency funding, the people said. SVB had roughly $20 billion available for financing at the San Francisco FHLB, according to the people familiar with the matter.
“We were well under way with the transfer of collateral and were waiting for a call from the Federal Reserve and SVB,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco FHLB said. “And while we were waiting for a call, the FDIC took over SVB.”
I am only just starting my in-depth research on the actions that led up to what I am going to call a “manufactured bank collapse”. There are two reasons I think it is worthy of more time and fact finding. First, the Feds are now trying to call this SVB incident “the tip of the iceberg” of the financial mess these “regional banks” are in the middle of. HELLO! This bank had institutions around the world, how can they call the 16th largest bank the U.S. a regional bank? And finally, yesterday I was told that SVB would be an excuse in getting more federal control of farming as the upcoming Farm Bill is in congress.
As much as I try to close each week with solutions, today we are only identifying the problems as I see them and I will continue to search for the missing cows to complete the herd gather. Stay tuned!