“I feel privileged to help spread awareness of lived queer experiences, partner with charitable organisations, and above all create a sense of community for our LGBTQ+ employees and allies.”
Now, what do you think is going to happen to a bank one of whose top executives has this list of priorities? Correct. Exactly what happened on Friday to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). It collapsed, burying thousands of investors and borrowers under the rubble.
The reported losses of $1.8 billion make SVB the largest bank to collapse since the 2008 crisis, and one has to congratulate SVB for winning the gold medal. Those directly affected probably don’t feel congratulatory. They must be asking questions, some beginning with the adverb ‘why’.
The statement above, in which I highlighted the key words, may begin to answer such inquiries. It was uttered by Jay Ersapah, the Chief Risk Officer for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Miss Ersapah uses corporate videos to boast of being a “queer person of colour from a working-class background”.
That pride was transformed into her dedicating her unbridled energy to serving “underrepresented entrepreneurs” and organising a month-long campaign actually called Pride, along with another one called ‘Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness week.’ She also indoctrinated staff in the spirit of her passion, using ‘safe-space’ catch-ups.
The board of the parent American bank, one of the biggest lenders to the high-tech industry, evidently felt that such commitments in no way encroached on Miss Ersapah’s day job, that of managing operational risks on three continents.
The board’s own approach to that function was rather lackadaisical anyway. Suffice it to say that for eight months in 2022 the bank didn’t have a Head of Risk at all, on the evident assumption that financial services were risk-free, able to tick along nicely come what may.
The CVs of most of the board members hint at the possibility that their own priorities aren’t drastically different from Miss Ersapah’s. Writing in fluent woke, SVB directors specify the pronouns that best reflect their self-identification, which is a dead give-away. Some disgruntled investors say it’s mostly such credentials that helped those executives climb the corporate ladder.
The bank certainly based its hiring policy on woke qualifications above all, as Miss Ersapah’s career suggests. Combined with SVB’s relaxed approach to risk management, the end was likely, although there must have been other contributing factors as well.
Many commentators, including on occasion me, have commented on the moral, social and intellectual costs of wokery, which are nothing short of prohibitive. But it appears that the costs can also be denominated in hard currency.
At the cost of sounding parochial, some of those costs were going to be borne by the British tax-payer. For the Chancellor was planning a bailout, which in this case wouldn’t have come cheap.
More than 3,000 British tech firms have about £7 billion in deposits with the bank’s UK subsidiary. Now Britain’s budding high-tech industry is screaming bloody murder: many companies can meet neither the payroll nor their own obligations to creditors.
By bailing out bankrupt firms, the state violates every fundamental tenet of classical economics. Money should be shuffled around the economic table not by the state, but by what Adam Smith called the invisible hand of market forces. Yet such economics is now seen as a quaint anachronism. The invisible hand is largely atrophied, and it needs regular boosting with steroidal injections of state capital.
We may not like it, and conservative economists may throw their hands up in horror, but such are the facts of life. It, life, has neither a reset button nor a rewind one, and we must accept state interference in the economy the way we accept earthquakes and hurricanes.
In this case, British tax-payers dodged the bullet. At the last moment, HSBC stepped in, bought SVB for £1 and assumed its debts. But the Chancellor was otherwise prepared for a multi-billion bailout, apparently seeing nothing wrong with such generosity. It’s the way of the world, isn’t it?
The state is both referee and player in the economic game, and all games have both winners and losers. If the state wants our money to make sure no one loses too badly, there’s precious little we can do about that.
However, we must be able to analyse why such seemingly successful concerns as SVB go under. And if their wokery is a contributing factor, then we do have some recourse. We can all fight that unsavoury alphabet soup of perversions being shoved down our throats. (Incidentally, when did ‘queer’, as in Q, stop being a pejorative term? It’s now seen as a badge of honour.)
The fight can start with small mano a mano skirmishes, with us standing fast in defence of morality and proper language. We can insist that there exist only three singular third-person possessive pronouns: his, her and its. We can refuse to address individuals in the plural. And, more to the point, we can withhold investment from companies emblazoning wokery in their corporate charters.
We can boycott companies whose hiring policy puts wokery before competence. And we can unite into large lobbying groups, on the assumption that a fist can deliver a harder blow than outstretched fingers.
Or we can do nothing and just sit back, watching wokery destroy what’s left of our civilisation – including its wealth – step by perverse step. Our choice.
First this Yellen says no bailout. Then she says bailout. This bank failure bigger than what we think I fear. Start-up companies going to suffer big-time. Actually worldwide implications.
But they have a handle on all this I am sure. Don’t they??
A quick read shows that instead of managing risk, Miss Ersapah spent most of her time managing sexuality – hers and her employees’. Small wonder, then, that SVB ran into problems.
“…we can withhold investment from companies emblazoning wokery in their corporate charters.” There are some state governments and financial institutions that base their business practices on other companies’ (and private individuals’) “woke scores”. Gone are the days when banks were accused of declining mortgages to minorities. We have evolved to decline funds to those who hold the wrong viewpoint! Let’s all give a welcoming smile to China’s system of “social scores”. Long overdue, I’d say. (I believe mine would be negative.)
Just wait for the stories that blame the SVB failure on discrimination against them because of their woke policies.
On the subject of bailouts, I once heard the phrase “Capitalism will never fail as long as socialism is there to bail it out.” During the 2008 financial crisis we were introduced to the idea that some companies were “too big to fail”. I assume this means the economic impact of so many people losing their jobs was best parried with a handout of enough of other people’s money to keep them going. (Let’s see if this idea holds true for the nation’s 3.3 million truck drivers when self-driving trucks become viable.)
The problem with the bankers who caused the last crash is that they succumbed to greed. They weren’t good. In 2023 woke => good. Problem solved. Or not as it seems.
“the evident assumption that financial services were risk-free, able to tick along nicely come what may.”
Well they weren’t far wrong, were they? Biden(‘s handlers) are going to bale them out with taxpayers’ / printed money.
Yes indeed “Woke” doctrine is insane – but it is the basic principle of Credit Bubble banking (money created from nothing) that is the fundamental problem.