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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: More bank fallout as France deals with retirement and change [1]
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Date: 2023-03-17
x Big shift: Macron decided to NOT have a vote on the retirement reform, but instead use what's known as the "49.3" procedure. That lets a law pass without any vote on the law! Instead, government allows for confidence vote: if it wins, law passes; if it fails, government falls.
https://t.co/uS4oNksVrP — Taniel (@Taniel) March 16, 2023
One the one hand …
Elizabeth Spiers/The New York Times:
I Was an S.V.B. Client. I Blame the Venture Capitalists. It’s easy to see how a whisper network of a few hundred C.E.O.s — all convinced they have exceptional vision, all working themselves into a panic — could spiral out of control. But what happened in that chat is an extension of the fundamental way that these venture capitalists operate, which is groupthink on a staggeringly consequential scale.
On the other …
Noah Smith/Substack:
Charting a course between inflation and bank failures. The first key thing to understand here is why the government acted so quickly and decisively. The key here is that the banking panic really did have the possibility of spreading beyond SVB, and beyond the tech sector and California in general. This is from a (very good) Washington Post writeup on the crisis: Over the weekend, [government officials] began to see banks outside of tech-heavy New York and California showing signs of volatility. Bank executives told federal officials that major customers had warned they would withdraw their money and move it to a Wall Street giant for safety first thing on Monday morning. If it had just been a case of some panicky VCs spreading fear and confusion, the panic probably just would have stayed in tech-world like every other tech crash. But there was a reason the panic had the possibility of spreading. That reason was interest rates.
Liz Hoffman and Gina Chon/Semafor:
Why the biggest banks were first shut out of bidding on Silicon Valley Bank Banks profit on the gap between the interest they pay depositors and other creditors and the interest they collect from the people and companies they lend to. The firms under the most pressure — a growing list that includes First Republic, Western Alliance, and Utah-based Zions Bank — were paying between 0.23% and 2% in interest on their deposits at the end of last year, according to securities filings. If those deposits continue to flee, they’ll be replacing them with government funds charging roughly 5% in interest. Replacing cheap deposits with more expensive government money will narrow or in some cases entirely close that gap. Profits will evaporate, and these lenders’ shares will trade at steep discounts.
Keep in mind that will make them targets for takeover.
x 1. Fox News' @JesseBWatters told millions of viewers that Silicon Valley Bank "donated $74 million to Black Lives Matter."
Similar claims went viral on Twitter
Some "facts" are too good to check
The actual amount that SVB donated to BLM is ZERO
Follow along for receipts 🧾 pic.twitter.com/32FhrK3A3Y — Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 16, 2023
Dave Weigel/Semafor:
Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who’s challenging independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for her seat, attacked her for supporting the 2018 Dodd-Frank rollback and said that Republicans would struggle to blame “wokeness” for the tumult. If 2022 GOP nominee Blake Masters ran again, said Gallego, he’d have to explain his mentor Peter Thiel’s role in the bank run; if any other Republican ran, Gallego would attack the “woke” distraction. “Not everything in the world is a noun, a verb and ‘woke,’” the congressman told Semafor. “Thinking that way is how we end up with Republicans de-regulating these banks to the point where they become ticking time bombs for the economy.”
It’s unclear how much of this banking chaos was due to deregulation and how much was due to lax Fed supervision, but we do know everyone wants to blame the Fed.
x The Eleventh Circuit has denied Florida's motion to stay the district court's injunction against the Stop W.O.K.E. Act pending Florida's appeal.
The district court's order blocking the law on First Amendment grounds will remain in effect, at least for now. pic.twitter.com/NJEE7xizhb — Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) March 16, 2023
Michael A. Cohen/MSNBC:
In Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats have Republicans on the run As the GOP increasingly moves to the far right, it has ceded the middle ground to Democrats. It’s not easy being a progressive these days. Republicans control the House of Representatives and are threatening to tank the economy by refusing to raise the debt limit. The Supreme Court, after having overturned Roe v. Wade and set an impossibly high standard for new gun control legislation, looks primed to undo President Joe Biden’s student loan relief. And at the state level, it seems not a day goes by that a red-state legislature doesn’t pass new laws targeting LGBTQ people or imposing new mandates on schoolteachers. But not all is lost, liberal America — Michigan has your back. The Wolverine State is not normally where progressives look for hope. But since Democrats formally took control of both houses of the Legislature in January — after a clean sweep of all statewide races, from governor to attorney general, in last fall’s midterm elections — Michigan has quickly become a contender to be America’s wokest state.
And we have a big vote coming up in a few weeks in Wisconsin.
x Cable "news"/news ratings Tuesday at 9 pm ET
FNC--Hannity: 2.17 million
MSNBC--Alex Wagner: 1.24 million
CNN-- Prime with Chris Wallace?
358,000
CNN's primetime and morning news ratings Tuesday were lower than the network's daytime/early evening numbers. Shocking — TVMoJoe (@TVMoJoe) March 16, 2023
x *for competitors — TVMoJoe (@TVMoJoe) March 16, 2023
Charlie Sykes/The Bulwark:
The DeSantis Mini-Trump Strategy It's not going well. Think of yesterday as the first real day of the 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. And it didn’t go well at all for Ron DeSantis. Making his first foray into foreign policy, the Florida culture warrior managed simultaneously to look both weak and out of his depth. David Frum summed it up: “Message: Tough on drag queens. Weak on national security.” On yesterday’s Bulwark Podcast, the Wapo’s James Hohmann said that DeSantis’s attempt to align himself with Donald Trump made him look “small and unserious.” “It’s bad policy and bad politics,” he said. “He's being a follower, not a leader.” DeSantis’s dismissal of Russia’s savage and illegal invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” was widely panned, even by some of his allies.
Molly Jong-Fast/Vanity Fair:
GOP ELITES CAN’T SIMPLY WISH DONALD TRUMP AWAY They may be done with Trump, but he isn’t done with the party. If this polling is right, the base is not “sick of losing.” There is no tangible evidence to support the GOP braintrust’s fantasy. If anything, the base seems stuck in 2016, as four polls last month showed Trump experiencing a February bump , expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis. It’s been clear for months— to me, at least —that Trump shouldn’t be counted out, whereas “several top Republicans,” Axios noted Tuesday, “keep saying there’s no way” he can win the nomination. But what’s the base saying? Thirty-eight percent of CNN respondents said they consider America’s “increasing racial, ethnic, and national diversity” to be a threat. More than half of the respondents want a candidate who would “support government action to oppose ‘woke’ values,” while a whopping “78% majority of Republican-aligned Americans” said that “society’s values on sexual orientation and gender identity are changing for the worse.” Oh, and 84% of those who identify as very conservative consider Biden’s indisputable 2020 victory to be illegitimate. Trump continues to very much have a hold over the hearts and minds of the GOP base.
x who, btw, is not wrong
https://t.co/WTRnwyPv3L — Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) March 16, 2023
Finally, for fans of Rep. Jamie Raskin:
[END]
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