Biden Tells Americans to ‘Feel Confident’ in Banking System
Also: The End of the Five-Day Work Week?
Biden Tells Americans to ‘Feel Confident’ in Banking System
In short remarks on Monday, President Biden reiterated a joint statement from the Treasury Department and FDIC and said that Americans should “feel confident” in the banking system.
In the joint statement, the federal agencies said, “Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system. This step will ensure that the U.S. banking system continues to perform its vital roles of protecting deposits and providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth.”
In his speech, President Biden said, “No losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the deposit insurance fund. Because of the actions that our regulators have already taken, every American should feel confident that their deposits will be there if and when they need them.”
He also attempted to blame the bank collapse on the Trump Administration. From Daily Caller:
“During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks like Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, including the Dodd-Frank law to make sure that the crisis we saw in 2008 would not happen again,” Biden said during his Monday remarks.
“Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements,” he added.
…
EJ Antoni, research fellow in regional economics at the Heritage Foundation, told the Caller “it’s unlikely that the Dodd-Frank changes would have prevented SVB’s collapse” because “the regulation dealt not with individual bank solvency but with systemic risk.”“Stress testing by the Federal Reserve does not focus on a bank’s health, but the bank’s interconnectedness to the entire financial system. The collapse of SVB was not, and is not, a systemic risk issue,” Antoni said.
“Those claiming the bipartisan deregulation in 2018 was responsible for today’s collapse don’t understand stress testing nor fractional reserve banking. SVB collapsed because of the unrealistically low interest rates imposed by the Fed and gross fiscal mismanagement at the bank. For example, management sold off the bank’s interest rate hedges in December 2021 – assets which would have offset the bank’s losses today,” Antoni added.
RELATED:
Let the bailout debate begin (Axios)
Panic and partying reign at SXSW amid Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse (NBC News)
Regional banks are seeing flight of deposits to too-big-to-fail megabanks (MarketWatch)
Must Be the Weather
A recent HUD report shows that more than half of homeless people in the U.S. are in California. The Post Millennial reported:
Out of the 582,462 homeless individuals, two thirds are living in shelters with about half of all “unsheltered” homeless people located in California. This has led some cities in the Golden State to start cracking down on encampments in cities like Sacramento, San Jose and Oakland.
According to the report, about 60 percent are “staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters, safe havens, or transitional housing programs—and four in ten (40%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation.”
In related news, Texas Gov. Abbott tweeted:
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