Fox Business anchor blames Silicon Valley Bank collapse on an “adherence to woke beliefs and policies”
Davis Asman: “This is ... the first bank failure that was caused by adherence to woke beliefs and policies. The woke belief that you can just print money without consequence.”
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From the March 13, 2023, edition of Fox Business’ The Story with Martha MacCallum
MARTHA MACCALLUM (ANCHOR): Ok, so David, there’s no bailout, and there are no taxpayer dollars. So, where is this money that is sweeping in to save these depositors coming from?
DAVID ASMAN (FOX BUSINESS ANCHOR): You know, it’s like the manna from Heaven. You know, it just appears. It’s so funny, because this kind of parallels this whole talk of being able to print as much money as you want for as many programs as you want with no consequences — there will be no inflation. Remember, Janet Yellen, who you just had, she’s admitted now that she was wrong, but she said there’s not going to be greater inflation. And, of course, there was inflation. Whatever inflation would be transitory — it wasn’t. So, she’s been wrong.
And, this actually is exactly why SVB got in trouble in the first place. This is the — really the first bank failure that was caused by adherence to woke beliefs and policies. The woke belief that you can just print money without consequence, led to them thinking that there wouldn’t be any increase in inflation, there wouldn’t be any increase in interest rates. Therefore, they could invest the bank, their own bank on these very low-interest rate Treasury bonds. And of course, when interest rates went up, their money was stuck in these bonds, if they pulled it out, they’d have to pay a penalty. So they wanted — And that would’ve broken the bank completely. And that’s really where they were.
But they believed in what Janet Yellen and all the other regulators were saying, that inflation was transitory, rates would stay the same when in fact they didn’t. We knew that they weren’t going to stay the same, because of all the trillions of dollars we’d been spending. And it was that belief in what’s called Modern Monetary Theory, that you could just print, print, print, that led to this bad decision that they made. And the regulators were not watching this bank because they believed in all that, too. They, too, believed that there was nothing wrong in investing with that wrong strategy in their heads.
MACCALLUM: Yeah, I mean, this is the problem behind groupthink.