Silicon Valley Bank is the second biggest bank to shut down in U.S. history, and people are freaking out. The government is going to have to bail out the depositors, but what will they do with all the money that's left in Silicon Valley Bank? Is this a system wide problem? Or is this just the latest in a long line of banks going under? Ben Shapiro explains why this could be happening, and what the government is actually trying to do to make up for the problems they're trying to solve. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by Express VPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.org/TheBenShapiroShow. Ben Shapiro is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, and host of the Financial Commentator podcast, The Weekly Standard, and is one of the most influential people in the financial press in the world. He's also the founder of The Financial Times and the founder and CEO of Forward Republic, a leading financial technology company. His articles have been syndicated in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post, and many other publications. His work has been featured on CNN, NPR, TechCrunch, and NPR. His latest book is out now, and he's on the cover of Forbes. The Dark Side of the Internet. He's a frequent contributor for Forbes, and you can find him on Medium, The Hive, The Daily Beast, and other publications, including The Financial Commenter, The Pitch. and The Hill. . He also tweets at and is a lot of great books, including Forbes, The Athletic, The New York Magazine, and has a new podcast on his new podcast, and his latest book, The FiveThirtysomething. , which you can be found on the internet, which you should check out here on the FourThirtysomething website, which is a must-read book, which he also has a podcast on the Internet, which will be out in the next few weeks, by the Four Seasons, by The Six Sigma by Ben Shapiro, and much more! is out on the streets of New York City, and so much more, including on The Four Seasons on his podcast is out there, too! And you can get a copy of Ben Shapiro's newest novel, The Six Million Dollar, The Secret Life of a Billionaire's Guide to the Billionaire s Guide to Money, The Real Life Story, by .
00:00:01.000The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:00:03.000Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
00:00:06.000Well, the second biggest shutdown of a bank in U.S.
00:00:09.000history happened over the course of the last 72 hours, and people are freaking out.
00:00:14.000And there's a reason that they are freaking out when a major bank goes belly up like Silicon Valley Bank just did.
00:00:19.000That freaks out everybody, especially because as it turns out, Silicon Valley Bank is apparently not the only bank that has the same kind of issues that shut down Silicon Valley Bank Signature Bank has also been closed right now.
00:00:29.000There is now talk about the possibility.
00:00:32.000Of other banks following in the footsteps of Silicon Valley Bank and having serious problems on their hands on their own.
00:00:38.000That would include, for example, First Republic apparently has similar issues to SVB.
00:00:43.000So we're going to go through exactly what happened with SVP, why it shut down, and we'll talk about whether there's a system wide banking issue.
00:00:50.000The first thing to understand is that the reason for all of this is federal government mismanagement.
00:00:55.000The reason for all of this is because the federal government blew it on inflation and then had to ramp up the interest rates in order to fight the inflation.
00:01:04.000According to the Wall Street Journal, SVB Financial is the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, which counts many startups and venture capital firms as clients.
00:01:11.000So this means that a lot of people are sort of laughing today because look at all the big tech bros who are about to go under.
00:01:16.000What's actually going to happen, as we'll discuss in a moment, is that the federal government is going to bail out the depositors, meaning that all of the people who had their money invested in Silicon Valley Bank, everybody who took their money and put it in Silicon Valley Bank and left it there, and then they would take Swing loans in order to pay their staff.
00:02:41.000It was very reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of 1999-2000, where all of a sudden, Firms that really should not have been valuated at the valuation that they were being provided were suddenly being valuated at extraordinary prices because people had money just gushing out of their pockets.
00:02:54.000Like, what am I going to do with this?
00:02:59.000I can go take my money and I can put it in some weird venture capital attempt and I can just throw the money at it because what else am I going to do with this money?
00:03:08.000And so all of those companies then took their money and they put it in Silicon Valley Bank.
00:03:12.000And so you saw the balance sheet expand dramatically For Silicon Valley Bank Financial.
00:03:18.000So this created a question for Silicon Valley Bank is the way the banks actually make money.
00:03:22.000They don't keep your money in a lockbox.
00:03:24.000It's not like you have a safety deposit box and you bring in your million dollars and they take it in cash and they shove it into the wall or something.
00:03:32.000And what they do is they then lend out the money to other possible ventures or they go and they buy bonds or they go and they buy stocks.
00:03:38.000They invest the money themselves and then they essentially arbitrage the difference between what they have in their coffers and what they owe back to you and what they think they can earn from the markets.
00:03:47.000So what exactly did SVB Financial do with this massive influx of cash?
00:03:51.000Well, they started buying tens of billions of dollars of seemingly safe assets, primarily long-term U.S.
00:03:56.000treasuries and government-backed mortgage securities.
00:03:59.000Which means that SVP's securities portfolio rose from about $27 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to $128 billion by the end of 2021.
00:04:09.000So they took all that money that was being thrown out there by the federal government, this inflationary wave by the federal government, they took all that money and they shoved it back into U.S.
00:04:23.000Treasury works is that you take $950, you invest it in a $1,000 bond, and that $1,000 bond is supposed to come to maturity in, say, 10 years.
00:04:31.000And that means that your rate of return on the $1,000 bond is, you know, a few percentage points.
00:04:36.000And that's fairly safe because you know you're going to get that money back.
00:04:39.000The problem is if the interest rates dramatically increase, then the value of your bond drops really dramatically.
00:04:45.000Because let's say that you buy a bond and that bond is going to give you a yield of 4%.
00:04:51.000And then suddenly there is an interest rate increase.
00:04:54.000And so the government is issuing bonds at a much higher rate.
00:04:57.000Well, then the market for your bond, which is going to earn you a much lower rate, The market just disappears.
00:05:02.000Suddenly your bond is worth like nothing because I can go down the street and get a brand new bond issued by the U.S.
00:05:07.000government that is going to earn me a much greater yield than the bond that you are now.
00:05:12.000You're going to have to sell your bond at discount to compete with the new bonds that are being issued by the federal government.
00:05:17.000This is why when interest rates increase, the prices of bonds that are currently on the market tend to drop.
00:05:23.000So they tend to work in sort of Counterbalance to one another.
00:05:29.000So what happened here is that SPV Financial thought that they were being safe by buying a bunch of U.S.
00:05:34.000Treasuries, but they were being stupid because they didn't look at the market and say, okay, wait, inflation is likely to follow here.
00:05:39.000And so when inflation follows, you're gonna have to ramp up the interest rates.
00:05:41.000When they ramp up the interest rates, what is likely to follow is that the bond holdings that we have are going to drop in value.
00:05:46.000So if there's run on the bank and all of our money is invested, all of their money, all of your money is invested in the bonds, we're gonna have to sell off those bonds at a loss and that's gonna bankrupt the bank.
00:05:55.000That's essentially what happened here.
00:05:57.000We'll get to more of the explanation in just one moment.
00:05:59.000First, in this economic climate, it's pretty sketchy out there.
00:06:03.000You need to be cutting your monthly expenses because you just don't know what's about to happen next.
00:06:06.000Pure Talk saves the average family over $900 a year when they switch from Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile.
00:06:48.000Again, there's no reason why you should be spending your money when you don't have to be spending your money, and you can get the same exact coverage.
00:06:53.000I use it for my business calls, PeerTalk.
00:06:54.000They do a great job, and I'm saving money.
00:06:56.000PeerTalk.com, enter promo code Shapiro, save 50% off your very first month of coverage.
00:07:01.000Again, according to the Wall Street Journal, they bought all of these securities.
00:07:05.000The problem, Emerge, is that because they pay fixed interest rates for many years securities, that's not necessarily a problem unless the bank suddenly needs to sell the securities.
00:07:12.000Because market interest rates have moved so much higher, those securities are suddenly worth less on the open market than they are valued at on the bank's books.
00:07:19.000And as a result, they can only be sold as a loss.
00:07:23.000The price on the bonds they had bought declined from when they had bought them because of the interest rate increases necessitated by the inflation.
00:07:30.000So as the Wall Street Journal says, at the same time, SVB's deposit inflows turned to outflows because clients were burning cash and they stopped getting new funds from public offerings or fundraising.
00:07:39.000So remember, all of their clients are tech companies.
00:07:41.000Those tech companies are very reliant on inflation.
00:07:44.000Those tech companies were burning through cash at an extraordinary rate.
00:07:48.000For about two years there, if you were a company that was in search of public financial capital, you would just seek to get bought up by what was called an S-PAC.
00:07:58.000You sought to be bought up by a publicly traded company that didn't have any content to it.
00:08:26.000And at that point, everybody started trying to draw down their balance of the bank.
00:08:29.000And when they started to draw down their balance of the bank, suddenly the bank had to figure out, because everybody is operating on essentially marginal deposits, right?
00:08:40.000Again, they keep a certain amount of money at the bank, like what they have to by law, but then the rest of it is being lent out or bought or whatever.
00:08:45.000And so suddenly, if everybody goes to the bank at the same time, you have the Mary Poppins scenario, right?
00:08:49.000Everybody goes to the bank at the same time, it's a run on the bank, and everybody freaks out because they have to shut the windows.
00:08:54.000There actually is no money at the bank.
00:08:56.000And so how do they fill back in that hole?
00:08:58.000Well, they have to go and they have to sell all these bonds at a loss, which bankrupts the company.
00:09:02.000So on Wednesday, SVB said it had sold a large chunk of its securities worth $21 billion at the time of sale at a loss of about $1.8 billion after tax.
00:09:11.000The bank's aim was to help it reset its interest rates at today's higher yields and provide it with the balance sheet flexibility to meet potential outflows and still fund new lending.
00:09:18.000And then it tried to raise about $2.25 billion in capital by selling stock.
00:09:23.000The problem is that the run was already on.
00:09:27.000On Thursday, customers tried to withdraw $42 billion of deposits, about a quarter of all of the money that was supposed to be held in the bank.
00:10:01.000Question number one is, are they going to bail out SVB?
00:10:04.000Are they going to bail out the depositors?
00:10:07.000How many other banks are in the vulnerable position that SVB was in?
00:10:12.000How many banks are not telling you they're in that vulnerable position?
00:10:15.000And nobody really knows the answer to that.
00:10:16.000There's a lot of unease in the markets today because even if the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank are bailed out, well, what happens to all of the, what happens to all the unsecured credit holders in Silicon Valley Bank?
00:10:29.000There are a lot of people, in other words, who invested in Silicon Valley Bank.
00:10:32.000They're not going to get their money out.
00:10:41.000It means they can't, like, they're bankrupt.
00:10:43.000I mean, it can bankrupt a lot, a lot of people.
00:10:45.000And so we are in the same situation, financially speaking, that we were not to the same extent as we'll discuss in a moment.
00:10:52.000During 2007-2008, when you started to see major financial institutions go down because they'd made bets that they did not see as being risky because they thought the federal government was going to backstop them.
00:11:02.000Now, again, This is almost a mirror image, in terms of the morality of it, of 2007-2008.
00:11:06.000You had a bunch of financial institutions who were tacitly relying on the promise that the federal government was going to fill them in to make risky bets, and then those bets fail, and then the federal government does indeed at least fill in the depositors.
00:11:20.000Now, they're not going to save Silicon Valley Bank here.
00:11:22.000Silicon Valley Bank will not be a going concern from here on out unless there is somebody who comes in, sweeps in, and actually buys up the assets.
00:11:28.000Now, that could have been done on the open market anyway, right?
00:11:30.000There could have been... Elon Musk talked about buying up Silicon Valley Bank, for example, and then going and finding investors to fill in what depositors were owed.
00:11:38.000Because it's not like Silicon Valley Bank had no money.
00:11:40.000It's not like they went from $200 billion in holdings to $0 in holdings.
00:11:44.000They still were able to liquidate some of the bonds that they had on the market.
00:11:47.000They would need somebody to come in and buy them up and fill it back in, and people would presumably continue to invest in Silicon Valley Bank once they realized that the run was over.
00:11:55.000But that's not what the federal government did.
00:11:57.000So the federal government had basically two concerns here.
00:12:01.000Concern number one is making sure that this thing did not spread directly from Silicon Valley Bank to the rest of the system.
00:12:05.000That there wasn't a meltdown where depositors lost their money and so everybody across the system went, hold up a second, my money is not safe at my bank.
00:12:12.000I'm gonna go do a run on the bank right now.
00:12:14.000And because there is a sort of herd mentality when it comes to this stuff, is my bank safe?
00:12:20.000And everybody goes get their money at the same time and suddenly a lot of banks start to go under and it looks very much Like 2007, 2008, and the federal government rushes in to fill in the gap.
00:12:30.000The other is the moral hazard created by the simple fact that over and over and over again, the federal government keeps doing things and people keep relying on the federal government to fill in the gap.
00:12:40.000In 2007, 2008, the presumption was for everybody who was invested in subprime mortgages that the federal government was going to back their play because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were quasi-government subsidies, subsidized, they were backing that play.
00:12:52.000In 2007-2008, the smart money was that the federal government was backing subprime mortgages.
00:12:58.000So, what's the big deal if we mix in a bunch of crap subprime mortgages with actually good mortgages and then we mix it all together and create a credit derivative structure that allows us to create a crap sandwich and then Everybody eats the crap sandwich, but most of the sandwich is not crap, so it's probably okay.
00:13:12.000Well, as it turns out, the federal government stepped in to save everybody from their own stupidity in relying on the federal government.
00:13:19.000Because all of these companies relied on the federal government not to raise those interest rates to dramatic levels.
00:13:26.000That's exactly what happened with SVP.
00:13:27.000They said, yeah, we can see that you're inflating the currency, but we will bet that you're not going to raise those interest rates to high levels, even as Jerome Powell was saying we probably will.
00:13:36.000And then, of course, things went south and now they're going to get bailed out by the federal government, at least the depositors are.
00:13:41.000And it's a question as to how much, how many other institutions are going to be guaranteed that way, which raises the question as to if depositors are just getting bailed out by the FDIC.
00:13:49.000Then why exactly is the federal government subsidizing a bunch of banks in the first place to engage in investments they would not make with their own money?
00:13:56.000Because that's really what you're talking about here.
00:13:58.000We'll talk about the moral hazard in just one second first.
00:14:07.000I'm really excited about, believe it or not, the White Sox this year.
00:14:10.000I actually think that they're going to over perform.
00:14:11.000But as much as I love watching baseball and rooting for my favorite teams, PrizePicks makes it a lot more fun because PrizePicks is the easiest and fastest way to play daily fantasy sports.
00:15:31.000Your counterpart in the United Kingdom has said that the government there has ruled out a bailout of the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank.
00:15:40.000Have you also ruled out that kind of government intervention?
00:15:46.000Well, let me be clear that during the financial crisis there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out and we're certainly not looking and the reforms that have been put in place means that we're not going to do that again but we are concerned about depositors and are focused on
00:16:15.000Okay, so she says we are going to make sure depositors are taken care of, but we're not going to save Silicon Valley Bank.
00:16:24.000The question is whether that's going to be enough to quiet the financial markets, because let's say that you are a bank.
00:16:29.000You're like, okay, well, my depositors are safe, but I am not safe.
00:16:32.000So there are a lot of the banks right now that are looking over their shoulder.
00:16:35.000Joe Biden's OMB Director, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young says, don't worry, our banking system is safe and secure.
00:16:49.000I think the voice here is our Treasury Secretary who is our lead in working with regulators.
00:16:54.000That's the appropriate person we should listen to here and who's tracking this the most closely.
00:17:01.000But again, what I will say is after the financial crisis, the reforms put in place have given regulators more tools and our system is more resilient and the foundation stronger because of it.
00:17:15.000Okay, so what is the final outcome here?
00:17:17.000So what they've decided to do is they're going to, number one, bail out all the depositors.
00:17:22.000So all the depositors, people who had their money in SVB, they're going to get their money out.
00:17:28.000According to Politico, after a white-knuckle weekend, you can be confident payroll will be met, checks will clear, your company will have access to every cent of its Silicon Valley Bank deposits, not just the FDIC-insured limit of $250,000.
00:17:38.000After federal agencies stepped in on Sunday evening to backstop the failed bank and attempt to stem a burgeoning crisis among the nation's medium-sized banks, if you're a banker, investor, financial regulator, business owner, or Biden administration official, you might still be plenty nervous.
00:17:50.000While Sunday's announcement was aimed at restoring faith in the banking system, the earlier Monday is that markets might not be buying it because another mid-sized bank, First Republic has similar issues to SVP and they've come under close scrutiny over the past week and they saw their shares drop precipitously in early trading.
00:18:04.000That would suggest that the federal government's emergency moves last night could just be the beginning, not the end of the Washington response.
00:18:09.000So here is what the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and FDIC have already announced.
00:18:12.000One, depositors will be able to access all of their money.
00:18:16.000Well, apparently any losses to the deposit insurance fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment On the banks, certain unsecured debt holders and shareholders will not be protected and also senior management has been removed.
00:18:31.000So they're decapitating the rest of the company and they're going to pay off the depositors, which again raises the question as to why we aren't banking directly.
00:18:38.000I mean, this is what Elizabeth Warren wants.
00:18:39.000She wants us to just bank directly with the federal government and then the federal government can just give risky loans to everybody else and bail out those people.
00:18:46.000Well, if you're SVB, that's kind of what this looks like in practice, actually, just without, just with the federal government as kind of the shadow monster in the background waiting to do all of these things.
00:18:56.000There's also the bank term funding program that is going to have, it's going to be a federal lender.
00:19:00.000SVB's problem was it had too much of its money invested in long-term treasuries and mortgage-backed securities that tanked in value as the Fed raised those interest rates.
00:19:08.000There are other banks with the same problem.
00:19:10.000To make sure they don't suffer the same fate, there's a new agency, yay, new government agency, that will allow them to access loans with generous terms.
00:19:16.000Instead of having to sell off their interest rate-ravaged treasuries, they'll be allowed to use them as collateral for a loan at their original value.
00:19:22.000So they are going to now get a loan from the federal government on the basis of the bonds that they are still holding.
00:19:27.000Now, the federal government, of course, has an interest in that because they don't want to see the bond markets, the secondary bond markets, absolutely tank, which, again, would force another rate rise, presumably in the interest rates.
00:19:37.000Meanwhile, New York based Signature Bank was closed and we'll get the same exact treatment as SVP.
00:19:41.000This one, this one's pretty spectacular considering that SVP, you know, that that's one thing.
00:19:45.000Signature Bank is a person on the board is Barney Frank.
00:19:50.000Barney Frank is the guy who was involved in Dodd-Frank.
00:19:53.000Barney Frank was the head of the House Financial Services Committee for decades.
00:19:56.000And he was on the board over at Signature Bank, which shows you that the regulators who are very often in charge of these banks, let's just say that they have a finger in the pie very often.
00:20:08.000And they never bear the results of their own bad decision making.
00:20:12.000So in a second, we'll get to the problems.
00:20:15.000There are really two problems here of Systemic moral hazard.
00:21:24.000Hilariously, Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and a person who had predicted the inflationary increase, he says, guys, we don't need the moral hazard lectures.
00:21:33.000Quote, this is not the time for moral hazard lectures or for lesson administering or for alarm about the political consequences of bailouts.
00:21:40.000Well, actually, this is exactly the time for moral hazard lecturing.
00:21:43.000I mean, when the moral hazard arrives, that's when you normally lecture about moral hazards.
00:21:48.000It's a moral hazard is the concept in economics.
00:21:50.000And when you incentivize bad decision making, you get more of it.
00:21:53.000So in other words, when you bail out depositors, What you are doing is telling them it does not matter where you put your money.
00:21:58.000You put your money where you can get the highest return, you'll get your money back.
00:22:01.000Because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will always pay you back your money.
00:22:04.000So instead of you being a wise consumer and looking at the various financial products and services provided to you in the market, instead you just say, which one of them promises the highest rate?
00:22:13.000So long as that firm is of sufficient size and scale in the United States economy, you will get your money back.
00:22:22.000It means that basically it's now up to the federal government and not to consumers, which firms ought to be successful and which ones ought not to be successful.
00:22:30.000Because again, right now, the too-big-to-fail phenomenon that was supposed to die back in 2007, 2008, that, wrong, wrong.
00:22:36.000Because again, the moral hazard that attaches here is twofold.
00:22:40.000One, you have, let's say that you run a bank.
00:22:43.000And your generalized feeling is the way that I grow my bank is by promising 9% returns.
00:22:50.000In order to get to those 9% returns, I'm going to push out risky loans, like I'm going to take big swings in the market.
00:22:58.000And I know that my as long as I have $200 billion in deposits, all those people can get their money back.
00:23:05.000So worst case scenario, worst case scenario is that everything goes belly up and I end up in a bad personal situation because the bank goes bankrupt.
00:23:13.000But best case scenario, I become one of the biggest banks in America because I'm promising 9% returns and all my depositors are going to get back their money.
00:23:22.000So you are actually incentivized to take these riskier swings.
00:23:25.000You are incentivized to do stupid things like buying tons of bonds in a market that is about to increase interest rates rapidly over the course of two years.
00:23:36.000It's a moral hazard for the people who run the banks.
00:23:37.000Second, it's a moral hazard for the depositors, because if you're a depositor, again, you just put your money where you are promised the highest rate of return.
00:23:43.000So instead of you actually actively looking at the bank where you put your money, you say, should I put it in this safe community bank that I know is going to give me back 3% year on year?
00:23:58.000Instead of that, you just say, well, you know what?
00:23:59.000I'm getting my money back no matter what.
00:24:00.000Federal government's going to pay me back.
00:24:03.000So, I totally understand the bailout position because, again, the urgent is generally the opposite of what is necessary.
00:24:10.000The urgent and the necessary are constantly at war with one another in the financial markets.
00:24:13.000The urgent is bail it out so the economy doesn't collapse and you don't have more banks that do this because they've all relied on this system.
00:24:19.000The necessary is that at a certain point, you're actually going to have to have one of these banks go into receivership and the people who have their deposits in the bank, you're going to have to have those people rely on somebody else to come in and fill that back in when the bank is bought for a very low price.
00:24:35.000Now, presumably, anybody who comes in and buys that bank is going to have to fill back in those deposits.
00:24:57.000Everybody was very against the idea that we're going to bail out the banks because, again, it was creating incentive structures for banks to make moves like this in the future.
00:25:04.000Those incentive structures will continue to exist so long as the federal government is in the belief system of we fill in the mistakes made by big banks.
00:25:13.000This is why you are seeing the federal government basically take the untrue position that it will cost the taxpayer nothing to do any of this stuff.
00:25:28.000Then there's a secondary moral hazard, which again, is that banks like SVB, they had other priorities.
00:25:35.000Their top priority was not, in fact, making money for their depositors in a safe and secure way, in a risk In a risk-neutral way.
00:25:44.000Instead, SVB, it turns out, was a very, very woke company.
00:25:50.000They didn't even have, as it turns out, a risk manager.
00:25:53.000According to the UK Daily Mail, collapsed lender Silicon Valley Bank operated without a chief risk officer between April 22 and January 2023, while the operation's United Kingdom-based head of risk stands accused of prioritizing pro-diversity initiatives over her actual role.
00:26:08.000This revelation comes after the firm became the largest bank to collapse since the 2008 financial crisis, disclosing a $1.8 billion loss in its finances.
00:26:15.000SVB's former head of risk, Laura Izurieta, who formerly performed a similar role at Capital One, left the bank in April 2022.
00:26:21.000She was not replaced until almost a year later when the bank hired Kim Olson, formerly of Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui.
00:26:27.000The bank announced Olson's hiring in January with a press release saying she brought 30 years of financial services experience.
00:26:34.000The bank's CEO credited Olson's deep and multifaceted financial services experience as a senior risk leader that positions her perfectly to manage SVB's financial and non-financial risks.
00:26:45.000But meanwhile, Jay Irsipa, who acts as CRO for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the chief risk officer, and who describes herself as a, quote, queer person of color from a working class background, organized a host of LGBTQ initiatives, including a month long pride campaign and implemented safe space catch ups for staff.
00:27:03.000In a corporate video published just nine months ago, she said she could not be prouder to work for SVB, serving underrepresented entrepreneurs.
00:27:10.000Professional network Outstanding listed UrsaPath as a top 100 LGBTQ future leader.
00:27:16.000Apparently she is quote unquote allies with gay rights charity Stonewall and her author numerous articles to promote LGBTQ awareness, and these included Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness Week.
00:27:27.000So obviously there's a lot of people who.
00:27:29.000You know, I think we're deeply concerned with the things that matter.
00:27:34.000Really deeply concerned with all the things.
00:27:39.000He ripped the wokeness of the bank over the weekend.
00:27:42.000He's like, guys, shouldn't you actually have some priorities like risk assessment?
00:27:49.000I think that the administration has pushed many of these banks into more concern about global warming than they do about shareholder return.
00:28:00.000Everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on one thing they should, which is shareholder returns.
00:28:14.000So, according to the Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley's bank failure hit not just its depositors and investors, but also its customers.
00:28:20.000The business is financed by SVB for years, now look riskier.
00:28:24.000Shares of home solar installer Sunrun, for example, fell 12% on Friday.
00:28:27.000Roku set about $487 million of its $1.9 billion in cash Was at SVB.
00:28:33.000Apparently they are going to get all of their money back.
00:28:35.000So again, you see what the government is trying to do and you also see why it creates future hazard.
00:28:38.000This is always the game with the federal government.
00:28:41.000When it comes to the federal, you get into bed with the federal government and eventually someone is going to end up being screwed.
00:28:46.000If you're lucky, you're big enough that it's not you and it's somebody else.
00:28:49.000But there is, um, there's a real problem here.
00:28:51.000If you're a smaller bank and this happens to you, do your depositors get back their cash?
00:28:56.000Does the federal government really step in?
00:28:59.000I mean, presumably the answer now is going to be yes.
00:29:00.000That for all time, the actual real way the banking system in the United States is now going to work, according to the federal government, is anytime a bank starts to go under, the federal government is going to step in and it's going to secure the deposits of the people who put their money in the bank.
00:29:13.000Which does raise the question as to whether these banks actually work for the federal government.
00:29:19.000Because again, this means the federal government is now subsidizing the risk-taking by people who are concerned with things like ESG.
00:29:28.000Because again, the markets were supposed to sort this sort of stuff out.
00:29:31.000When you fail, you are supposed to actually fail.
00:29:34.000When you're not good at a thing, you're actually supposed to lose.
00:29:38.000But again, apparently the basic idea here is that we got to stop the meltdown while we got to stop the meltdown.
00:29:45.000While I'm sympathetic to the stop the meltdown mentality, considering that everybody has money in the market at this point, at some point you're going to actually have to let consequences take place for firms that make bad risk assessment.
00:29:56.000And those consequences are going to have to hit people who put their money in banks like this.
00:30:01.000And the way that that's going to rejigger the system will allow for better and more meticulous risk planning.
00:30:06.000So anybody who says that this is a quote-unquote failure of capitalism, no, this is a failure of corporatism as always.
00:30:11.000When the government creates systemic risk structures that favor too risky behavior and then bail out sort of the downside risk, this is what you get.
00:30:21.000Okay, in just a second, we'll get to the Oscars last night.
00:30:24.000It was an incredibly dull Oscars, but it was Diversity Forward, which is the thing that matters most.
00:30:28.000First, let's talk about how you get better employees at your firm.
00:30:32.000So, let's say that you run a bank and you actually would like a risk assessment officer who assesses risk rather than promoting various diversity days.
00:30:39.000Well, perhaps you should check out ZipRecruiter.
00:30:41.000ZipRecruiter helps you find the most qualified people for your roles fast.
00:30:44.000Right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
00:30:48.000ZipRecruiter's matching technology helps you find the most qualified candidates for a wide range of roles.
00:31:15.000ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
00:31:17.000We've been using ZipRecruiter here at DailyWire for years.
00:31:19.000It's how we are constantly making our employee base better.
00:31:21.000If you're a business and you're looking to find the best possible employees, the best place to go, ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire to try out ZipRecruiter for free today.
00:31:30.000Also, What if I told you there's one book that has done more for literacy than any other book?
00:32:20.000Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg.
00:32:24.000Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case.
00:32:31.000Now the book is available to everyone.
00:32:33.000From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself.
00:32:42.000It is the most influential book in all of history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that.
00:32:52.000It's a fantastic piece of work from Jordan.
00:32:54.000Now, this is the part where I'd normally tell you Logos & Literacy is only for DailyWirePlus members, but we are making it available for free for everyone right now at DailyWirePlus.com.
00:33:22.000I mean, seriously, if you're going to bet the Oscars, always bet on the diversity film in order to win.
00:33:27.000This year, the diversity film was indeed everything, everywhere, all at once, all the time, forever.
00:33:31.000And that film was likely going to win.
00:33:33.000Now, normally what happens with the Oscars is that there is a film that sort of emerges as the early frontrunner, and then there's a backlash against the film, and then some other film wins, right?
00:33:41.000You'll remember that happened the year that it was like three billboards at Ebbing was in the lead, and then all of a sudden it just sort of fell away because everybody's like, ah, it's a lot of white people in that movie.
00:33:52.000Well, the Oscar winner last night, the big Oscar winner that took everything home, was everything, everywhere, all at once, forever, for the rest of time.
00:34:00.000That movie ended up winning Best Actress for Michelle Yao.
00:34:14.000Now, the reason that it swept is because it fulfills two intersectional check boxes.
00:34:21.000It fulfills the Asian intersectional checkbox, and we already had Parasite, the one a couple of years ago, so we've done that, but it's a very gay movie.
00:34:27.000Everything all at once is a very LGBT movie.
00:34:32.000The main storyline is essentially an Asian immigrant mom who is working really hard and ignoring her family, but she has to learn that her lesbian daughter's girlfriend should be introduced to grandpa, who has to be taught to accept The new ways of the world.
00:34:49.000The whole movie is about alternative universes and parallel universes.
00:34:52.000And in one of them, Michelle Yao herself is a lesbian.
00:34:55.000Oddly, her daughter is a lesbian in all the universes, apparently.
00:34:58.000But Michelle Yao is a lesbian in some universes with Jamie Lee Curtis in like Hot Dog Fingers universe.
00:35:03.000None of this makes any sense unless you've seen the movie because the movie itself does not make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
00:35:07.000I was kind of lukewarm when I first watched it.
00:35:08.000The more I reflect on it, the less I like it.
00:35:10.000There's a Hollywood and quiet ballot that got revealed before this.
00:35:15.000I said I had to watch, I had to sit there like four times to get through it.
00:35:55.000We want to dedicate this to the mommies, all the mommies in the world, to our moms.
00:36:01.000Specifically my mom and dad, Ken and Becky, thank you for not squashing my creativity when I was making really disturbing horror films, or really perverted comedy films, or dressing in drag as a kid, which is a threat to nobody.
00:36:17.000Um, so, yeah, that's, um, I mean, I'm sorry.
00:36:22.000Talk to us more about your morality, Hollywood.
00:36:23.000Yes, I want to hear from Hollywoodites how to raise kids.
00:36:26.000That's definitely what I want to hear.
00:36:28.000So, Everything Everywhere All at Once was the big winner last night, again, because of the diversity.
00:36:33.000I will say that the best moment of the Oscars was a winner, again, it swept, from Kei Haekwon.
00:36:39.000You'll remember him as the short round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
00:36:44.000He was handed the award by Harrison Ford.
00:36:47.000I will say it's kind of amazing that Harrison Ford still has not won an acting Oscar, but Kei Haekwon, who would have called that?
00:36:52.000That short round is going to win an acting Oscar before Harrison Ford.
00:36:55.000But in any case, he did give a quite wonderful speech last night.
00:37:31.000And I think that's why everybody was rooting for Kehek Kwan.
00:37:34.000The other aspects of sort of the diversity picks were, for best actor, a straight white male won, but playing a gay white male, of course.
00:37:41.000An overweight, morbidly obese gay white male, that'd be Brendan Fraser in The Whale, who won over Austin Butler, who probably gave the best performance of the year as Elvis, really kind of inhabited Elvis.
00:38:06.000I think a better performance in to Leslie, but doesn't matter because of course, diversity above all best supporting actress went to Jamie Lee Curtis, who's a big sweep, as I say for everything, everywhere, all at once, all the time.
00:38:16.000Now the big shutout here, and it's worth noting here, the big shutout here is Top Gun.
00:38:20.000So Top Gun, I believe did not win a single award.
00:39:12.000Top Gun was clearly the phenomenon of the year.
00:39:15.000The fact that there were so many people who were opposed to Top Gun was a quasi political statement.
00:39:21.000It was sort of along the lines of this piece from MSNBC called Top Gun Maverick is the most insidious movie at the Oscars is from Zeeshan Aleem, who said that it is a it's insidious because it is very much in favor of the American war machine as a beacon of virtue and excitement.
00:39:39.000It's a poisonous kind of nostalgia, one that smuggles love of endless war into a celebration of live action.
00:39:44.000I think that that is one of the kind of subtle reasons the Top Gun had to lose, because it was just it was kind of too pro-America.
00:39:57.000I'm not sure why Donnie Yen was was speaking at the Oscars, but as it turns out, Donnie Yen also is a front person for the for the Chinese regime.
00:40:10.000So according to NME. There's a petition that was actually set up against Donnie Yen doing this, set up by a Hong Kong activist who claimed the decision showed contempt for the people of Hong Kong and that Yen's presence would damage the image and reputation of the film industry. He had opposed the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019. He called it a riot.
00:40:30.000He is, he was known for starring in the Ip Man series, which is a kind of kung fu series. He was in Rogue One, he's in the 2020 live action remake of Mulan.
00:40:44.000But he is, in fact, a frontman for Chinese positions at the Oscars.
00:40:47.000Again, not particularly shocking that the Oscars was perfectly fine featuring all that.
00:40:52.000Overall, however, pretty boring Oscars.
00:41:00.000The Oscars is still a flagging enterprise by the numbers.
00:41:03.000It's still going down and down and down and down.
00:41:05.000Again, the reason for that is because the big movies are the ones, the only two that really did like amazing business last year were Top Gun and Avatar, and neither of them really cleaned up at all.
00:41:14.000Okay, meanwhile, insanity breaking out over at Stanford Law School.
00:41:19.000So, according to the UK Daily Mail, a federal appeals judge appointed by Donald Trump has now demanded an apology from Stanford Law School after he was invited to speak.
00:41:26.000He's on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:41:27.000He was actually ambushed by an Associate Dean of Equity, Diversion, and Inclusion named Kyrian Steinbach during a discussion on Thursday night.
00:41:34.000Steinbach is a former ACLU lawyer who had previously defended freedom of speech.
00:41:38.000She initially claimed that Duncan had a right to express his views and then launched into a six-minute speech condemning his life work and condemning him in front of the students, which is just Perfect chef's kiss woke idiocy from Stanford.
00:41:52.000One of the reasons all these colleges and universities are too expensive is because they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee to create administrative positions that are just pure nonsense and garbage.
00:42:03.000This lady is obviously a career useless person and here she is going at a judge.
00:42:08.000So, you've invited me to speak here, and I'm being cackled non-stop, and I'm just asking for an administrator to sign the rules.
00:43:37.000The reality is that this DEI administrator should lose her job for this.
00:43:42.000Because it turns out that is not your job, is to berate invited speakers in front of the rest of the students.
00:43:47.000But this is what it's come to at many of these universities.
00:43:50.000Again, the goal of many of these administrators is not to actually perform their job.
00:43:54.000It is to perform in favor of the woke students in order to maintain their job, because the woke students and they play an inside-outside game where then, if they get fired, the woke students protest and create all sorts of trouble at the university.
00:44:04.000It's a great way of preserving your job, is to play this really stupid game by attacking the very people that you have invited.
00:44:11.000Okay, meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to fail abroad on literally every front.
00:44:15.000I mean, it's amazing how much they are failing on pretty much every front.
00:44:18.000The only front you can say that this administration is not failing on right now is Ukraine, where they're basically just sort of holding the line, but not providing Ukraine enough assistance in order to actually win, but not providing enough assistance, not providing enough impetus for them to actually make a deal.
00:44:30.000So it's kind of just inertia in Ukraine, essentially.
00:44:34.000As always, Joe Biden leading from behind.
00:44:35.000Meanwhile, situation over in Mexico continues to be absolutely egregious.
00:44:40.000The Texas state government now says that Mexico is too dangerous for spring break, which of course is not a shock considering that people keep getting kidnapped after crossing the border.
00:44:47.000I remember my wife and I were thinking of vacationing in Cancun about a year ago, and my security team was like, no, you're not going to Cancun.
00:44:52.000Like they're going into hotels now and actually trying to trying to kidnap people.
00:44:57.000Well, Senator Bob Menendez of the Democratic Party in New Jersey, he says that he is not even sure that he would declare the cartels terrorist organizations, which is sort of weird.
00:45:06.000Would you vote to designate these cartels terrorist organizations?
00:45:48.000The best part of the administration's immigration policy over the first two years is that they ended family detention, which proved to be a failure under both the Obama and Trump administrations as a way to deter individuals from coming.
00:46:13.000Meanwhile, they're allowing China to just run roughshod over the rest of the world.
00:46:17.000It's amazing to watch China expand its influence as its actual power decreases.
00:46:21.000That is the sign of an incredibly weak administration.
00:46:23.000China right now has amazingly serious demographic problems, amazingly serious military problems, incredibly serious financial problems.
00:46:30.000And yet, they're expanding their footprint pretty much everywhere.
00:46:33.000Xi Jinping, right now, according to the Wall Street Journal, has been moving definitively to end the reform and opening era.
00:46:41.000While Deng built a collective leadership system to protect against one-man rule, gave private enterprise right a room to flourish, and marked a separation between the party and the government, Xi has done away with term limits, narrowed the scope of the private sector, and placed the party at the center of Chinese society.
00:46:53.000And now, he has set in motion changes to further emphasize the party's leadership over all aspects of governance, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:46:59.000He paved the way for giving the party more direct control of the country's financial and technology sectors, and pledged to cut the staff of the central government by 5%.
00:47:07.000Meanwhile, even as this is happening, China has built up its power in the South China Sea.
00:47:11.000The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing is becoming the dominant force in the South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes each year, a position it has advanced step by step over the past decade.
00:47:22.000With incremental moves that stay below the threshold of provoking conflict, China has gradually changed both the geography and the balance of power in the area.
00:47:29.000Beijing now claims pretty much all of the South China Sea, even though it's ringed by Taiwan, other Southeast Asian nations, even though it is, in fact, the hub of transit for virtually A huge percentage of goods and services across the globe.
00:47:42.000China has turned reefs into artificial islands, then into military bases with missiles, radar systems, and airstrips that are a problem for the U.S.
00:47:48.000It's built a large coast guard that, among other things, harasses offshore oil and gas operators of Southeast Asian nations and a fishing militia that swarms the rich fishing waters lingering for days.
00:48:01.000Meanwhile, China is expanding its power in the Middle East.
00:48:04.000So as the Biden administration has taken an anti-Israel, anti-Saudi position, this has actually driven the Saudis into the arms of the Chinese.
00:48:10.000So the Chinese came in to the Saudis, who have been, again, put on the ropes by the Biden administration, and they said to them, we love the Iranians, we are working with the Iranians, and we can see that you guys, you need to triangulate with regard to the Americans, because Joe Biden ain't helping you out, so why don't you come over here and sign an agreement with the very people who wish to destroy your entire government, the Iranians.
00:48:29.000And the Saudis, seeking to play both sides of the table, Because they are an independent nation.
00:48:34.000They were like, okay, I guess we'll sign something with Iran.
00:48:37.000This obviously actually increases the possibility of conflict in the region.
00:48:40.000One of the things that was hemming Iran in was an alliance of other nations, Arab and Jewish, in the entire area that was saying that Iran cannot expand beyond its borders or if it tries to develop a nuclear weapon, we're going to work together to stop it.
00:48:52.000Now China is coming in and actually facilitating Iran's dreams.
00:48:56.000By attempting to bribe the Saudis into going along with all this and pledging that it will play neutral arbiter between the Saudis and the Iranians.
00:49:02.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden's just sitting there asleep.
00:49:06.000When Arab leaders met Xi Jinping at a regional summit in Riyadh last December, the Chinese head of state pitched an unprecedented idea, a high-level gathering of Gulf Arab monarchs and Iranian officials in Beijing in 2023.
00:49:19.000By Friday, China had brokered a deal to restore relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which had gone seven years without ties.
00:49:25.000The broader summit between Iran and the Six-Nation Gulf Cooperation Council, which hasn't previously been reported, is on track for later this year, according to those people.
00:49:32.000Mr. Xi's diplomatic initiative shows Beijing sees a central role for itself As a new power broker in the Middle East, a strategic region where the U.S.
00:49:39.000has been the most influential outside player for decades, no longer focused exclusively on energy and trade flows, China's foray into the region's politics signals a new chapter in competition between Beijing and Washington.
00:49:50.000This again is going to actually increase the possibility of a serious war in the region because if the Abraham Accords were a guarantor against war because Iran couldn't go up against everybody combined, especially Israel using Saudi airspace, what happens exactly when the opposite occurs?
00:50:04.000When China brokers some sort of cold rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Israel is isolated again while Iran is developing nuclear weapons?
00:51:11.000Turning down acting projects and deciding to stream more.
00:51:15.000But the fact of the matter is, the last few projects I've worked on, I didn't have the best experiences.
00:51:25.000One of the last movies I did, one of the producers asked me to Like, he hired a girl that he was sleeping with, and then he had her ask me to have a threesome with them.
00:51:45.000Good for her for saying, I don't wish to work for people like this.
00:51:48.000And increasingly, I hope you'll see this in Hollywood, because as it turns out, that as Hollywood loses its luster, people are going to have additional choices and they're gonna be able to make smaller films and get into the sort of stuff they want to get into without having to deal with predatory Hollywood directors.
00:52:00.000Who use the casting couch in order to get what they want.
00:52:04.000Again, the notion that Me Too started in Hollywood and that Hollywood then became the sort of tip of the spear in terms of fighting Me Too is always bullcrap.
00:52:11.000And they went right back to doing what it is that they do.
00:52:13.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:52:25.000So somehow the patriarchy in Germany has convinced women that in order for them to achieve full equality with men, they have to show their boobs.
00:52:34.000According to CNN, women in Berlin can now swim topless in the city's public pools if they choose to, just as men can.
00:52:41.000As well as being hailed as a step forward for gender equality in the German capital, the measure introduced this week is symptomatic of Germany's love for Freikörperkultur.
00:52:50.000Literally translated as free body culture, which has its roots in the late 19th century, Berlin's authorities took action after a female swimmer said she was prevented from attending one of the city's pools without covering her chest in December 2022.
00:52:59.000The woman then lodged a complaint with the city ombudsman at the Senate Department for Justice, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination.
00:53:06.000The authorities agreed that the woman had been a victim of discrimination and said all visitors to Berlin's pools, including women and those who identify as non-binary, are now permitted to show their tits.
00:53:16.000It follows a similar incident at a Berlin water park in the summer of 2021.
00:53:19.000French woman Gabrielle Labreton sought financial compensation from the city after security guards ordered her to leave the premise when she refused to cover up her breasts.
00:53:26.000She was with her five-year-old son when the incident happened.
00:53:28.000That kid's gonna grow up healthy and happy, I think.
00:53:30.000Speaking to German newspaper Die Zelt at the time about why she believed it was gender discrimination, said, for me, and I teach this to my son, there is no difference for both men and women.
00:53:38.000The breast is a secondary sexual characteristic, but men have the freedom to remove their clothes when it is hot and women do not.
00:55:33.000Whatever gives you happiness is only one component of what your life is supposed to be.
00:55:37.000We do things every day that don't give us happiness, that give us a meaning of fulfillment and purpose, but don't give us happiness.
00:55:44.000The happiest path, generally, is to be incredibly narcissistic and to do what you want every day, all day, and then let the consequences fall where they may.
00:55:54.000This makes you a selfish and bad person.
00:55:56.000Also, it's not a path to actual happiness.