No, No - It Wasn't Bad Asset Choices By SVB Officers That Ruined Bank, It Was "Woke Investing"

[hatrack]

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Regulators seized control of Silicon Valley Bank in California on Friday, and Signature Bank in New York on Sunday, hoping to safeguard customer funds and prevent a wave of account withdrawals from triggering a larger financial crisis. Those two collapses mark the second and third largest bank failures in U.S. history behind Washington Mutual’s collapse in 2008, which helped spark the Great Recession.

“We see now coming out they were one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing,” Kentucky Rep. James Comer, a Republican and chair of the House Oversight Committee, said on a Sunday morning Fox News program—referring to climate-friendly investment funds that take environmental, social and governance factors into account. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who is being floated as a potential GOP frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election—also appeared on the Fox show, where he suggested diversity and equity efforts could be to blame. “I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff,” he said. “I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”

Other high-profile Republican pundits and far-right lawmakers, including Donald Trump Jr., Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, chimed in with similar accusations on social media. And Suzanne Downing, a former communications director of the Alaska Republican Party, explicitly blamed financial institutions “buying into climate change theology” in a Sunday op-ed.

But those accusations have been broadly refuted by leading economists who place the blame more squarely on rising interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame inflation, plus decisions by the banks to invest in Treasury bonds and other government-backed securities, as well as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. “I don’t have a clear idea of what woke is and it seems to change by the day. Maybe government bonds are now woke, but that is what got them into trouble,” Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research who predicted the 2008 housing bubble crash, told Business Insider.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14032023/republicans-blame-the-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-on-woke-climate-financing-economists-disagree/

[brush]

1. Woke investing? How ridiculous. And they know it's disinformation.

Well, some do. Others just run with the lie and spread the misinformation far and wide.

From my understanding, disinformation is the act of knowingly creating damaging, untrue info and spreading it.

Misinformation is the act of accepting disinformation lies without verifying their accuracy and spewing/spreading it far and wide.