Tag Archives: responsibilities

Right, But for a Different Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors’ headline and subheadline is on a reasonable track:

Punishing Banks for Regulatory Failure
Regulators want to saddle midsize banks with new capital rules.

The editors the proceed to disparage the regulators’ move, and they’re correct about that. They’re mistaken in their lede, though, and that leads them to the erroneous aspect of their disparagement:

Silicon Valley Bank failed owing to rising interest rates and lapses by regulators, not a shortage of capital.

It’s true that a shortage of capital did not cause SVB’s failure, except as the proximate outcome of the real cause of the failure, an outcome that made the failure inevitable.

SVB did run short of capital value, and that meant it couldn’t survive the rapid outflow of cash through depositor withdrawals. But rising interest rates were only the means of that capital shortfall and bank failure, not the cause. Nor were lapses by regulators—and there were some serious ones, including their lack of oversight diligence, which should have led to better enforcement of existing rules—involved in the bank’s failure.

The bank’s managers failed in their own fiscal duties, overbalancing as they did the nature of their capital holdings in the face of those rising interest rates: those managers chose not to balance the interest rate risk related to their deposits and the rates they were paying against the interest rate risk related to their capital holdings and the way rising rates were devaluing their holdings.

Those managers could see as well as any of us, and as well as their depositors, what rising rates were doing to their bank’s capital, and those managers could see as well as any of us, and as well as their depositors, the increasing risk to the bank of the decreasing interest rate spread between what the bank paid depositors and what it earned on its loans, loans the bank was increasingly unable to make in the face of those rising interest rates. And that exacerbated the impact of the bank’s decreasing capital holdings, which those managers could see as well as any of us, and as well as their depositors.

Nor did lack of overt regulator intervention have much of anything to do with SVB’s failure. Bank managers, any enterprise managers, are paid to act on their own initiative, not to wait until they’re told what to do and then, subsequently, told to go ahead and do it.

SVB’s managers were no exception to that.

This was an SVB management failure, and Regulators have no place for writing new capital rules. It’s sufficient for the market place to apply the appropriate sanctions, even if that deprives government bureaucrats of an opportunity to feel good about themselves by Doing Something.

Dishonest Press

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The New York Times and the tabloid’s cronies in the journalism guild ran long and hard about Justice Clarence Thomas’ gift from Dallas Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones, a gift the NYT and its parrots claimed was an authentic Cowboys Superbowl ring. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News are among the Texas tabloids that repeated the rumor, and joined the NYT in masquerading their rumor as fact.

Never mind two trivial, if actual, facts.

The ring Jones gave Thomas was a $12 replica.

Thomas reported even that tiny gift in his 1994 ethics form, which he filed with the Court.

Mark Paoletta, longtime friend of Thomas who worked on his 1991 confirmation:

I expect the New York Times to issue a retraction on this falsehood, and an apology to Justice Thomas[.]

And

How could New York Times reporters get this so wrong?

Good luck with that apology. The NYT made no “mistake;” this was the outlet’s, and that of its fellow rumor mongers’, deliberate smear of a Supreme Court Justice whom they view as nothing more than an uppity black man who left the Liberals’ and their press’ plantation and runs his mouth too much. Thomas, shamefully, is their 21st century Dred Scott to the press’ Chief Justice Roger Taney.

Press Censorship

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This time, it’s NBC‘s Dasha Burns’ dishonest censorship, along with that of her bosses a the legacy broadcast network.

Correspondent Dasha Burns pressed DeSantis during an interview about whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if he won the Oval Office next year.
DeSantis: I would not allow what a lot of the left wants to do, which is to override pro-life protections throughout the country all the way up really until the moment of birth in some instances, which I think is infanticide.
Burns: I’ve gotta push back on you on that because that’s a misrepresentation of what’s happening. I mean, 1.3% of abortions happen at 21 weeks [of pregnancy] or higher.
DeSantis: But their view is is that all the way up until that, there should not be any legal protections.
Burns: There is no indication of Democrats pushing for that.
The network then cut off DeSantis in its news package as he started to reply.

DeSantis’ cogent response, which Burns had censored from her segment because it demonstrated the lie of her underlying narrative, was this:

Well, yes, they are. They’ve done it in California. They’ve done it in other states.
I don’t say that that’s the norm in terms of this. But I do think that the left in this country has moved on from a position that said, “You know what, we do want to discourage abortion, it’s not something that’s a good thing,” to now viewing it more as a positive good for society. I don’t think most Americans think it’s a positive good for society. It’s obviously a tragic circumstance.

It’s breathtaking, and not a little insulting, that the press thinks us ordinary Americans are so mind-numblingly stupid that we cannot see through their blatant, censoring, dishonesty.

Backwards

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Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) has a hold on a number of President Joe Biden’s (D) DoD appointments and promotion lists—something often distorted into being an outright block, but in fact is only a requirement that these appointments and lists go through by floor votes in the Senate rather than by rubber stamp, unconsidered unanimous consent. Tuberville’s hold is motivated by his opposition to SecDef Lloyd Austin’s insistence that DoD fund military members’ abortions, travel to locations providing abortions, and abortion-related services. It’s bad enough that DoD would cover these expenses—can only cover these expenses—with taxpayer monies, but Austin’s insistence is in direct violation of the Hyde Amendment, which blocks just such taxpayer-funded expenses.

And that’s before we get to the immorality of killing unborn babies in the first place.

Lucas Kunce is a Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senate from Missouri and is running against the incumbent Josh Hawley. He decries Tuberville’s hold. He thinks Tuberville’s hold is negatively impacting national security, and he cynically wraps himself in his 13 years as a Marine, including his time in the badly bloated (my characterization) Pentagon.

Kunce has it backwards, and cynically so. To the extent the lack of these appointments and lists affects national security, that is solely from Austin’s insistence on DoD support for abortion. If Kunce—and Austin and Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D), the latter whom controls the Senate’s vote schedule—were serious about claims of national security risk, they’d leave off from holding out for abortion at taxpayer expense. They’d drop that matter and allow the appointments and lists to go through, or they’d push for the floor votes; either way, they’d desist from using the disagreement for their personal political gain.

CIOs, Affirmative Action, and Diversity

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Company CIOs, Chief Information Officer inhabitants of the C-Suites, claim to be worried about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling banning colleges’ and universities’ use of race as an admission criterion on their own access to a suitably “diversity”-laden work force.

By removing race from college admission considerations, the pool of tech talent entering the workforce may not only be less diverse, it could also be smaller if underrepresented minorities don’t see the field as a welcoming or viable option, those executives say.

No, rather than looking to plus up their virtue credentials, these executives should be more worried about (prospective) employees’ ability to do the job than about whether their departments have the “correct” balance of skin colors and sexes.

There is this from Juniper Networks‘ CIO:

“I worry about, in universities, if we’re not making it a more hospitable environment, that we make it harder than it is,” said Sharon Mandell…. That means companies and IT leaders need to work to convince diverse workers that technology is “a compelling place, and a welcome place for them.”

That hints at a good start (but only hints); however, by beginning at the college/university level, it renders itself too late to be an effective start. Of course, I’m also, probably naively, assuming a benign definition of “hospitable.”

Hence my question: if these CIOs and their companies are serious, and not just virtue-signaling, what are they doing to improve K-12 education and the resulting better preparation for all students? If all students get an equal opportunity at a quality education, the resulting population of job applicants—whatever the job—will pretty much automatically have a requisite diversity, artificial as that criterion is.

Unless, of course, these CIOs (they wouldn’t be alone in this regard) actually think some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior in ability to other groups of humans and so those lesser groups need special handling and protection.