Tag: Silicon

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HEALTH & PORTABLE – Hair Scalp Massager Shampoo Brush can deeply remove dandruff, exfoliating, dandruff, stimulate the blood circulation of the scalp, relieve itching of the scalp, and get a relaxing massage every time you wash your hair. It is small in size and easy to place and carry. EASY TO HOLD – Scalp shampoo brush has a perfect grip, ergonomic design, you can hold it comfortably in your hand, use scalp massager brush in the shower, it is better to use, will not slip, will not fall off, it works great , You will find this scalp scrubber very useful. SUITABLE FOR ALL HAIR STYLES – Scalp brush is suitable for all types of hair, long hair, short hair, curly hair, straight hair, oily, dry and wet, thick, sparse, men and women, the comfort of hair cleaner brush has also won the love of children , Hair washing brush is worth having. MANUAL OPERATION – Scalp scrubber for hair does not require batteries and is completely waterproof. No parts need to be replaced. The gentle head massager scrubber is very suitable for exfoliating and caring for the scalp. You can use the massage brush at any time to keep your scalp cleaner. QUALITY – Made of high quality and durable rubber, portable size makes it convenient to handheld.
Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8 x 8 x 8 cm; 110 Grams
Date First Available ‏ : ‎ 10 August 2022
Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ RENESMEE
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BTPN53X1
Item model number ‏ : ‎ Wheat Straw Hair Scalp Massager
Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India
Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ RENESMEE, E Basket
Packer ‏ : ‎ EB India
Importer ‏ : ‎ EB India
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 110 g
Item Dimensions LxWxH ‏ : ‎ 8 x 8 x 8 Centimeters
Net Quantity ‏ : ‎ 1.00 count
Included Components ‏ : ‎ Hair Scalp Massager
Generic Name ‏ : ‎ Scalp Hair Brush
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March 21, 2023
How D.C. and Silicon Valley Got Stuck With Each Other

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For a group of people eager to position themselves as thought leaders this was not exactly a PR triumph. Others in the industry saw the display as counterproductive.
“There’s a universal agreement that libertarian VCs screaming for bailout money was not helpful,” said one person involved in managing Silicon Valley’s response to the crisis, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about tech industry peers. “Elevating startup founders or even business owners outside of tech — those are better faces for the industry than a guy in Atherton who’s scared that his portfolio companies might get hit.”
At the same time, anticipation was growing for some VC comeuppance, among tech critics on Washington Twitter.
“Uninsured depositors — who are sophisticated risk-managers — are going to take a loss. There is no bailout here,” tweeted Matt Stoller of the Economic Liberties Project, which advocates for more aggressive federal intervention to counter monopolies.
The stage looked set for a big, messy collision between two countervailing forces. Except that turned out to be little more than a revenge fantasy.
In fact, Washington was ready and willing to step in. Coming off a historically bad year for bond markets, Silicon Valley Bank was far from the only depository institution to take a huge hit on its bond portfolio. And Silicon Valley startups were far from the only businesses with huge piles of uninsured cash inside banks.
And most of Silicon Valley was earnestly happy to have the help. “Good news,” Sacks tweeted, with an applause emoji, when the Fed, Treasury and FDIC announced their rescue plan.
Does this mean the end of the sparring between the Valley and the capital? Of course not.

Now that Silicon Valley has what it wants from Washington, the VCs may be free to go back to plotting the capital’s planned obsolescence. And members of Congress want to keep hauling Big Tech CEOs before them for browbeatings.
But both sides have quite a bit at stake, and — as the SVB collapse makes clear — they know it.
Washington needs tech entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S., and not get too disillusioned. As the current generation of Silicon Valley offerings make it easier than ever to start a global business from anywhere, the possibility that the next generation of global tech giants arise somewhere other than the U.S. has become more real.

Washington needs tech entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S., and not get too disillusioned.
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
As for Big Tech — as those once-nimble startups have matured into corporate giants, they’ve become more and more tethered to the federal government. As Amazon and Facebook explore fields like drone delivery and payments, their collisions with government policymakers — like the FAA and state money transmission authorities — become more frequent and consequential.
This has affected their corporate cultures, according to Nu Wexler, a former congressional aide and veteran of Google and Facebook who now works in public relations. “The companies were more libertarian just because they were operating in more unregulated spaces,” he said.
Last year, even as Elon Musk railed against the powers that be on Twitter, his network of satellites was helping to keep Ukraine online as it responded to Russia’s invasion. Even Thiel, despite his libertarian provocations, is financially intertwined with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, some of the biggest customers for his data analytics company, Palantir.
The libertarian ethos of startups and their most vocal backers may be in for some tempering, too. Last year, A16Z’s Katherine Boyle published an investing thesis titled “Building American Dynamism” that called for “building companies that support the national interest,” including in national security. Once, in Silicon Valley, the idea of “American dynamism” might have seemed cornily patriotic. Today, at A16Z, it’s just the name of a fund.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 18, 2023
FDIC taps investment bank to lead Silicon Valley Bank sale

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“I think it’s deeply concerning,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) said in an interview late Tuesday. “The notion that they’re going to do better as this asset turns into a carcass? … It’s hard for me to understand how that’s the best answer.”
The FDIC declined comment. Piper Sandler did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Banking regulators and Biden officials ultimately determined that emergency measures to backstop the bank’s uninsured depositors — which included roughly half of all Silicon Valley-backed businesses — would provide more clarity and calm amid fears of a possible financial contagion.
Signature Bank, a New York institution that had been a key banking partner to major crypto businesses, was also shuttered by regulators on Sunday.
The credit ratings agency Fitch Ratings on Wednesday downgraded First Republic, another lender whose shares have been battered in the days since SVB went under. The ratings agency also warned that the regional banking crisis could spill over into the broader market, including insurance businesses and investment funds.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 16, 2023
Silicon Valley Bank gets a spin on the anti-ESG turntable

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the weekend battered Silicon Valley Bank leaders for being too focused on so-called “woke” initiatives to defuse the time bombs on its balance sheet. Meanwhile, social media fusillades from the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley ( R-Mo.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) injected a dose of identity politics into bone-dry debates over banking regulations.
As regulators raced to defuse worries over the prospect of a broader financial crisis, conservative policymakers who claim environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives portend the decline of modern capitalism are taking a victory lap.
“Rather than doing their job on risk management, they must have allowed themselves to be distracted by other things,” Sen. Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, told POLITICO on Tuesday evening. “I think banks should be in the business of banking, not social engineering.”
Policy battles over ESG are nothing new at this point. But Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion last week – which set off concerns about a contagion that would threaten other financial institutions – has uncorked a new strain in the GOP’s self-styled war on woke. And SVB’s high-profile efforts to present itself as a good corporate citizen makes for easy fodder.
The bank’s 2022 ESG report boasted plans to invest more than $16 billion in low- and moderate-income communities and climate-friendly businesses over the next five years. It also pledged to bolster its leadership ranks with Black and Hispanic/Latino employees and to build relationships with diverse suppliers.
DeSantis, a potential Republican frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election, used an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” to blast the bank for being “so concerned with DEI and politics” that it “really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”
The former Trump acolyte isn’t shying away from those claims either – a sign that some Republicans view those attacks as a winning message as policymakers scramble to respond to the Biden administration’s bank rescue.
DeSantis is “leading the national conversation on the dangers of putting a political agenda before a fiduciary duty,” said Jeremy Redfern, a spokesman for the governor.

There’s little evidence Silicon Valley Bank’s ESG policies had any role in its demise. The bank’s balance sheet was exposed to investments that lost value when interest rates climbed. When SVB tried to raise cash to account for the losses, well-heeled venture capitalists and tech startups raced to draw down their deposits — more than 90 percent of which exceeded the FDIC’s deposit insurance limit of $250,000.
Customers pulled $42 billion from the bank on March 9, according to California regulators, a massive run that forced regulators to step in and shut it down.
Attributing those failures to ESG or diversity policies “is absolutely ridiculous,” Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on House Financial Services, told POLITICO, adding that claims that ESG or diversity pledges contributed to its failure are “a racism argument.”
“People are going to see through those kinds of arguments,” she said.
Actual precipitating causes aside, Silicon Valley Bank’s positions on issues are now a target for Republicans who claim its political posturing may have a hand in its rescue.
The West Coast “elites” who ran SVB had “lost focus on what really matters,” said West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore, a Republican who has already announced that he’s running for Congress in 2024. It’s “a great example, unfortunately, of what ESG ultimately – I believe – will do to the free market capitalist system here in this country. It will destroy it.”
Republican attacks on Wall Street and corporate America’s embrace of ESG have accelerated in recent years. Despite its origins as a talking point for corporate types, it’s showing signs of being an effective wedge for GOP power brokers looking to sow dissent among their rivals.
Republicans were backed by three moderate Dems facing tough slates in 2024 in a recent vote aiming to reverse a Biden administration rule that allows fiduciaries to weigh environmental, social and governance considerations in making investment decisions. At the state level, policymakers like Moore are pulling public money away from asset managers and banks over what they see as ideological differences on ESG.
“The fools running the bank were woke and almost became broke, but the Democrats and the Fed swooped in to make sure their woke donors at SVB didn’t go under,” Greene said in a tweet shortly after Biden officials announced the rescue plan on Sunday night.
SVB’s political activity paints a more complicated picture. Its federal political action committee has spent just under $300,000 since 1998, and it has spread money among California candidates from both parties. In addition to funding Bay Area Democrats like Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo — whose districts include many of the businesses and venture funds SVB had relied on for deposits — the committee also donated more than $20,000 to committees tied to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
The bank’s customer base was no less ideologically diverse. Until last week, portfolio companies backed by a venture fund belonging to Republican mega-donor Peter Thiel — one of Hawley’s biggest supporters — counted SVB as their bank. It was also a key partner for clean energy investors and top Silicon Valley firms like Union Square Ventures, whose executive contributions tilt more toward Democrats.
What’s more, while the bank’s depositors have been made whole, its leadership was removed by regulators on Friday. Federal relief will not extend to SVB’s financial backers and unsecured creditors.
Spokespeople for Hawley and Greene did not respond to requests for comment.
— Jeremy White and Jordan Wolman contributed to this story.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 15, 2023
Maxine Waters to return political donation from Silicon Valley Bank

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Waters recalled speaking with someone from Silicon Valley Bank around 2020 about FinTech issues but said she does not remember details.
“Everybody knows I have an open-door policy,” she said. But she maintained that she did not speak with the bank about the 2018 bill that loosened up regulations of banks like SVB. Waters opposed the bipartisan measure, which has come under renewed scrutiny since the California-based bank’s collapse. Lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank were among those that lobbied on the bill.
“Philosophically, I’m opposed to deregulation, always have been, been consistent on it and will continue to be,” Waters said.
Between 2017 and 2022, Silicon Valley Bank’s PAC gave more than $50,000 to the campaigns of nearly two dozen senators and representatives, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. The donations largely went to members — Republicans and Democrats — who served on relevant committees including the House Financial Services Committee or Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) received the most from the PAC, each bringing in $7,500 over the six-year period.
Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, also made maximum individual donations to the campaigns of Warner and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) during the 2022 cycle, FEC records show. A Schumer spokesperson on Tuesday said the contributions have been donated to charity.
Representatives for the offices of Warner and others who received money from the bank’s PAC did not return requests for comment. Warner previously released a statement praising regulators’ response to the bank run, while McHenry similarly expressed confidence in financial regulators.
The bank’s sudden collapse has put a spotlight back on the 2018 deregulation law, which exempted medium-sized banks from conducting regular stress tests.
Lobbyists from Franklin Square Group, which has worked on behalf of Silicon Valley Bank and other financial services clients, also made individual contributions to some lawmakers near the vote on the 2018 law. Among the recipients were Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who received more than $8,000 total from three lobbyists a few weeks after the Senate passed the bill but before it went to the House for approval, where Sinema was a member at the time.

A lobbying disclosure by Franklin Square Group in 2018 lists that bill as one of its lobbying activities.
Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat challenging Sinema in the 2024 Senate race, has sought to make a campaign issue of the donations, pointing to the contributions in a press conference in Tempe, Ariz., this week. Sinema has not announced yet whether she is running for reelection.
“When we were presented with the same information, I voted to protect Arizonans,” said Gallego. “She voted to give the banks free rein.”
A spokesperson for Sinema said the senator has questioned regulators about how they managed SVB’s unique level of specific concentration risk. In a tweet about the bank this week, Sinema tweeted that the “federal government must now ensure those responsible are held accountable, while maintaining stability for all Americans who rely on our banking system.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 15, 2023
California’s Dem Senate hopefuls vie for higher ground over Silicon Valley Bank debacle

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“What happened in the last financial crisis? Dodd-Frank was put in place to reflect those lessons,” Porter said in an interview, using the colloquial name for the 2010 law shaped to rein in the industry after the Great Recession of the Obama years. “Not even 10 years later, look what happens: The so-called pro-business Democrats and the Trump administration and Republicans voted to weaken the capital holding requirements.”
But Porter’s two main Senate rivals, Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), are also pointing to the 2018 vote as an example of Wall Street’s hold over Congress and a leading cause of the regional bank’s failure. Schiff previewed his own proposal Monday on MSNBC to hold bank management accountable. Schiff and Lee both voted against the 2018 bill; Porter, who at the time was a House candidate, said she’d oppose it and is now working on legislation to reverse it.
The California trio’s close and loud positioning on the bank failure may not yield much competitive advantage for any single candidate, despite voters’ laser-focus on an uncertain economy. But it does focus new attention on lingering divisions between Democrats lining up to blame the 2018 legislation and the handful of centrists still in office who voted for it, some of whom face tough reelection battles this fall.
The 2018 measure sparking the current Democratic backlash had rolled back capital requirements put in place for smaller banks in the aftermath of the Great Recession, which some experts and Democrats say would have allowed those institutions to better weather economic volatility.
“The capital requirements are really the bottom line for banks,” said Alexandra Thornton, a senior director for tax policy at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress. “When they don’t have enough equity there, it’s other people who are harmed. And then, if the government has to step in, that just creates the expectation that this will happen again and again.”
The Bank Policy Institute, a group that represents mega- and regional banks, has pushed back on claims that the rule change played a role in the ongoing turmoil — noting that the change “does not appear to have been a major factor in SVB’s or Signature Bank’s failure.”
Schiff, who built a national profile on the House Intelligence Committee where oversaw a lengthy investigation into former President Donald Trump, announced his own plan on Monday as lawmakers picked through the wreckage of SVB’s collapse. The Los Angeles Democrat, whose district includes tony swaths of Hollywood and Burbank, said that Congress needs to craft rules that would force SVB’s executives to disgorge bonuses and stock sale proceeds.
“I plan to introduce legislation to claw back those earnings from these delayed bonuses from stock trades that were beneficial in the run up to this run on the bank,” Schiff said during an appearance on MSNBC, adding that the “failure of oversight” and a “failure of the banks’ management” merited different solutions.

For her part, Lee said in a statement that the next step following the Biden administration’s actions was ensuring “that we have the strong regulation in place to prevent future problems, and that we seek accountability for any impropriety or market manipulation.”
Other House progressives, in some ways, see themselves vindicated for their 2018 opposition to the deregulation bill by the fallout from the bank failure and the likely family conversation looming in the party.
“Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is the predictable and direct outcome of a furious 2018 effort by bank lobbyists to evade basic oversight, transparency, and financial stability in favor of profit,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), in a statement highlighting the group’s raising of the alarm against the legislation, though the liberals singled out Republicans for creating a “future of more chaos for our economy and more impunity for bank misbehavior.”
Nearly half of the 33 House Democrats who voted for the 2018 bill have since left the House, including now-Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). She’s since faced harsh campaign-trail criticism from Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who’s vying for the Senate seat in next fall’s elections, over her past positions on banking regulation.
Some House Democrats still in office who voted for the 2018 bill, like Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), could still face competitive reelection challenges in the future. But Thornton, the Center for American Progress expert, said the banking reform should transcend partisan politics.
“Here’s the thing, members go through elections, and those are difficult. But there should be people on both sides of the aisle — there should be Republicans strongly supporting an increase in capital requirements,” she said.
And it’s not just candidates who are openly criticizing fellow Democratic or Democratic-aligned lawmakers for their past votes. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley, knocked his party colleagues for the vote in a tweet that remarked “[t]oo many Dems voted yes” in 2018.
Feinstein and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) joined the majority of their party in opposing the 2018 banking bill.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 14, 2023
How Biden saved Silicon Valley startups: Inside the 72 hours that transformed U.S. banking

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The result, announced just minutes before financial markets in Asia reopened, was sweeping: The federal government would provide SVB’s depositors with access to all their funds, effectively averting painful financial uncertainty — and the threat of heavy losses — for thousands of venture-backed startups. Signature Bank, which had followed SVB into insolvency, would receive the same guarantee.
Even more critically, the Federal Reserve would provide a massive lifeline to the nation’s banks: It would singlehandedly give all other similar lenders access to funds designed to keep them afloat and quell the panic brewing across the country.
The swift and forceful action to rescue depositors at the two failed midsize lenders rewrote crucial banking guardrails in ways that could reverberate for years. It put the Biden administration’s stamp — for good or ill — on the sector’s future financial stability, while sending a message about the government’s willingness to rescue private businesses in new ways. It also was done without passing a single new act of Congress or holding hearings among elected officials in recent days.
And it almost didn’t happen.
President Joe Biden began the weekend highly skeptical of anything that could be labeled a taxpayer-funded bailout, according to four people close to the situation, who were not authorized to speak for attribution.
That would be a serious political risk for the president given that many of SVB’s customers were start-up entrepreneurs and investors with so much money deposited in the bank that they far exceeded the federal government’s $250,000 insurance limit. Signature catered in part to once-high-flying crypto investors.
Biden, who as vice president had watched then-President Barack Obama get hammered over his role in bailing out giant banks during the financial crisis, had little desire for a repeat — especially since he had long embraced a “bottom-up, middle out” economic philosophy focused on average working families, the people close to the situation said.
Yet as officials worked through the weekend — mostly in open-ended virtual meetings tying several agencies together — to determine the blast radius of SVB’s failure, they concluded that failing to protect the bank’s depositors could leave small businesses across the country unable to access money needed to pay workers and keep their operations going.

“There’s not a way to help the people he wants without also helping the uninsured depositors who made a bad choice by putting too much money into a single bank,” said one adviser to the White House. “I have no doubt in my mind that he feels ambivalent about it. But he’s not willing to take a risk with this economy.”
Though there was little concern that the failures of SVB and Signature threatened to destabilize the entire banking sector, officials mapping the network of companies tied to those institutions worried that refusing to step in could disrupt large swaths of the economy.
Panicked depositors would likely pull their money en masse from other regional banks, creating a cascading crisis on top of the alarm already spreading throughout Silicon Valley.
Biden aides and Democratic lawmakers had also grown concerned about the viability of certain payroll-processing companies tied to SVB, two people familiar with the discussions said. If they were unable to function, the number of workers at risk of not receiving their paychecks would increase exponentially. The situation risked spiraling quickly from there, denting consumer confidence in the economy’s stability.
“There’s just a lot of sensitivity, and he doesn’t want to disrupt an economy that he thinks is doing really well for workers,” the adviser said. “The direction was: Stabilize everything.”
Biden eventually came around to the view that an emergency rescue was the only viable option after multiple briefings Friday through Sunday from chief of staff Jeff Zients and new National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard, who just joined the White House after serving as vice chair of the Fed and chair of the central bank’s Financial Stability Committee. He also spoke with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday about SVB’s failure and its impact on the state.
Biden received a final briefing from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen along with Zients and Brainard on Sunday afternoon shortly before the announcement.
Throughout the weekend, Biden’s inner circle emphasized the potential impact on workers’ paychecks, which they believed would resonate both with the president and the public, said one of the people familiar with the deliberations. And they urged Biden to speak to the public before U.S. markets opened to ward off runs on other regional banks.
Biden agreed, but not before stressing that his speech needed to play up his concern for small businesses and make it clear Americans should maintain trust in the banking system.
At 1 p.m. Friday, Yellen convened a team to come up with a battle plan: Fed Chair Jerome Powell, FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg, Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu, and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, whose regional branch oversaw the bank.
Their teams eventually settled on three potential options, according to a person familiar with the talks: looking for a buyer, backstopping uninsured depositors, and launching a new emergency lending program at the Fed. By Saturday, they’d agreed to pull the trigger and work on all three.
But it was not easy getting to the finish line, especially when it came to the FDIC and protecting all depositors at the two failed banks.
The FDIC’s decision was particularly fraught and down to the final hours, two people said. Agency officials worried that the proposal could create thorny issues for the agency, which is statutorily bound to protect the deposit insurance fund — a longstanding pot of money financed by bank fees.
It also raised questions about whether the FDIC might be expected to make all depositors whole anytime a bank fails, something it is not designed to do, making the decision especially painful for Gruenberg and his fellow board members.
Though the Fed and the FDIC were each designed to stop financial panics, the moves by both agencies also risked ratifying the notion that the government would always be there to dull the consequences of the collapse of a larger bank. It was the “moral hazard” question that dogged rescue efforts in 2008 and 2009.
But the administration needed a straightforward solution, and also faced increasing pressure from Capitol Hill, where California lawmakers inundated by worried constituents pushed officials to take whatever steps were necessary to maximize SVB’s chances of being bought by another bank.
Members of the California delegation spent the weekend scrambling for any information that might shed light on whether SVB’s extensive customer network of high-tech startups and powerful venture capitalists would be able to access their funds come Monday. A briefing with FDIC officials on Friday offered little substance — according to a lawmaker who attended — as the agency was still gathering information about the bank’s uninsured deposits.
As information trickled out on Sunday about a possible plan to backstop depositors, FDIC and Treasury officials wouldn’t even confirm or deny a widely reported auction process for SVB’s assets, Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat whose district includes a large section of Silicon Valley, said in an interview.
While lawmakers remained largely in the dark until shortly before the announcement, officials from the Fed, FDIC, White House and Treasury spent all weekend in rolling virtual meetings that continued through Friday and Saturday nights into Sunday.
The administration had yet to finalize its plan by the time Yellen went on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, forcing her to remain noncommittal about a path forward. Yellen merely said the government would not be bailing out a bank’s investors.
Yet over the next several hours, officials raced to nail down the final details of their approach. Emails and drafts were exchanged among the top players right up until they pushed the button on the announcement and held press briefings. One person familiar with the meetings described them as short of frantic but “very driven and determined.”
At 6:15 p.m. ET on Sunday, the Fed, Treasury and the FDIC jointly announced that the government would immediately provide access to all depositor funds held at the two failed banks, using the government’s power to immediately designate the institutions as systemically significant.
The action did forestall a market meltdown. Stocks ended Monday only slightly lower. But it did not keep investors from hammering other regional banks. Shares in First Republic, which saw lines of panicked depositors over the weekend, plunged 62 percent despite the government actions, suggesting investors still have doubts about the banking system, especially the tiers just below the most heavily regulated giant banks.
Bob Kocher, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock and former Obama-era White House official, said some panicked companies are going as far as transferring all their money into board members’ individual bank accounts while they set up their own new accounts with major financial institutions.
“There’s no way now as a board member you can sign off on putting all your money into a regional bank,” he said, adding that he expects to see significant outflows at similarly sized institutions like First Republic Bank and PacWest Bancorp. “Everybody’s racing to put their money into JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.”
Beyond making payroll, Kocher said, SVB’s failure raised questions about how companies would pay for basic services like cloud storage and website maintenance, as well a constellation of smaller suppliers, if their deposits got tied up in a troubled bank.
“I think it’s going to take at least a month or two for things to calm down and settle out,” he said.
There’s similar trepidation among Biden officials, who spent Monday holding their breath, closely monitoring banks’ falling stock prices for signs of broader contagion.
In the meantime, aides have tried to head off blowback from the party’s progressive wing, emphasizing that taxpayer money won’t directly go toward propping up SVB’s depositors — and that the toll on workers could have been far worse had they simply let the bank fail.
Biden stressed that point on Monday in remarks aimed at calming the markets, expressing confidence that “the banking system is safe” while also repeatedly emphasizing that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for any losses.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, was similarly resolute. “The government is not bailing out anything,” she said in an interview. “If the banks have made mistakes, if the investments have been bad, if they weren’t watching the balance sheet, they’re going to be held accountable.”
Jonathan Lemire, Sam Sutton and Eleanor Mueller contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 14, 2023
US Treasury Secretary Yellen rules out bailout for Silicon Valley Bank

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Washington: US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday said that the federal government will not provide a bailout for Silicon Valley Bank’s investors after the bank was abruptly shuttered, but said financial regulators are “concerned” about the impact to depositors and working to address their needs, media reports said.
“During the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out,” Yellen said in an interview, CBS News reported.
“And the reforms that have been put in place means that we’re not going to do that again. But we are concerned about depositors and are focused on trying to meet their needs.”
California regulators shut down the Silicon Valley Bank on Friday after depositors rushed to withdraw money last week amid concerns about its balance sheet. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was appointed receiver, and regulators are working to find a buyer for the institution, which ranked as the 16th-largest bank in the US before its failure.
The collapse of the 40-year-old bank, which catered to the tech industry, is the largest of a financial institution since the failure of Washington Mutual in 2008.
President Joe Biden spoke to California Governor Gavin Newsom about Silicon Valley Bank and the federal response on Saturday, and the FDIC spoke to members of the California congressional delegation late Saturday night.
Yellen said that in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, Treasury officials have been hearing from depositors, many of which are small businesses, and she has been working with bank regulators to “design appropriate policies” to address the situation, though she declined to provide further details.
The FDIC, she said, is likely considering a “range of available options” to stabilise the situation, which could include an acquisition by a foreign bank, CBS News reported.

“The American banking system is really safe and well-capitalised. It’s resilient,” she said. “In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, new controls were put in place, better capital and liquidity supervision, and it was tested during the early days of the pandemic and proved its resilience. So Americans can have confidence in the safety and soundness of our banking system.”
Still, Silicon Valley Bank’s shutdown has prompted nervousness about whether it could trigger a run on other small and regional banks. Yellen, though, said financial regulators are working to prevent the fallout from spreading to other institutions, CBS News reported.
“We want to make sure that the troubles that exist at one bank don’t create contagion to others that are sound,” she said. “The goal always of supervision and regulation is to make sure that contagion can’t occur.”
“We’re very aware of the problems that depositors will have,” Yellen said, CBS News reported. “Many of them are small businesses that employ people across the country, and of course this is a significant concern and [we’re] working with regulators to try to address these concerns.”
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 13, 2023
Federal bailout for Silicon Valley Bank off the table, Yellen says

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The bank had $209 billion in assets, and many of its depositors were Silicon Valley-backed startups and health-care businesses — many of them small businesses, Yellen said. Some have payrolls to meet this week.
But although the collapse is concerning, Yellen emphasized that the American banking system is “safe and well-capitalized” and “resilient.”
Americans “can have confidence in the safety and soundness of our banking system,” Yellen said Sunday.
“We want to make sure that the troubles that exist at one bank don’t create contagion to others that are sound,” Yellen added.
Although SVB’s failure is being compared to the financial crisis of 2008 that led to the collapse of hundreds of banks across the country, there’s reason to believe the government can steer the country away from a nation-wide fiscal emergency, Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“In 2008, the regulators did not have nearly as a robust toolbox that they have today,” Cohn said. “Today, the regulators have enormous tools at their disposal. They have enormous discretion to go through and really do whatever they want in this situation. … So, I’m cautiously optimistic that they will use their tools.”
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), agreed that the government should avoid bailing out SVB’s investors. “I’m not ready to offer them a bailout by any stretch of the imagination,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd during an interview on Meet the Press.
The best outcome would be for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to find a buyer for the bank, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), said Sunday.

“I’ve been in conversations with the regulators, the administration, the [Federal Reserve], the best outcome will be, can we — can they find a buyer for this SVB bank today before the markets open in Asia later in the day?” Warner, a member of the Banking Committee said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
SVB’s collapse shouldn’t be seen as a sign that banks need to more regulation, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said; it’s more likely a sign of mismanagement, he said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Small banks “certainly don’t need any more regulation. That doesn’t mean that you can you can be mismanaged,” Cramer said. “Maybe better oversight, but certainly not more regulation.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also addressed the bank’s failure Sunday, saying the federal government was working to come up with a solution before the markets open in Asia Sunday evening.
“I have talked with the administration from [Fed Chair] Jay Powell and Janet Yellen. They do have the tools to handle the current situation. They do know the seriousness of this, and they are working to try to come forward with some announcement before the markets open, McCarthy told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“I’m hopeful that something can be announced today.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 12, 2023
Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to impact Indian startup ecosystem: Experts

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Washington: The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the largest vendor in the startup ecosystem, is likely to adversely impact the Indian startup scenario as well as it has injected a lot of uncertainty in the sector overnight, industry experts say.
“Hopefully the matter will get resolved, but I think it is a big hit for Indian startups,” Ashu Garg, a prominent Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist and early-stage investor for over two decades, told PTI in an interview.
California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th largest bank in the United States, was closed on Friday by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation which later appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as its receiver.
The FDIC, in a statement, said as of December 31, 2022, the Silicon Valley Bank had approximately USD 209.0 billion in total assets and about USD 175.4 billion in total deposits. At the time of closing, the amount of deposits in excess of the insurance limits was undetermined. The number of uninsured deposits will be determined once the FDIC obtains additional information from the bank and customers.
“The reality is that the Silicon Valley Bank has been a real supporter of the Indian startup scene and has provided banking services. Most Indian startups that do business in the US use this bank because it is one of the few institutes willing to work with the Indian banks. A lot of the banking institutes do not want to work with overseas customers,” Garg, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, said.
“So, SVB has been able to work with the Indian companies that do not have US employees. So if they (are gone), it will be very problematic for the Indian (companies),” he said in response to a question.
Over the past several years, SVB has been one of the most preferred choices of banking for startups and tech industry in the Silicon Valley, mainly because of its understanding of the industry and flexibility in many aspects suiting the startup ecosystem.
Given that every third startup in the Silicon Valley is founded by Indian-Americans, experts feel a significantly large number of these founders would be impacted as early as next week in terms of even making basic payments and giving paychecks to their employees.

Similarly, a large number of Indian startups which do not have even an employee or an office in the US had opened up their accounts in the Silicon Valley Bank as it let them do so without much regulatory questions and with a customer-friendly approach.
The implications of the collapse of SVB on Indian-Americans and their companis are very serious, Garg said.
“The Silicon Valley Bank is the largest vendor to the startup ecosystem. So now you have all these loans. You do not know what is going to happen if the loans get sold and get called.
“Besides, a lot of fintech also depends on the Silicon Valley Bank… So you probably saw Rippling, which is a payroll company, unable to issue payroll because their underlying bank is the Silicon Valley Bank. It also has potential implications for the banking system in the US and the rest of the world,” the venture capitalist said.
A group of Silicon Valley-based venture capitalists after a meeting to discuss the aftermath of the bank’s downfall said the events that unfolded over the past 48 hours have been deeply disappointing and concerning.
“In the event that SVB was to be purchased and appropriately capitalised, we would be strongly supportive and encourage our portfolio companies to resume their banking relationship with them,” it said in a joint statement released by Indian-American Navin Chaddha, an early stage investor.
” SVB has been an early partner for many of our companies at Battery Ventures through the ups and downs of company building. The last 48 hours unfolded in ways we could have never imagined, but now is the time to back our partners and we strongly support our companies working with SVB as and when we have more clarity on their path forward,” he said.
Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley in the House of Representatives, said the FDIC needs to investigate short sales over the past few months by executives, and at minimum, there should be a clawback with penalties of profits made.
“This should go to non-profits like Sunnyvale Community Services who are worried about losing SVB deposits and paying mortgages,” he demanded.
Indian-American presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said the American taxpayers should not bail out the likes of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
“If you want to make deposits at the Silicon Valley Bank, that is your business. But I did not hear the tech industry’s intelligentsia calling for bailouts of East Palestine last month,” he said.
Meanwhile, Indian-American Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is tasked with protecting the consumers interest in the case. He is also one of the FDIC directors.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 12, 2023