‘Time to buy gold’
By Harold Hutchison
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Friday that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was similar to a “bank run” from 1929 and the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
“We’re starting to get a better, more precise sense of what it means when Joe Biden brags about the strongest and most equitable economic recovery in history,” Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller News Foundation, said. “What it means is it could be time to buy gold and stockpile food.”
“Some of the biggest banks in this country, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley collectively lost more than $50 billion in market value in one day. That’s quite a hit. On the other hand, those banks still exist,” Carlson added. “You can’t say that for Silicon Valley Bank. As of this morning, Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, has gone under completely. That makes the second biggest bank failure in the history of this country.”
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Federal regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank Friday after its stock price collapsed and customers began a bank run following the financial institution’s disclosure of a $1.8 billion loss on asset sales due to high interest rates, CNBC reported. Carlson noted the efforts by depositors to get their money back.
“What we have there is a 1929-style bank run and that’s not a good sign for anyone. The question is whether the people who run SVB saw it coming. The CEO, a man called Greg Becker, apparently sold more than $2 million in bank stock in the last two weeks,” Carlson said. “According to the site Unusual Whales, several other high-level employees of SVB including chief marketing officer Michelle Draper, COO Phil Cox, general counsel Michael Zucker, all sold significant amounts of stock in SVB this year.”
“Did those employees know their bank was in trouble? We don’t know. Once again, where were the regulators? Carlson asked. “They were supposed to prevent this. Once again, we don’t know. And the business press? Supposed to be telling ordinary people what’s happening with business. Apparently, nobody noticed anything.”
Carlson compared the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to the fall of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which filed for bankruptcy Nov. 11, saying the failures by regulators and the press were similar in both cases.
“This could be very, very, very serious. We hope it’s not,” Carlson said. “We hope it ends today in an isolated story.”
