Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Kaliningrad Oblast) wants to know if the feds can censor private messaging platform to stop bank runs like the one that hit SVB. That’s the big crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap — an entire week’s worth of lefty nuttiness wrapped up in one easy-to-swallow medicated news capsule.
Plus:
Before we get to today’s big story, here’s a short video to make you lose whatever little faith you might still have in humanity.
I didn’t make it even 30 seconds into this one, how about you?
Cringey corporate self-promotion videos have been around for almost as long as video, so it isn’t a big deal that SVB produced a few. The question is: Can you produce cringey corporate videos and keep your finances in order?
Until today, I would have told you that West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin was probably the dumbest, or maybe even the most dangerous man in the Senate. His 2016 election year comment — “Due process is what’s killing us right now” — inspired me, a pistol shooter, to buy my first rifle. It was even one of those extra-deadly super-assault AR-15s with the chainsaw attachment. Not in four decades of watching politics had I witnessed an elected official so explicitly and blithely corrupt his oath of office.
But then along came Mark Kelly.
Red-pilled California activist Michael Shellenberger‘s Public substack grabbed an exclusive on Monday about a weekend conference call concerning the SVB bailout. There, Kelly “asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) if they had a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks.”
Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie was also on the call and told Public, ““I believe he couched it in a concern that foreign actors would be doing this but he didn’t suggest the censorship should be limited to foreigners or to things that were untrue.”
So the way Kelly sees it, Americans sharing facts are a danger. This guy ran as a moderate — and got a way with it, too.
It isn’t often I praise Swamp bureaucrats but according to Massie, they “just sort of took a pass on the question.”
According to a fascinating WSJ piece from Sunday, apparently the SVB run was “organized” — that’s too strong a word, hence the scare quotes — on apps like Slack and WhatsApp. “Spooked customers,” according to the WSJ, “whipped out their phones and opened their banking apps. With a few taps and swipes, their money was on its way.”
Rachel Louise Ensign, one of the authors of the piece, called it “the first bank run ever organized over Slack.”
But Slack isn’t social media, is it? It’s an internal communications platform, closer in function and spirit to text messaging than it is to Twitter or Facebook. And Sen. Mark Kelly, perhaps the most dangerous man in the Senate, wants to know if the Treasury Department can somehow get its grubby hands all over your private communications.
Recommended: The Biden Economy Is Falling Apart, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Spoiler: Dog wins!
Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t just a longshot 2024 GOP presidential contender, he’s also a cofounder of Strive Asset Management. He knows a thing or two about finance.
That’s why I took him seriously when he wrote on Sunday that “SVB’s situation is different from that of most U.S. banks.”
“SVB was regulated like a bank but looked more like a money-market fund,” added Andy Kessler.
The details are a bit technical, but more broadly, Ramaswamy noted that:
SVB also had a concentrated client base of tech startups whose needs for capital were highly sensitive to rising interest rates. Yet SVB itself had the highest concentration of any major bank in mortgage-backed securities, also especially sensitive to that risk factor. This is an egregious oversight specific to SVB. Its investment portfolio was 57% of total assets, more than twice its peer average of 24%.
“Either SVB was incompetent or this is a case of moral hazard, taking excessive risk and expecting political favors and bailouts,” Ramaswamy concluded.
So the good news is that SVB seems to have been a special case and not the first bank failure in a cascade caused by nationwide systemic risk. The bad news is that the bank’s big (and well-connected) depositors are getting bailed out, anyway.
I said it yesterday on Instapundit and I’ll say it here again today: More and more she looks like a Republican plant. I mean, if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis could actually choose a Democrat foil, could he possibly do any better than Nikki Fried?
It’s bad enough that vagrants enjoy so much control over parts of Portland that they spend their nights smashing car windows and not necessarily even stealing anything. But worse are attitudes like the one displayed by Portland resident Jake Kelly, quoted here by KGW News.
“We had kind of been tipped off about car jackings, car theft, vandalism being on the rise in the [Pacific Northwest], but we didn’t want to lean too much into that narrative,” he told KGW. “We didn’t want to, like, judge.”
Virtue doesn’t signal itself, folks.
Some Americans are so so gaslit that you wouldn’t want to stand next to them anywhere near an open flame.
Previously On Insanity Wrap: ‘Lynching the Deplorables’
If you need a smile today, the replies to self-described “academic” Daniela Nadj are priceless.
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That’s a Wrap for this week.
Come back next week for another Insanity Wrap…
…assuming we make it that long.