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A Blip On The Radar Or The Beginning Of The End?

Despite decades of working in financial services, mostly in customer facing roles where I kissed ass and took the heat for the screw-ups of others, I don’t fully understand what happened with Silicon Valley Bank but when a top 20 bank collapses, it is big news.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/silicon-valley-bank-crashes-65-halted-pending-news

As others have pointed out, while SVB is a top-20 bank it pales in comparison to the really big players like Chase and Bank of America. Chase alone has something like $3.2 trillion in assets.

Notice that the bank right below them, Fifth Third Bank where I was a branch manager at a couple of locations, has slightly lower total assets but 1,104 branches while SVB only had 16 branches but more in “assets”. This was a very different kind of bank. Still it is a significant event getting little coverage because Sniffy Man Good is President instead of Orange Man Bad. It was also another opportunity to mock The Wrongest Man Alive, CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who is so reliably wrong you could base your investment strategy just off of doing the opposite of what he recommends (not investment advice, etc)

It is amazing that someone as dumb as Jim Cramer still makes a bunch of money being incorrect.

While I would hesitate to go full Zerohedge and declare this is a harbinger of imminent collapse, it does show us again that the financial system we operate under is a Jenga tower. You can pull a piece out here and there but one of these times a critical piece will come out and the whole thing will fall.

It almost happened in 2008 and we are in much worse shape economically and culturally in 2023. There is a seething undercurrent of anger and resentment that crosses a lot of different streams within our various tribal identities, all just looking for an excuse to riot or loot or to just simply start feeding degenerates into a woodchipper. In 2008 the nation was more unified than it is today and most people, especially working class and middle class Whites, still trusted and believed in the system. Today? Thanks to Covid, January 6th, Ukraine, etc more Whites than ever have realized the deck is stacked completely against them and are saying the mantra many of us have been chanting for years: we aren’t voting our way out of this.

I would and have argued that all that is holding our nation together at this point is shared consumerism. As long as we can keep consuming, whether than means new variations on existing tech products or cheap calories or endless entertainment, the lid stays on. When I can watch Netflix on my new iPhone and order delivery Taco Bell on the same phone, I might grumble but deep down still believe things are OK. A major economic calamity would disrupt that somnolent state and lots of people will realize how much they are pissed off and that they really don’t like vast swaths of our population.

Another theme here at dissident thoughts is that desperate people will do desperate things and even the meekest guy can flip and become a killer under the right conditions. You may look at the corpulent lard-ass who looks like his wife bosses him around all day and think he is harmless, and under most circumstances that is true, but I suspect a lot of even cucked men can get pretty violent pretty quickly under the right circumstances. Multiply that by tens of millions and you get the sort of scenario we often talk about.

Something else I am pretty confident in saying is that we probably won’t know it is happening until it really blows up. Who watched the video of George Floyd being arrested and thought “I bet this will lead to a whole year of rioting and looting”? Or watched a clip about some new flu coming out of China and thought “Well I guess we will close the whole country down and be forced to wear a piece of paper across our face for two years”? My point being that it might not, almost certainly won’t be a cascade from SVB, but it will be something and since you don’t know what it might be, you have to be ready for anything. On the bright side, when Jim Cramer tells us that things are going great that will be a clear indicator that the wheels are about to come off….

15 Comments

  1. Gryphon

    You could see this as a “pivotal event” towards the (inevitable) Collapse, but IMO, because the (((federal reserve nottabank))) is still able to Print to the Moon (and Planets beyond) this problem can be solved by Printing whatever it takes to cover the Depositors. Until something happens that causes “Runs” at multiple Banks at once, the Printing can save any given one. It’s when they have to do the “Bail-In” thing using all the Depositor’s Savings and Retirement Accounts that things will Escalate to “Bank Holiday” status.

    Disclaimer: I have NO ‘accounts’ with any (((banksters))). As a Collapsitarian, I. Can’t. Wait. for it to Crash….

    • U G

      I have been a Collapsitarian for quite a while and did not even know it! Thanks for giving us the word we have been looking for! The sooner it crashes the sooner we can recover without them….

  2. Plan Accordingly

    You have to burn it all down better in order to build back the CCCP.
    Peak Stupidity and Heather has two mommies were done for this time of controlled demolition.
    Jo Jo Brandon is the Joe Slovo for the new West South Africa, posing as a doddering old fool while he destroys everything in sight.

  3. saoirse

    Time for some more economic follies to keep the normies and cucks quaking in their souless debt-ridden lifestyles.

    Yes, a lot more whites are giving lip service to the TINVOWOOT (there is no voting our way out of this) statement but I’ll wager that over two-thirds of them will show up at the polls like dutiful sheeple, especially if Trumpenstein and the republicunts tell them more sweet little lies.

    And yes, only a major economic calamity can dissolve the veil of illusion, but only over some people.
    Everyone will panic and react unpredictably but few will have ‘eyes to see’ their way out of the morass of mental and emotional conditioning they willfully accepted just to stay in the game and keep playing.

    Like Gryphon, I’ll welcome the day and be far away!

  4. anon

    Now’s the time to make sure your shit is squared away and ready to go, do some last-minute shopping to top things off, etc. Banks are closed on the weekends but you can be sure there is a lot of stress boiling over among the fractional reserve crooks as this is a symptom of how bad the economy has gotten and who knows what follow-on effects may occur. There is a good chance they manage to paper over it again, stop the contagion from spreading, but it’s not 100%.
    If it gets hairy soon, good luck to you all.

  5. Jeffrey Zoar

    I’ve been saying for a long time that the financial media is just as fake as the political media. Perhaps even more, as a lot of it is people talking their book. I’m aware that this is clown world, but if this isn’t the thing that finally sinks Cramer, then nothing ever can. It’s one thing to recommend a stock that goes down in the short run. It’s another to recommend one that goes full belly up in exactly one month’s time.

    There are 3 possible scenarios I see: 1. Powell is in cahoots with the rest of them to bring it all down. 2. If #1 is false, then they will do what they have to do to make Powell change course, up to and including killing him. 3. Powell will ease up and lower rates.

  6. 3g4me

    Now apparently both Signature and Republic banks are also teetering. These are all niche banks in that they catered to the startups, techies, cryptos, etc. I don’t particularly care if various moms who pretend to have a business on Etsy lose their money, or if California wineries have to close, or if medical tech startups doing some ungodly experimentation can’t get funding. The depositors lining up to get their money don’t look particularly White to me, either. But just the sight of those lines is sufficient to panic others. It won’t take too much to get a genuine bank run started, particularly with most banks holding 0% reserves and most people living via credit/debit cards.

    We already keep a significant amount of cash at home, and plan on splitting whatever we feel we must leave in the bank among two or three local ones as soon as we move. I’d like to think one of the bigger ones, like BoA (which caters to non-White non-murricans) will go first when a true crash begins, but who knows? With today’s inflation and economic uncertainty, prudent people try to minimize financial risk/debt and ‘invest’ in tangible assets. But if I were the standard unthinking NPC, I’d look around here in the DFW ‘burbs at all the busy restaurants and shops and people planning to travel this summer and I’d think everything was just peachy. Most have totally adapted to the new ‘normal’ as if it were 2019 all over again.

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  8. mike

    Gold jumped $31.00 that day. The Iranians and the Saudis also just re-established relations through the diplomacy of the Chinese. That one is clearly a big boost for the Brics movement and seems like another blow to the petrodollar. Considering Isreal is rumored to be very close to attacking Iran over the nuclear program, the timing is very interesting. It looks like SA is realigning itself ahead of the shooting. All of these trends and developments on the world stage have drastic consequences for the fake us economy.

    • Stilicho

      SVB made a lot of loans to tech startups for operational needs. Think lines of credit which many businesses use because the timing of revenue and expenses don’t match. It also sounds like SVB made some longer term loans to these startups at the historically low rates that were in place since 2008 until recently. Loans which would not have been made by most banks due to the inherent risks of startups. Add in that the venture capital financing of these startups has been drying up and suddenly SVB discovered these loans were not worth much, it had to raise capital to shore up its balance sheet. When this effort failed, word got out and the bank run started.

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