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March
14
2023

The Cover-up Begins
Paul Craig Roberts

The disinformation service, Bloomberg, takes the lead. Bloomberg points its finger at Donald Trump and “Trump era deregulation.” In Bloomberg’s rewriting of history,  Trump is responsible because he signed a bill passed by Democrats and Republicans that allowed mid-sized banks to “skirt some of the strictest post-financial crisis regulations.” So, where was the federal reserve? Where were the bank regulators? Bloomberg doesn’t say.

Presidents don’t write financial legislation. Financial legislation that the Federal Reserve and the SEC don’t approve doesn’t get passed. A third world immigrant-invader, Ro Khanna, who somehow represents in Congress Silicon Valley says: “Congress must come together to reverse the deregulation policies that were put in place under Trump.”

What utter total bullshit.

Silicon Valley Bank failed because in 1999 the Clinton regime signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act and because the Dodd-Frank Act allows failing banks to seize the deposits of depositors in order to have a bail-in instead of a bail-out. The foolish legislation causes depositors to withdraw their deposits on any sign of bank trouble.

The utterly mindless Dodd-Frank Act set up the mechanism for modern-day bank runs. If you have more money on deposit than the $250,000 insured amount, Dodd-Frank allows the bank to bail itself out by seizing your deposits. Many companies and corporations have payroll deposits in excess of $250,000. If deposits are seized, business can’t pay their workers or their bills. Thus Dodd-Frank is an excellent way of initiating bank runs and collapsing businesses and employment and city and state tax revenues.

But don’t expect Bloomberg to ever tell you any truth. I have never read a correct report on Bloomberg.

Silicon Valley Bank got in trouble because the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and reduced the value of the bank’s bond portfolio which made the bank insolvent. Large depositors, seeing their money at risk, quickly withdrew it. Silicon Valley Bank had to sell its depreciating bond portfolio, thus depreciating its value more, to meet withdrawals, thus driving down the value of its bonds, with the consequence that the bank’s liabilities exceeded its assets leaving the bank bankrupt.

The Democratic Party is an anti-American political party. It does not represent anything envisioned by our Founding Fathers. It has no respect for a rule of law, the US Constitution, truth, and White Americans, who are racist and domestic terrorists by definition.

Trump was a challenge to Democrat woke hegemony. Consequently, everything wrong in America is blamed on Trump by Democrats and presstitutes.

The crazed woke politics that Democrats, presstitutes, and universities have inflicted on America precludes intelligence analysis. Everything that would save existing society from failure is dismissed as “white supremacy.”

Apparently, banks themselves are affected by this ideology. They hired not competence but diversity in support of the rainbow. If the Federal Reserve also has this problem, there is no hope of avoiding financial collapse.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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