Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/14/23: Bank Stocks Collapse, David Dayen Trashes Bailout Defenders, China Humiliates Biden on Ukraine, Kamala Unpopularity, Lab Leak Poll, Bailout Reveals Rigged System, East Palestine Forgotten, Matt Taibbi Responds to Congressional Smears

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Bank stocks collapsing after Biden says Banking System "Sound", Secret Fed Bailout pumps billions into banks, David Dayen (@ddayen) executive editor at The Prospect trashes Jason Calacanis's takes on SVB bailout, China humiliates Biden with potential Ukraine peace deal, Dems panic over Kamala's unpopularity, The View plays Race Card in Kamala's defense, a supermajority believe the Lab Leak theory despite media lies, Saagar looks into how the Bailout reveals a rigged system against small business, Krystal looks into how Silicon Valley gets bailouts while East Palestine gets screwed, and Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) joins the show to talk about his experience being smeared by congressional democrats in the Twitter Files hearings.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots to get to this morning. We have the very latest in terms of the SVB bailout, including comments from President Biden and exactly what happened in the markets yesterday. So we'll break all of that down for you.

We also have David Dayen on to talk about his analysis of everything that is happening. Incredibly sharp financial observer. So excited to speak with him. We have some news regarding China, both brokering a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also speaking with Zelensky and, of course, with Russia. This is a huge, huge deal. So we'll break all of that down for you. Interesting clip coming out of The View and interesting reporting coming out of the Democratic

Party. They are very upset. They want people to shut up about the problems they have with Kamala Harris. They are getting very concerned because you may not know this, but Joe Biden is 80 years old and they're very concerned that, you know, if people don't love Kamala Harris and they realize that she's number two on the ticket and she's a heartbite away from the presidency, that could be a problem for them. Also have some polling regarding lab leak. Public did not buy the media spin job on that particular issue. So all of that, plus we have Matt Taibbi in the show today, too.

Yeah, Matt Taibbi, so-called journalist, he'll be responding to Congress. And we'll actually talk about the content of the Twitter file, something that you missed, unfortunately, in those hearings. Just a reminder, we're very happy to announce that we have video for all of our premium subscribers on Spotify. So if you go ahead and become a premium subscriber today, you can both toggle between audio and video and actually watch it fully there. People have been absolutely loving it. I know there were some glitches on Spotify's end yesterday, but we got them all resolved and we should be 100% good to go from here on out. And as always, existing premium subs, I had the instructions yesterday. Just log into your Supercast account, click the Spotify icon, and you can update it.

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sign up there and connect your thing to Spotify and you'll be good to go. We will make it all good to go. Let's start with the Silicon Valley bailout. So President Biden speaking yesterday to try and calm the markets and assure everybody everything is just A-OK despite the bailout. So President Biden speaking yesterday to try and calm the markets and assure everybody everything is just a-okay despite the bailout. Here's what he had to say. Today, thanks to the quick action of my administration over the past few days, Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them. Small businesses across the country that deposit accounts at these banks can breathe easier knowing they'll be able to pay their workers and pay their bills. And their hardworking employees can breathe easier as well.

So anytime a politician has to say the banking system is sound and it's safe, you should probably start to ask some questions about what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, Wall Street did not take the president's warning to heed. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Absolutely stunning day in the Treasury markets. The two-year Treasury yield posted the biggest three-day decline since the aftermath of the 1987 stock crash. CNBC writing here, Investors swarmed into government bonds on Monday after the collapse of the bank, sending treasury yields tumbling. The yield was last trading at 4%, down 59 basis points.

The largest three-day crash since October 22, 1987, when it fell a comparable 117 basis points, otherwise known as Black Monday. So one of the worst days in stock market history. But, you know, there's an irony here because part of how Silicon Valley Bank got into trouble is they were holding all of these long-term treasuries. And now with this huge market movement, this may have been enough to pump up the value of their long-term treasuries and make them solvent. But anyway, so that will be helpful to other banks that are potentially in similar situations. But, yeah, that's what we're looking at. You can almost not make it up. The major point being, though, that this was a absolute bloodbath of a day for everybody in the regional bank sector. We had the first Republic CEO go on CNBC to tell everyone that, no, it's actually fine. Many depositors aren't leaving despite the fact

their stock got absolutely massively hammered. Here's what he had to say. I just spoke with Jim Herbert. He's the CEO of First Republic. And I asked him, what are the outflows today? And he said, it's business as usual. Now, remember, I'm speaking to the CEO. That does not mean Jim Cramer says it's business as usual. That there are not that many liquidations above $250,000. It's pretty much the same as you would expect.

The J.P. Morgan funding is working, trying to make it so this situation is stable. All right, so despite his assurances, Crystal, let's put this up there on the screen. First Republic Bank dropped 60% in its stock value in a single day, leading the decline in bank stocks despite the government backstop of SVB. They had to raise its unused liquidity to $70 billion, again, than being able to tap the new Fed facility. And I think that is where we need to focus some of our analysis more of the bailout, right? Because it's important, and we're going to do an entire thing on the Federal Reserve, but to tie these two things together, even with the extraordinary actions of covering, effectively setting the precedent that from here on out, all banks are too big to fail.

All banks' deposits are now effectively covered by the FDIC. We're going to see how much more these banks have to pay for the FDIC. And we're also going to see how much more customer fees all of us are going to have to pay in order to make. Yeah, once again, if you think those banks are the ones absorbing the cost, then you're an idiot. So somebody's got to pay for it. It's almost certainly going to be us in addition to all of these taxpayer, you know, it may not be actual appropriated funds, but let's just say like having the Federal Reserve backstop all of the treasuries on the balance sheet of every bank in the United States, that's just an extraordinary

gift. I mean, basically, imagine if you had a loss on your balance sheet that was declining, and then the government just came in and said, we'll redeem it though at the original value of that. That'd be real nice for any of us in the small business world. Right. But if you happen to own a gas station or a restaurant, you're screwed. If you're open to own a bank, oh, you're all good now. If we tried to do that, that would be accounting fraud. Yeah, it's called fraud. Yeah, it would be accounting fraud. And yeah, I mean, I think it's important to remind everyone of just what is entailed in this bailout. Effectively, because they are backing up 100% of the deposits, both at SVB and at Signature Bank. De facto, that means every

deposit in the entire country, insured or uninsured, is backstopped by the FDIC. And in addition, and this is perhaps the even more significant gift, is they're creating a new lending facility at the Fed so that banks can borrow against collateral, including some of that collateral that has declined in value. They're just going to pretend that it didn't decline in value. So huge change to the banking system without, and this is in a way makes it worse than 2008. In 2008, at least there was some pain extracted from industry in terms of Dodd-Frank financial reform. Now, I think we're learning in real time that Dodd-Frank didn't go far enough, and especially now that we see some of those regulations being rolled back. But there was at least new guardrails put on the banking sector. Here, they're getting a free lunch,

and they're not being asked for anything. I mean, I don't hear Biden really, you know, calling for Congress to put anything on his desk. Of course, there are some members, Elizabeth Warren in particular, who are calling for a rollback of that deregulation that happened under the Trump administration. But will that get anywhere when you have a Republican House? I, you know, I'm skeptical at best that anything will happen on the regulatory front. So they're getting this bailout. They're getting a massive gift from the U.S. federal government, and they're not being asked for anything in exchange. So I think it's really important to remember that. Let me also say in terms of Biden, there's some new reporting this morning. You know, I don't know if this is really true or not, but the reporting suggests that he

really had to have his arm twisted in order to do this bailout because he didn't like the 2008 bailouts, whatever. And at the beginning of the weekend, he really didn't want to go down this path. But effectively, like, you know, Treasure Janet Yellen and Powell kind of talked him into going forward with this bailout. So you can see in his comments, he goes to great pains to position this as like a populist play. Oh, we're just backstopping small businesses, et cetera. But ultimately, they're lying about what this really means. They're lying about the extent of it. They're lying about the idea that it's not a bailout. All of this is very, very misleading in terms of what has actually just happened. So our guest yesterday, Matthew

Zeitlin, actually had a great point. And I'll read his tweet here. Quote, the no taxpayer money just gives you insight into how legalistic and literal that the government now is. The thrust of Dodd-Frank and just the general vibe was that what happened in 08 should be avoided after the bailouts. So the feds are very carefully just not doing literal 2008 all over again. You can't actually pass a law that says don't do anything wacky with banks again. So the feds will stay within the lines that Congress has drawn. But what Congress has drawn is by giving this extraordinary authority to the FDIC and also with the Federal Reserve and its expanded powers to basically say, oh, well, it's not an appropriated, congressionally passed, taxpayer-funded bailout. Yet the Fed is

backstopping the balance sheet of every single bank in the entire United States. And also, we just set an insane and extraordinary standard that all deposits in the U.S. are now covered by the FDIC. Hmm. Once again, the FDIC has only, what, $100 billion or so in it. There's $9 trillion worth of bank deposits that are not insured currently by FDIC. So who is going to make up the difference? And whose full faith and credit and legitimacy is backing it? The taxpayers. that are not insured currently by FDIC. So who is going to make up the difference and whose full faith and credit and legitimacy is backing it? The taxpayer. So much of this is just, you know, as you said, it's semantic. We tried to do it. It'd be tax. It'd be accounting fraud when

they get to do it. It's because the feds are backing them. And if the feds are backing you, then it's a bailout. You know, I'm rereading, I've said yesterday, too big to fail. And one thing that comes through is many of these deals that happened at the time, you know, JP Morgan or somebody buying Bear Stearns or Barclays buying parts of Lehman, all of this, it was all orchestrated by Hank Paulson and by Timothy Geithner. Now, you can maybe say it's not a bailout because one bank bought another. They never would have done it if the Treasury Secretary wasn't like, hey, you're going to buy this bank and you're going to do it because I'm telling you to do so. In many explicit cases in the private conversations, the bankers were saying, I would never do this if Hank did not tell me to do

it. So that's called a bailout. If the Treasury Secretary is basically ordering the senior most people in the financial system to take actions they would not have otherwise done by giving them the legitimacy, the backing of the federal government, well, that is in one sense a taxpayer-funded initiative because one of the ways that we would do it was by guaranteeing their loans or by giving them the legitimacy or saying, oh, well, we'll give you preferential financing on this part of the deal. Of course, that is backed by the government, which by definition is, you know, the representation of the people and of all of the taxpayers. So, so much of what we're doing here is just semantic games and it's driving me crazy the way they want to wiggle out of this. Yeah, I agree. And the way that they are gaslighting the public means that they're trying to tamp down any sort of a populist revolt in reaction to this, which look, politically,

I understand why they wouldn't want to do that. But because they are trying to tamp down that public pressure, it makes it much less likely that the bank reform that really needs to happen, obviously, after this whole debacle really needs to happen, is less likely to actually come to pass. So that's the unfortunate situation that we're in now. I mean, they have with these effectively three actions that they've taken, they have really transformed how banks are going to see themselves, how banks are going to see like the, you know, view what type of risky behavior they can engage in. They have sort of revolutionized the banking sector in a really bad way without putting guardrails on the industry. So it is kind of a worst of all worlds situation.

Now, in terms of the market moves yesterday, so a lot of regional bank stocks, as you pointed out, Sager, you know, there was a lot of Silicon Valley carping about and fear mongering about over the weekend was, oh, there's going to be this huge flight of depositors from the regional banks to the big players. That's why we have to do this. We have to forestall any sort of a bank run. And it's possible that the actions they took worked. And so, you know, they cut off the potential of a bank run. That may be the case. But it is worth noting that even as you had what they described as an investor bank run, so investors fleeing these stocks, you didn't actually see any movement really that we know about, massive movement in terms of depositors pulling their funds and moving them to the big banks. So again, maybe that's because the actions worked, or maybe it's because a bank run was not actually going to happen here and people in Silicon Valley were just looking out for their own interests. There ain't no way to know. But what we do know is that an extraordinary line has been passed and now we're just living in another new bank reality,

just like we were in 2009 after the 08 bailout. So let's go to the second part here. This is important as well, and that we've been trying to make people understand the extent of covering just the deposits is in some sense the least objectionable part of the bailout. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. So given the new Federal Reserve bailout, the big four U.S. banks have now gotten a $210 billion federal bailout. How? Because the Fed's new facility allows banks to borrow against the negative collateral value that is shown here at par instead of at market value. So once again, they are able to borrow at par on their securities and assets instead of the losses that they rightfully should take on assets that they bought purely in order to increase the amount of capital to cover their deposits. That is a bailout.

There's no other way to describe it. Effectively, the Federal Reserve is saying you do not have to account your business in the same way that every other business on the planet has to because you're too big to fail. That is the greatest gift that we can try and expound is when the feds and specifically the Federal Reserve here are allowing these accounting gimmicks to take place at all of these banks, they now operate fundamentally different than any other business in the entire country with a massive advantage and gift. And there is no current regulation, there is no current law, Crystal, that they cannot use this to this tremendous advantage, and they can't pay themselves out bonuses tomorrow. They could pay themselves out bonuses in three months. The ability to survive is everything in business. So if you survive this and then you start making tremendous profits, you think they're going to pay any of this back?

Like you think they're going to pay some sort of fine or anything? If anything, they're just going to pass on the FDIC fees to all of us customers. And then they will increase even more of their profits. And they're going to either pay dividends out or they're going to buy back their own shares and they're going to either pay dividends out, or they're going to buy back their own shares, or they're going to pay themselves out big bonuses. This is bullshit, like when you really think about it. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think Zeitlin said it really well yesterday when he said, sometimes you can get lost in the semantics of like, okay, what's the taxpayer dollar?

Where are they going? Who's funding it, et cetera. The bottom line is a gigantic benefit and gift has been given to the entire banking sector in a way that, you know, we never see the machinery of the federal government jump to when it's the interest of working class people that are on the line. So not only do you have the speed of action, not only do you have a sort of shock and awe overwhelming force of the action, but you have all of the machinery in place to make sure that these wealthy, well-connected individuals are always taken care of at a moment's notice. And I think that is just incredibly clear from what we've seen and the speed with which we've seen it. You know, if there was even a whiff of a potential problem for these individuals, Biden was convinced over one weekend to take dramatic action, turning the banking system really on its head and again, not demanding a single thing in return. So that is the bottom line here. The other piece of

this, and let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. All right. So the Fed had been engaging in this policy of monetary policy, tightening hiking interest rates with the stated explicit goal of crushing wages and spiking unemployment. OK, now let's keep in mind that the actions that the Fed and the president just took were in the opposite direction when it was the jobs of a certain group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their employees. Well, then they had to make sure there were no job losses but the overall policy remains we need higher unemployment and we need lower wages okay so they are getting ready to decide what they're going to do in terms of a rate hike rate decrease or keeping things the same

the wall street journal headline here is feds magical accounting might save banks but doom rate increases um they go on to say there are plenty of lessons for investors in the collapse of SVB and other banks. So now there's a big question about, OK, well, so this entire bailout is, you know, goes in the direction of monetary easing. So it's the polar opposite direction of what the Fed has been trying to do in terms of getting inflation under control, although we've discussed on this program ad nauseum how the Fed hiking rates is an incredibly blunt tool that doesn't have any guarantee of success at even getting inflation under control. It's going to be very painful for a lot of people, especially if they spark a recession.

And lo and behold, thus far, their moves have not actually gotten inflation under control. And, you know, we still stand that risk of a recession. So what are they going to do now? The analysis seems to be kind of all over the map. I've seen some people even saying, oh, maybe they're going to actually not only stay in the same place in terms of rates. Maybe they're actually going to go in the polar opposite direction because they're worried about banks and their financial soundness. Maybe they're going to continue on the path of rate hikes, even though this is like directly at odds with these other actions that they just took. Maybe they're going to just keep rates where they are right now and see what happens. So

it's really pretty up in the air now of what the Fed is going to decide to do. Yeah, I think you're right, Crystal. And that was let's go and put this one up on the screen. Right now, the market still expects the Fed to go through with rate hikes. But the fact that the question is even in their minds over here also shows you how fundamentally unfair the system is. Whenever the rates start to go up and threaten the balance sheets of the big banks and the too-big-to-fail institutions, then we're allowed to rethink the policy. Right. are getting crushed by rate increases and can't take any loans if they want them, when all of the viewers of our show are literally unable to buy a house because the mortgage rates are at the worst time that they've been in like 50 years when you consider both the price increase, the housing market is a disaster, everything is slowing, unemployment is happening,

or at least is happening to the extent that they want it to or even increasing rates because they want the jobs numbers to go down, it's not a question. This is the only thing that makes them pause and think, yeah, maybe, maybe that we won't increase the rates. I think you're right, though. I mean, I just don't know. I do feel like they're probably going to increase just simply because of what the jobs numbers were yesterday. But they may not go as far as they originally were going to before this crisis began. Maybe they did 25 basis points instead of 50 basis points. That seems to be what the market is kind of pricing in. But, you know, I think the important point is the one

you made, Sagar, that, you know, they are actively trying to cause unemployment nationwide with their policy. But then when it's this one group that's well-connected and has some very loud and influential voices to advocate for their interests, then they do a U-turn and go in the polar opposite direction. Yeah, there you go. So, look, system is rigged. I guess that's a common theme of the show. Yeah.

Trying to explain exactly. I know it can get complicated with the jargon and all of that, but just take away the very basic lesson. It's like they get special tools and accounting that are granted for them that no other business on the planet gets. And specifically, no other worker's concern is ever even factored into their minds. And that's the basics of it. And we're not asking them for anything in return. Nothing.

We're not – Let's be nice. As of now, not tightening, regulating, nothing. Nothing. They just get a bailout, and that's that. Yep. All return, nothing. We're not tight. As of now, not tightening regulate. Nothing, nothing. They just get a bailout. And that's that. Yeah. All right, guys, we want to dig in deeper on this same topic with David Dayen. He's, of course, executive editor of the American Prospect. Fantastic financial analyst and journalist. Want to get his take on everything that's happening. So let's get to it. David, great to see you. Good to see you. Yeah. So let's go and put David's piece up on the screen here. What he has been writing,

phenomenal work as always. The headline is the Silicon Valley bank bailout did not need to happen. The debate over protecting all deposits in a blink looks past the incompetence that got us here. So I would love you to break down the thesis of this piece, but also just give us your reaction to the fairly extraordinary measures that term deposits in their in their facilities. Silicon Valley Bank has essentially no regular customers. It's a bank that serves founders and startup companies. The normal bank maybe has 40, 50 percent of deposits over the FDIC's $250,000 limit. Silicon Valley Bank had 95 percent. in how you're using those deposits because you have this continuous risk of deposits fleeing and you not having enough money to take care of it. And they put all their money into long-dated government bonds, which are generally fairly safe, but have interest rate risk. And the interest rate risk is that if you have to pull out that money right away and interest rates are high, they're going to be worth less than the face value.

And that's exactly what happened. And if Silicon Valley Bank was in a regime that was tightly regulated in kind of the experience of larger banks. And of course, Silicon Valley Bank was the 16th largest bank by assets in the United States, but it did not have the same kind of stringent regulation, particularly around liquidity, which was the entire problem here, as big banks because SVB lobbied for and received in 2018 essentially a deregulation of its bank and similar banks of its size. So, David, can you just explain maybe even further here about the existing regulations and about the way that this would have gone down without the extraordinary interference here by the U.S. government?

Right. So when we had Dodd-Frank in 2010, that created a regime where all banks above $50 billion in assets were subject to enhanced regulatory standards. That means higher liquidity and capital requirements. In other words, absorbing losses exactly the kind of losses that we saw here with respect to these outflow of deposits. And, you know, bigger stress tests, more stress tests, just tighter supervision generally. In 2018, Republicans decided that they wanted to weaken these regulations. They did it in the name of relief for community banks. and they smuggled in a change to the enhanced regulatory standards from $50 billion to $250 billion. These are, and I'm in a very exhaustive piece in The Intercept, we call these the stadium banks.

This is what some individuals in Congress were calling them. That means that this is a gift for banks that aren't big enough to be JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America, but they are big enough to have naming rights to a stadium, you know, BB&T Field, you know. Anyway, so not only were Republicans interested in this because if it was just Republicans, this would die in the Senate. But several Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee decided to join in on this process. They went around. Sherrod Brown, who was the chair of the Senate Banking or the ranking Democrat at that time on the Senate Banking Committee. I'll give you the names. It was Joe Donnelly and Heidi Hedkamp, who are no longer there and are both lobbyists now, and John Tester and Mark Warner. And those four,

in conjunction with Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee, wrote this bill. And the key section did what I just talked about, which was the enhanced regulatory standards, moving that threshold from 50 billion to 250 billion. The second thing that it did is it changed one word in the U.S. code. It changed a word from may to shall. And this was called the tailoring rule. And this changing it from may to shall made it so that the Federal Reserve, instead of having the option to tailor rules to the size of particular banks, said that they shall do that. In other words, a directive to tailor the rules. And this changed those rules even further. It gave the green light to the Federal Reserve to deregulate and weaken to create more propensity for potential bank runs and financial crises.

Of course, Senator Elizabeth Warren, when this bill passed, said the same thing. Katie Porter, who was not yet in Congress, told me this bill should get zero votes at the time. It was very clear to people paying attention that if you deregulate this part of the sector, and particularly if you change that threshold from 50 to 250 billion, the limit to how much growth a bank is going to want to do suddenly jumps up. And it's going to create a lot of consolidation in the system. That's exactly what happened. Silicon Valley Bank and many other medium sized large regional banks started eating up all the other community supposed to prevent because the bill was allegedly because it was supposed to be about saving community banks. It actually ate community banks. It created this situation where these large regionals got way big, way quick and and couldn't handle the risk that came along with getting big. Well, and there's a great irony in the actions that the government just took because at that time, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank

was effectively lobbying Congress to say, we are not a systemic risk to the system. And then what has happened with this bailout is that they have deemed them a systemic risk to the system and not just Silicon Valley Bank, but also Signature Bank, which is a much smaller player with sort of crypto aligned and disgustingly with Barney Frank, who wrote the Dodd-Frank regulations and famously sits on the board. Then as in his position now as a board member of this bank,

actually went and lobbied to roll back the very regulations that he helped to craft. Yeah. In 2018, he was right on the front lines lobbying for this on behalf of Signature Bank, you might say. And of course, they grew big time in size. They were in this between 50 and 250 position, and then they failed. You're absolutely right. They had to deem a systemic risk. That was the only way to get around the rules in Dodd-Frank, which said, we're not going to do bailouts anymore. The only way that they could do it is by the FDIC triggering a systemic risk exemption. And so the very banks who said, don't worry about us, under 250 billion, not a systemic risk. Meanwhile, we knew, you know, IndyMac was under 250 billion. Continental

Illinois in the 1980s was under 250 billion. These types of banks have historically triggered systemic risk. But, you know, the Democrats and Republicans who aligned on this bill bought what Silicon Valley Bank and these other banks were selling, which is we're not a risk. Let us grow. They did it. They deregulated. These banks grew. And what do you know? They completely failed. David, let me just play devil's advocate for a moment, because I think there are a lot of, you know, good faith people who are making the argument like, look, these depositors in Silicon Valley Bank, they didn't do anything wrong. It's not their fault that the bank was taking on this risk. It's unreasonable to expect individual depositors to be vetting the practices of the bank when even the Fed was caught unawares that there was risky behavior going on

here. And furthermore, if you don't backstop the depositors and perhaps take some of the bank when even the Fed was caught unawares that there was risky behavior going on here. And furthermore, if you don't backstop the depositors and perhaps take some of the other actions that were taken in terms of creating this new lending facility and allowing them to keep their collateral at the original value that they purchased it at, without that, we could have a bank run because now you're going to have all these depositors flee the quote unquote stadium banks and go to the JPMorgan chases of the world. So you're effectively just going to end up with, you know, not only a bank run and financial chaos, but you're also going to make the bigger banks even bigger. What do you say to those who believe that and have been arguing in that direction? action? These depositors did do something wrong. Roku had $487 million in one bank. That is the dumbest risk management I've ever heard in my entire life. There are very simple

steps that companies take to ensure that their money, which is invariably sometimes over $250,000, is protected from all bank risk and limitations like that. It's on the bank to make those options available. And those options were available at Silicon Valley Bank, although they were somewhat hidden and not used very often. But there's things like insured cash suite, there's cash management accounts that essentially cuts up your amount of money that you have in your bank and puts them in a reciprocal fashion in hundreds of banks that are in this network and makes sure, if there's a failure in one, you can still get access your money. It's a simple risk management strategy that practically every company on earth,

except the big brains in Silicon Valley, use. And you have people like Jason Kalkanis out there now saying, oh, we're going to get so much innovation because now we're going to come up with digital strategies to get around the $250,000 limit. That's like Uber reinventing the bus. These guys are idiots. They're complete morons that think that nobody else is as smart as them to come up with these strategies. In fact, these are extremely common strategies used for decades. And when they realized they didn't have it, then they started this digital bank run, which then had this threat to move to other parts of the system and led to this extraordinary

Federal Reserve bailout that is going on with not just it's you're right to point out. It's not just that they're essentially making infinite deposit insurance for every every bank in America and every depositor in America. It's this thing about opening this this lending facility that says, give us all your assets, even if they've gone down in value. We'll pretend that they're worth what they used to be worth. That is, again, all kinds of risk management in banks that we've seen for decades. And it's going to create massive amounts of risk to pull. This is a bigger problem than what was actually dealt with here. And it's going to get much worse. Yeah, I think that's really well said. I mean, because the Fed has basically said to the entire banking sector, don't worry about risk. The American people

will cover it. We'll take on the risk. You just keep making your profits. David, thank you so much for breaking all of this down for us. Great job, man. Really appreciate it. Extraordinary news on the international scene at the same time. the world that are both upstaging the U.S. and really just showing us increasingly on a day-by-day slow basis of really what a return to multipolarity is going to look like. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Xi Jinping is now announcing a plan to speak with President Zelensky for the first time since the Ukraine war broke out. This is going to follow the Chinese leaders meeting with Russia's President Vladimir

Putin next week, making China one of the major interlocutors currently between Moscow and between Ukraine. This was previously a role that France had taken. There were some indications that maybe the Indians would step in and do it. But with China stepping in, it is an extraordinary moment for a couple of reasons. Number one, almost nobody actually maintains relations with both countries. But two, this would be a huge step in Beijing's basically current want to be the international peacemaker. We're going to talk a little bit about the peace deal that they've brokered with Iran and Saudi Arabia, or at least restoring of diplomatic relations, not necessarily a peace deal. But to think about what level of legitimacy that would bestow upon them on the world stage is actually extraordinary.

And there was a really interesting moment that happened yesterday. There's an Atlantic Council fellow. For those who don't know, the Atlantic Council is kind of like as neolib as it gets, protecting the Atlantic Alliance. It's like the heartbeat of the blob. It is the heartbeat of the blob. That's a great way to put it. As foreign policy establishment thinking goes, that's where it is.

And it was a scholar there who was very much of that mind, and she's like, hey, I'm in India. I don't think we in the West really understand how little the European and U.S. rhetoric about autocracy versus democracy is not landing at all in South Asia. She was like, here in India, they don't want to hear it. They don't care. A huge portion of the global South that we've talked to spanning from Lula to people in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere are like, I don't want to hear all your talk about democracy. And even the Indians were like, listen,

we're not saying that what happened is good, but, you know, you guys expanded NATO and these things. So the point is that they're willing to look at both sides very equally. They see it very differently. And we covered that that poll that showed that basically only the U.S., even Europe wasn't really buying the like it's democracy versus authoritarianism. Even they felt like, OK, this is more about national interest. And certainly the rest of the world does not view this conflict in the way it has been framed to the American people. China is exploiting that void by basically embracing a real politic view of everything. And this is to their benefit for a variety of reasons. Number one, of course, they are currently on the verge of making a decision on whether to send lethal aid to Russia, basically to help them fight the war in Ukraine. It would be a major development for them to do so. It would definitely open up and change a lot of the Russian supply problems that they have. And it certainly would have some impact there on the battlefield, but they're doing it at the same time that they also have been facing international condemnation. Remember also that China's approval rating worldwide dropped dramatically because of COVID. Everybody blames them for COVID rightfully, I think,

in my opinion. We'll cover our poll later in the show about it. Everyone thinks, basically, a super majority of Americans are like, yeah, it's a lab leak. And in America, that's probably low compared to the rest of the world where they're like, obviously, it's a lab leak. And in America, that's probably low compared to the rest of the world where they're like, obviously, it's a lab leak. So they need to try and shore up their international support. Second, they want to define the world in their way. Why? Because then if there was ever a major showdown over Taiwan, they would have a lot more international capital built up in the diplomatic system than they currently have right now. So, look, the call has not yet been announced. I do think it will happen for a very specific reason. Let's go and

put this next one up there on the screen. It's because the Chinese proposed a peace plan about a couple of weeks ago on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Effectively, the plan would just freeze the battlefield where it is right now with some negotiation over parts of Eastern Ukraine and would bring the two sides together. The Chinese, they like to frame everything in terms of mutual respect, and by that, really, they mean their definitions,

but they say, quote, all parties must stay rational and exercise restraint, avoid fanning the flames, aggravating tensions, prevent the crisis from deteriorating further or spiraling out of control. They want to step in and cast themselves as the peacemaker. What was also very important is, despite the fact that Zelensky, anytime somebody like Elon is like, hey, I'm not so sure about this, maybe we should have a peace plan, he actually responded very positively to it. You know why? Because he knows that if he were to reject it

out of hand completely, the Chinese would be like, okay, well, if you're not even willing to negotiate at all, then we're just going to send weapons to Russia and then you guys will be defeated holistically on the battlefield. So the point is, is that they actually put Zelensky in a bind and have gotten him to a point where he has said, I am willing to discuss this with the Chinese. So he opened up that ground saying, I want to speak to President Xi. A lot of people in the West were like, Zelensky's calling Xi's bluff. I'm like, is it a bluff? Because maybe they actually do want to broker this.

It would be the diplomatic coup of the century if they were to bring this conflict to an end. It would upstage and humiliate the United States. It would make a Chinese takeover of Taiwan 10 times more possible because just in terms of the legitimacy, in terms of the allies that they would get through that, in terms of the way that Asia would start to look at the conflict. And let's be honest, global public opinion wise, they would be striking at the core of what most people want. Not necessarily here in America, although increasingly, I think more so. But specifically all across the world of people who are like, I'm not buying this U.S. framing of this conflict. I think it's very positive.

If China wants to play the role of peacemaker, God knows that somebody needs to. And the U.S. has absolutely abdicated their ability and desire to play that role from early in this conflict when they decided that our interests were in continuing the war in order to be a check on Russia rather than trying to push the parties to the negotiating table to bring the conflict to a close and end what has been an absolutely devastating war, certainly first and foremost for the Ukrainian people, but also for the world in terms of energy prices, in terms of food prices, in terms of global instability. So I absolutely welcome this role for China. I hope they are approaching it in good faith. I think the fact

that there is any receptiveness on the side of Zelensky is incredibly noteworthy because it was interesting, Sagar, when the peace plan from China, quote unquote, was first introduced, announced, etc. The official response from Ukraine was very dismissive. But when Zelensky himself was asked about it, he was actually much more receptive. Now, NATO, on the other hand, is, you know, not impressed. They say China doesn't have much credibility. This is the NATO secretary general. China doesn't have much credibility because they've not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine.

But in fact, China is on the verge potentially of taking some more aggressive and clear cut steps to back Russia. At that point, their ability to play any sort of peacemaker role is going to be dead. But they haven't done that yet. And in fact, the fact that they have kept a good relationship with Russia and haven't totally killed their relationship with Ukraine actually enables them to occupy this space. So I think it's actually kind of the polar opposite of what the NATO Secretary General has said here. Yes, it was an illegal invasion of Ukraine. We're not afraid of saying that here. But the fact that China hasn't said that and hasn't really pissed off the Russians in that way actually gives them a chance to be useful here.

It's important to keep in mind as well, prior to the war, China was actually Ukraine's biggest trading partner. So it's not like there isn't any relationship there. There are deep and longstanding important ties, economic ties, which also underscores that the way China has approached their foreign policy or their approach to imperialism, you might say, has been less through, we're going to put bases everywhere, we're going to enforce it with military might, and more through economic ties and cooperation and using those ties as a form of leverage and coercion. So, you know, certainly they have a lot that they can work with here in terms of those ties with Ukraine and obviously with Russia. And the reason why this is part of a bigger campaign is, let's

put this next one up there on the screen, our friend Treeta Parsi talking about how Saudi and Iran normalization of relations is a huge deal, not just because of the positive repercussions that it could have in the region from Lebanon to Yemen, but because it was mediated by China and not the United States. As he lays out here, Saudi and Iran tensions have had ups and downs in the last 40 years, but this is the first time they've ever agreed to lower the temperature through Chinese mediation. By not taking sides, China emerged as a player that can resolve disputes rather than merely just sell weapons. Unfortunately, the U.S. has adopted an approach to the region that has disabled it from being a credible mediator. Too often, Washington will just take sides in conflicts,

become a co-belligerent, as in Yemen, which then reduces its ability to play the role of peacemaker. While many in Washington view China's emerging role as a mediator as a threat, the reality is that more of a stable Middle East where Iranians aren't at each other's throats and Saudis also benefits the United States. So I definitely think he is right. And the reason, though, that I'm trying to take a step back is, listen, all states, I am a real, like, all states are doing things for self-interested purposes. All, what the Chinese want is hegemony over East Asia and specifically to unite China and Taiwan. And everything that they are doing is setting the ground to try and make that happen.

I think that would be a catastrophe for the U.S. economy and for U.S. relations in Asia, which I think is the most important region in the entire world, hence why I'm broadly opposed to much of our aid both to Ukraine and to our role across the Atlantic Ocean because I think Europe is a dying society, slowing GDP, not going to be important, nearly as much so as it is 100 years, as opposed to the Asia Pacific. And so everything that they are doing is basically trying to replicate what we did all through 1945 and onward, brokering these peace deals, you know, and recreating the type of diplomacy. Listen, we didn't do it for benevolent reasons either. We did it also to expand the American economic empire.

That's the exact same reason that they have had, both of NATO and of aid to Ukraine, and the tremendous danger and opening that they have left us to by abandoning all pretense of realism in any of this conflict. And so to watch this happen, I mean, multipolarity was not a joke. It actually led to a lot of wars across the world. I'm not necessarily saying that unipolarity doesn't have its downsides either, but we shouldn't close our eyes as to what like a new, more unstable world is going to look like. And, you know, in this case, it can be positive, but it can also be very negative. Well, I mean, we've played ourselves is the bottom line. I think Tricia's point here is really critical that we are co-belligerents in terms of the Ukraine war. We're co-belligerence in terms of the Ukraine war, or co-belligerence in terms of Yemen. So of course

that complicates and disrupts our ability to serve as a credible peacemaker in either of these regions and in any of these conflicts. So what he ends with here is that Washington should avoid a scenario where regional players view America as an entrenched war maker and China as a flexible peacemaker. And that is exactly the direction that we're headed in right now. You know another thing that's so embarrassing, we have spent billions, hundreds of billions on Saudi Arabia. They did this in the full knowledge that it would make Biden and America look like a fool, like a second rate power. What are we doing supporting these people? They're just beyond their barbaric society. Why are we doing this for any positive reason? What are we getting

out of it? We are selling them weapons while they flip us the bird. It's like, you know, in Iraq, look, we spent what, $5 trillion in Iraq. They turned around and signed a deal, an economic deal with the Chinese. It's like, you can't even make this stuff up in terms of the level of support that we've provided to them. And they'll stab you in the front. They don't even care. And it's one of those where I can't blame them. I'd probably do the same thing

if I had such a foolish person who was willing to give me so much money. And then also not actually bring any of its real power to bear for our own interests and just basically taken for a ride in terms of lobbyists. So look, bottom line, this is a big deal. This is a very big deal. And if it does develop, it will represent a major

sea change in international relations. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Let's turn to some domestic politics here. The Democratic administration and other Democratic elites are getting very concerned about the public's negative impression of Vice President Kamala Harris. Because there's an election coming up and Joe Biden is expected to run with Kamala Harris on the ticket again. And they are realizing that the fact that you've got a dude who's the president of the United States who would be 86 years old by the end of the next term, well, that makes the vice presidential position even more important than it normally is. Because while, look, the vice president's always a heartbeat away from the presidency, when you're talking about the heartbeat of an 80 plus year old man,

it becomes a kind of a different deal in terms of the actuarial tables. So the initial issues started between Democrats, sort of the Biden administration, Kamala Harris in particular, with some comments that Elizabeth Warren made. We actually covered them at the time on a radio show where she was asked whether Kamala Harris should be the vice presidential nominee. And she kind of had to take a listen to that. You know, I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team. I've known Kamala for a long time. I like Kamala. I knew her back when she was an attorney general and I was still teaching. And we worked on the housing crisis together. So we go way back. But they have

to be a team and my sense is they are. I don't mean that by suggesting I think there are any problems. I think they are. Yeah, very interesting. She's like, oh, they need to be a team. I'm not saying they're not a team, but just saying like he needs to be comfortable. Okay. So Kamala was very upset about this. Apparently, put this next piece up on the screen. According to CNN, they have a long article here about the worries about Kamala Harris. Elizabeth Warren called Kamala twice to apologize after those comments she made on whether Biden should keep Harris as VP. Harris has not called back.

But they go on in this article from CNN to talk about the fact that Democratic elites just want everybody to shut up about their concerns and complaints about Kamala Harris. They want commentators to stop talking about it. They want certainly this issue that came up with Elizabeth Warren. They want her to shut her mouth about it. What they say is that it's the latest in a long string of snubs to a vice president who they say has never gotten the respect or support she deserves. They also contend, multiple Democratic leaders, they say contend that if people don't start feeling more positive about the next person in the line of succession, they might turn away from the ticket entirely. So they're urging allies to stop the Harris pylon, if only for Biden's sake or for Democrats sake or the party's future.

So basically, keep your mouth shut. Don't be honest about the problems here because we're sticking with Kamala and it's really important that the American people are somehow persuaded that it would be all fine and good if she ended up as president of the United States. Good luck with that. She has such a thin skin

for letting something like that get underneath. Like, what is wrong with you? And look, I just think it underscores skin for letting something like that get underneath. Like, what is wrong with you? And look, I just think it underscores only people who are fundamentally weak act like this. People who have real holds over the party, real constituencies, real operations, and real chances of the presidency, they don't behave in this way because they have a real power base. Because she is such a media creation, literally she is almost like a product of the conspiracy of silence. Everyone knows she's a terrible politician. Everyone knows that she is

the least popular vice president in modern history, more so than Biden, and she doesn't even do anything. And yet, no one can say it, mostly because of racial politics and because she's a woman, because of basically media enforcers and then the weaponization of identity politics. It's like the Hillary factor almost times 20. I never thought I would live to see a national politician who was worse than Hillary come to the stage, but we've been delivered. That's what we've been delivered. over it. Yeah, it is incredible. And I mean, listen, the reason Kamala Harris is vice president of the United States, in spite of the fact that she couldn't even make it to the primaries to have a single voter cast a vote for her in 2020, is because James Clyburn basically said, you will

pick a black woman. And, you know, she ends up on the list. Actually, Jill Biden did not want her there. Joe should have listened to Jill. But it was obvious to everyone that, you know, whatever you think of her record, which there's a lot to say about that as well, just on the level of political talent, she just didn't have it. And to try to deny that obvious reality to the American people, I mean, it's just not going to work. But this whole CNN article hand-wringing about the situation they find themselves in, it's funny because they're saying, oh, there's just not going to work. But this whole CNN article hand wringing about the situation they find themselves in. It's funny because they're saying, oh, there's this this pile on on Kamala Harris. It's quite the opposite. There's been so little critical coverage of Kamala Harris, to be honest with you. I mean, she really has been protected from the beginning in a lot of ways. It's just that it's really apparent that, you know, this is going to be a political issue for Biden and the ticket moving forward in 2024 and definitely impacts

his electability. There's no doubt about it. Even if you think he's great and did a great job, you got to ask yourself who's next in line. And the answer is very troubling. And then, you know, for whatever reason, he didn't run or he was unable to run. Then you have an even bigger problem because she's the one who you've said by making her vice president is next in line. And they know they have a real political issue with her. So this all great clip to show you from view. Ladies discussing all of this, the CNN report, the Elizabeth Warren comments, etc. Their takes are just just amazing. Take a listen. I feel like the Biden West Wing isn't necessarily setting her up for success by giving her things

that she can go out and champion. At a time when voters, I get the age is not the most important thing. But if you're electing someone who's an 82-year-old in 2024, you need to believe that the vice president is able and willing the next day to be the president. And I think there's some concern about just the lack of policy accomplishments that she's made as vice president. I'm surprised that there's concern. I think it has a lot to do with this. She's a black woman. Black women get everything done. We've saved this country's democracy for centuries. She's obviously amazing, but what specifically? But, well, where shall I start? I mean, she was in the Senate, of course.

But no, I mean, as vice president, of course, she's highly- She's the Inflation Reduction Act. I mean, she was the face of Roe v. Wade. The list goes on and on. I'd like to ask you, what did Pence do? What did Pence do? He said, put his lips firmly on the butt of Donald Trump and still is fighting a subpoena to testify against Trump. I mean, when Pence finds the cojones to do something, then I think we can talk about a vice presidential. It does feel a little. It's so funny because Alyssa Farrah there, her critique, her like pushback on The View is like so mild and mellow. Like, well, I just think maybe like she could have done a little bit more. And then Sonny immediately pulls the Trump card of you're basically implying she's a racist.

Right. You're only saying that because she's a black woman. So that's number one. And then Alyssa's like, OK, well, just tell me some policy accomplishments. Where do I start? And she can pull up like one or two things. Yeah, she names inflation reduction act, which Kamala Harris had zero to do with. And being the face of Roe versus Wade, what is that?

That means nothing. That absolutely means nothing. And also, Sagar, you were reminded from that comment of one of our personal show favorite moments of the incredibly effective job that Kamala Harris did representing the administration's interest when it came to the issue of abortion. Take a listen to this. I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled. Clearly we're not. No, that's right. And that's why I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real unsettled times. So that was her response to a question about— That's the face of words Roe v. Wade. Hey, should have they maybe done something, the Democratic Party, when you had a supermajority

under Obama, and that was the gobbledygook answer that she was able to offer. It's just such race-baiting BS to say that any criticism of her is because she is a black woman. If anything, the only reason that she is in the national office is because she is a black woman. That conflating criticism of that is outrageous when really they're the ones who played the race card from the beginning so it's outrageous second yeah as you can see in that clip with alissa she's very very tepidly even pushing of course they could literally the only quote-unquote right person they could find is somebody who's like kissing the ass of cnn uh has denounced trump at every turn and look i'm not saying that that isn't a valid point but i'm saying like that does not represent is somebody who is like kissing the ass of CNN, has denounced Trump at every turn.

Look, I'm not saying that that isn't a valid point, but I'm saying like that does not represent conservatism in the United States literally in any way. I don't even also claim to do that, but I'm saying that is literally what her job is supposed to be. I also like how when Sonny struggles to articulate what Kamala has provided in the office of the vice presidency, the next rhetorical trick she pulls is going, well, what about Mike Pence? Because she knows that the view audience will, like that's an easy rhetorical victory for her to be like, and Mike Pence was out there kissing Donald Trump's butt.

And it's like, okay, true. What does that have to do with Kamala Harris? But, you know, she knows that that's a good way to get the audience on her side since she's struggling to actually defend her record in office. And look, let's be honest, vice presidents, you know, they don't typically do a lot there. Biden was actually more impactful when he was vice president because he had all those relationships with the Senate. Obama hated doing like that kind of retail politics. Joe Biden obviously loves doing that kind of retail politics. Joe Biden obviously loves doing that kind of retail politics. So you could actually make a case.

OK, he actually mattered in terms of trying to work with Republicans, strike a deal, etc. With Kamala, you know, the thing that you would hope for with her is that she would be a competent spokesperson in these various interests in representing the administration and their positions. That's really the one job she actually has as vice president. And it happens to be a job that she is incredibly poorly suited to because she's just not quick on her feet in these interviews. She's always trying to, she's always trying to just like recite what was in the briefing book without having actually spent any time with the briefing book. Marshall always makes the point she's really trying to like West Wing it and say something profound every time when really you should just be like answering the question directly

and straight. Right. So anyway, you know, they want and it went on with what's her name? Anna Navarro was like, I don't know what's wrong with Democrats. They just need to be quiet about this criticism because you're giving Republicans talking points, which also completely drives me crazy because you can't just lie to people and deny reality because you're terrified about what Republicans might say. Republicans already have their they're going to have talking points no matter what you do. So you only undermine your own credibility when you are straightforward with the American people about what you actually think.

There's a phrase I just remembered called the biggest tree of low expectations. Yes. And I think that is really what's happening here is that we have such low expectations of her that it's literally bigoted. So you're conflating the criticism when what we really expect is a competent vice president and that's it.

So to say that we're not allowed to criticize her or the criticism of her for her bad, obviously bad performance is in some way racial, is itself injecting something that has nothing to do with her actual job. Well, I have a perfect example for you. After Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump, there were a lot of people who said it was because of sexism. Yes. Yeah. Country was too sexist to elect a female president. And that is an incredibly, I mean, listen, I'm not denying the reality of racism or sexism. Far from it. But when that is the narrative that you go with when there were so many other obvious failings of Hillary Clinton,

well, what does that tell Democratic voters the next time around? And this came up in the runs of people like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and others. You know, I really might like you or I might like your policy, but my number one priority is electability. And I was just told with Hillary Clinton that a woman can't win. So you end up when that's your only analysis. And when you throw it up as a smokescreen for every single thing, even when there are clearly other obvious issues going on. What you're doing is you're telling other young women or other young black women that they don't have a chance. And you're telling voters that they shouldn't back these people in primaries because ultimately the electorate is too racist and too sexist for them to have a shot. So if you care about winning, I guess you just got to stick with the old white guys.

Very good point. It really is. Hopeful note, though, in terms of the media. So apparently the American public, not Democrats, not Republicans, not independents, but the media spin with regard to the origins of the pandemic. Let's go and put this up on the screen. This is really quite fascinating. This is an Economist YouGov poll. They found that they asked people, OK, what do you think? Was COVID origin natural or was it a lab leak? Sixty six percent, super majority of Americans said they lean toward lab leak. That includes 54 percent of Democrats, a majority of Democrats versus only 25 percent who say they lean towards

natural. The other 21 percent say they're not sure. So 54 percent of Democrats say lean lab leak, 62 percent of independents and 86 percent of Republicans. So there are some partisan differences there, which you would expect. But even among Democrats, which, you know, almost entirely consume news media that for years was telling them not only was Loud League wrong, definitively wrong, but it was also racist to even consider it. They didn't really listen to their media purveyors of choice. And I find that to be an incredibly beautiful and encouraging thing, ultimately. Oh, I love this. This is kind of like the Kennedy assassination thing. Yeah. Where everyone's like, here's the official story, all of that. And by 1975, they're like, yeah,

I just don't believe a literal word of what happened. I think it was a complete conspiracy. And you know what the crazy part when you dig into this is many Democrats even are willing to buy that it was a deliberate leak of the virus. Some 35% say it was actually deliberately leaked in some sort of bioweapon. And so that is, you are seeing the level of suspicion that Americans have here about whether COVID was leaked from the lab and whether even it was intentionally leaked from the lab. So I think that that just really encapsulates everything, where you can have as much media propaganda as you want. Americans are not stupid. It's been almost two and a half years now that polling has indicated that at least half of the country has always thought this was the lab

leak. It just turns out that half was never represented on television, and now you have a supermajority. It's like the Jon Stewart bit. He's like, you're telling me that the lab where they happen to study this is the place where the pandemic happened. It's common sense, people. It's just straight up common sense. All the spin, all the actually four Intel agencies

would have nothing to do with labs, all disagree. They're not buying any of this crap. They know what's true and they know what's not. All you had to do is lay out the circumstantial case, and then the reams of evidence on top of that, and then the testimony of the former CDC director, and then all of the cover-up, and it just confirms everything that they knew from day one.

Yeah. Sometimes ordinary people have a lot more common sense than these supposed experts and elites that get trotted out on cable news. But, you know, it's just really encouraging to see a level of skepticism, even among, you know, sort of the Democratic base and liberals who had their own ideas about this, even as, you know, all of their media outlets were pushing one particular narrative. And even as they're, you know, someone who they could still consider like a hero of the pandemic continues to be on the other side of the debate, they're still able to look at it and be like, you know what,

I'm taking off my partisan hat. I'm taking off my like, I love Fauci t-shirt. And I am going with what is like common sense to me and what appears to be the most likely explanation here. It's also, in my view, another sign of the decline in trust, much deserved decline in trust among the traditional mainstream corporate press. I think that is also a really good thing because if you are going to disrupt the status quo in any meaningful way, you're going to need a bulk of the population to be free thinking and to reject the lines that they are, or at least to question the lines that are being pushed to them from mainstream press. So I see that as nothing but a positive development. Absolutely. My only fear with this is, you know, with a lot of these Democrats, because if you also were to be like, well, what do you think of Fauci? They'd like very positively.

And unfortunately, I think that the explanation for lab leak and for the cover up is deeply convoluted. As much as I would love for it not to be, it's difficult to convey to someone who is not already deeply skeptical. Now, millions of people are. They watch the show. We can see that in terms of the level of interest. But imagine you got to explain to a layman, EcoHealth Alliance

and bat coronavirus research gain a function. That is the disconnect where it's like, it's kind of like Iraq. Everyone's like, well, Bush lied about WMD. And it's like, yeah, that is broadly true. But then the actual specifics of it to try and explain the mechanics of Joseph Wilson and your yellow cake and Valerie Plume, and then that was its own scandal. It just starts to become too much and people's eyes glaze over. And ultimately, they rely on that because that's the way that they never actually get held accountable for these broad crimes, which are immense and which are terrible.

So I just wish and hope that if we can try and start a campaign to really get people to get fully sped up on the actual details of this there would be even more of a level of outrage and there might actually be some accountability too and look let's say let's put fauci aside i don't think you'll ever go to jail even though i think you should let's at least ban and put new uh new limitations on game function like that would be the ultimate victory i don't think you need a lot of details and like intimate knowledge of the original That would be the ultimate victory. I don't think you need a lot of details and intimate knowledge of the original conference call and the letter and how it all went down

to just get on a really basic level. This research caused a pandemic. We should curb this research or likely or potentially caused a pandemic for the YouTube misinformation sensors. So maybe we should do about that.

Like, that's a really simple and straightforward and common sense direction that I think people would be very, and I think are very receptive to. Yeah, I think that's well said. All right, so how are we looking at? Well, if you're like me, you're probably incredibly annoyed at the proliferation on Twitter, Instagram,

and presumably on TikTok of tips on how to get rich. Seemingly every person who has ever started a business is out there with threads on how to optimize your taxes, how to get into the storage business, how to start a drop shipping company, how to maximize your NFTs, how to get into REITs. I could literally go on forever. Much of this is a scam, but clearly the supply is there to meet the demand. At the heart of these schemes is the idea that you can, through sheer force of will, become rich and financially free in this country. And it is certainly true to a limited extent. In fact, I was stunned at a recent New York Times survey of income tax data that showed a massive portion of the people who make over $1.58 million a year in this country are car dealers

and mechanic shop owners. Small business owners very much have the chance at striking it modestly rich in this country. In many ways, that is the American dream. But to really strike it rich, to really become a whale, generational wealth, an entirely different skill set is now required. And unfortunately, it has almost nothing to do with actually creating value for anyone in America. I couldn't help but be struck in watching this everything go down at Silicon Valley Bank. We have executives at this bank who cashed out millions of dollars in their own stock before the collapse. They gave themselves bonuses hours before the feds took it over and they were insolvent. It hit me that these thread posters, they've got it all wrong.

The way to really become rich in America is apparently start a regional bank, make dumb bets and gambles, run your business badly, pay yourself a bonus, then have the government backstop your customer deposits while you laugh all the way to Aspen. Really consider the precedent that we have set, which we expounded on yesterday. All cash deposits in all banks are now backstopped by the government. Okay, but then why do these bank executives get to use our hard-earned money to trade, loan out, to bet on investments, when they pay us fractions of the penny on the dollar in interest and paying themselves big bonuses. Now, I have long said to some controversy,

we would be better off if people became billionaires in this country the way that Elon Musk and Bezos did, because at least that requires creating world-changing companies. Today, it almost has nothing to do with that. Consider the Forbes billionaire list and the newest additions that are US citizens. 50 as of April of 2022 were added to the list. What do you think the single most common occupation of these new additions was? To a T, almost every single one of them was in finance, including, and I'm not joking, who they shouted out, Gary Wang, vice president of FTX. I guess he's no longer on the list. But the rest of them, the most common occupation of these new billionaires was almost all the same. Some derivative of finance, private

equity, fintech, investment banking, venture capital. Of the additions was Bill Gates's ex-wife after her divorce settlement. The rest were a sprinkling of genuine entrepreneurs and then some real estate guys who were effectively as big sharks as the financiers. In many ways, the industrialists like Musk and Bezos that we focus on having the biggest fortune, it misses the fact that the most common way today to become filthy rich is not to start anything. It's financial engineering, shorting stocks, buying companies, gutting them, offshoring, selling for parts, squeezing stock value, or in the case of the FTX guy, being a literal fraudster. And by the way, that was just the new billionaires list. A comprehensive review of the Forbes 400 list found that the most common occupation in developed

nations for billionaires is finance. And if you lower the threshold down to mere multi-millionaires, it remains just as common. Basically, above small business owners, the only real way to get really rich in this country is to get some way involved in the financial industry. If you compare this to other countries, we are the standout dramatically. Chinese billionaires and Indian billionaires, Russian billionaires, they are disproportionately concentrated in manufacturing, retail, textile, and industry. Now granted, many of them are oligarchs with connections to the state, but the point stands that their raw wealth is creation coming from hard assets. Ours is just games on a spreadsheet. Yes, I know I am

simplifying this significantly. No, I am not saying these businesses have no place whatsoever in our economy. But do you really believe that it should be number one? Worse, seemingly our entire tax code is actually geared around protecting this very type of wealth. Once you have generated significant net worth, your effective tax rate drops dramatically. Even amongst billionaires, your ability to avoid income tax is on a graduated scale. No single group of American billionaires enjoys more benefits than those in finance, including, but not limited to, capital gains taxes, the carried interest loophole, and the ability to borrow against the value of stock to effectively have

zero income. Take financial billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett, for example. Both have an effective lifetime tax rate of less than 1.5%. Buffett's is actually at 0.1%. It is difficult to comprehend how much the entire system is designed almost entirely for their benefit. Meanwhile, if you're one of those successful small businesses owners that I mentioned, even with all the depreciation in the world, you are likely paying one of the highest effective tax rates in the United States. Maybe it's just me, but that's ass backwards. Businesses that are parts of the community are effectively penalized for earning cash, while the people who ostensibly manage that cash for you

take leverage bets on the market, they make a killing, and they pay nothing. I already know nothing is going to change in the immediate term. but it is important to keep this in your mind, what things really should look like, should the time ever come that we can ever actually do something about this. You know, this is a point, Crystal, I've always tried to make, and I just wanted to revisit it. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as we've been covering here, when things got dicey for wealthy venture capitalists,

their friends, and their portfolio companies, the government leapt into action. After Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, it only took the government a single weekend to guarantee all depositors would be made 100% whole, but that was really just the start. They also opened up an entirely new lending facility to make sure that all banks have liquidity and will even allow banks to use as collateral for those cheap loans assets that have lost billions in value. Now, these actions not only benefit Silicon Valley bank depositors and signature bank depositors, but the entire banking system. Every bank executive and shareholder with a shaky balance sheet just got a massive bailout. Every wealthy person in America with more than $250,000 in the bank, they just got a guarantee that all their deposits are safe, even though their institutions did not

pay enough insurance to actually cover all of those deposits. All banks are now effectively too big to fail and all deposits are now effectively insured. And as much as they want to claim this has no impact on the American taxpayer, we're the ones who are backstopping this new revolutionary banking status quo. Even if you just consider one piece of the bailout, the Fed's decision to allow banks to borrow against negative collateral value, this amounts to many billions of dollars in value conferred to one sector of the economy from the U.S. government. Now, I cannot help but contrast this shock and awe response from the federal government with a response to another crisis that we have spent a lot of time covering

here, the Norfolk Southern train catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio. Both crashes at core were created by corporate greed and political capture. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, their CEO successfully argued for a light regulatory touch, exempting the bank from stress tests that might have kept it from going belly up. 17 Democrats joined with 50 Republicans to usher these changes through Congress during the Trump administration. Now, in the case of Norfolk Southern, railroad interests had their way with the Obama administration when they successfully limited the scope of new safety regs. The Trump administration went even further, rolling back several of those Obama-era provisions.

And the Biden administration maintained the status quo and then sided with the rail bosses over their workers on safety and on working conditions. But in one situation, the victims were wealthy and well-connected. In the other, the victims were working-class people in a part of the country that the fancy people abandoned a long time ago. Now, I'm not saying the train crash and the bank crash are 100% analogous. That'd be ridiculous. One big and important difference is that in the case of SVB, there was a possibility of financial contagion spreading to banks across the country. I tend to think these fears were a bit overblown, but it was certainly a real possibility, especially with a bunch of influential people running around hair on fire, basically willing one into existence.

Now, with the Norfolk Southern train derailment, the fact of this one derailment was not going to trigger an onslaught of derailments. There was no contagion risk. So it is different in that it was not going to trigger cascading effects. Although, if you look at the safety stats, we already have a nationwide epidemic of train derailments, which should be treated as a crisis. But both crashes have to do with the lives and the livelihoods of American citizens. And evaluating the responses, what you come away with is a pretty clear message about who our government is set up to serve, who gets a bailout, and who gets a raft of excuses for why we can't do anything, who gets socialism, and who gets that good old-fashioned rugged individualism?

So let's do a little thought experiment. What would it actually look like if East Palestine, Ohio got the Silicon Valley treatment? The first critical aspect of the government response to Silicon Valley was speed. It took mere days to marshal a major response, announce groundbreaking new policy, leaving depositors concerned about these bank accounts for only a single weekend. On the other hand, the Norfolk Southern train derailed on February 3rd. It has been six weeks now since that happened, and still the community is lacking in the most basic of answers. Just last week, the EPA finally ordered soil to be tested for toxic dioxins, a glaring oversight given the risk of these chemicals and concerns of health experts. And outrageously, that testing is being conducted by Norfolk Southern itself, the very company that caused the catastrophe and which has every incentive to cover up potential problems. I have zero doubt that a wealthy community would have expected and received

full air, water, and soil testing conducted immediately before anyone was told that it was safe for them to come home. Now, with Silicon Valley Bank, a key concern was the ability of business owners who had accounts at the bank to continue their operations and not miss a payroll. The government immediately stepped in to guarantee that those depositors would be made 100% whole. What would it look like for East Palestine residents to be

made 100% whole? Well, they may not have owned fancy tech startups, but plenty had small businesses which have undoubtedly now been destroyed by the fact that their town has become synonymous with a massive industrial accident. Their home values have been decimated overnight. Any idea that perhaps they should move out of a potentially toxic town is being crushed by the fact that whatever they sunk into building wealth by a home ownership has now been completely wiped out. Medical bills are mounting for some who are continuing to report symptoms ranging from dizziness to skin rashes to vomiting blood. Making East Palestine 100% would involve a cash infusion to make up the losses of their assets from homes to businesses, funds to relocate if they desire to do so. It would mean a Medicare for All guarantee that would eliminate current and future medical bills. By the way,

there's a provision in Obamacare that could be invoked to secure universal health care for this town. It just requires the government to admit there is a public emergency, something they are ultimately loathe to do. Even this would not make the residents of the town 100% whole when you consider the stress and potential health impacts and splintering of a deeply rooted community. But at least it would be a start. The government's actions with regard to Silicon Valley Bank, they went far beyond just that one bank. They created a whole new program in an attempt to make sure no other banks or depositors suffered any losses. What would this look like in the case of industrial accidents like what happened in East Palestine? It would mean expanding any programs that benefited that one Ohio community to cover

any community impacted by a derailment or a chemical spill. It would mean creating dedicated mechanisms like what exists within the Fed, where funding can go out immediately without having to wait around for Congress to get their act together, which they never do. And that's really the key difference between banks and ordinary people. We have an elaborate architecture in place that can spring into action the instant there is a whiff of trouble for big business and for banks. But all of the mechanisms which are meant to help and protect ordinary people, they are decrepit or inadequate, non-existent or broken. So instead of an actual government response to suffering, you get Pete Buttigieg writing a strongly worded letter to rail bosses and Trump flying in to hand out branded water bottles and McChicken sandwiches.

Imagine if in response to these bank failures, Janet Yellen just wrote a letter asking the banking industry to please do better and Obama flew to California to hand out copies of his latest Netflix series or something like that. Now, there is one unfortunate commonality between these two crashes. Neither incident is likely to lead to the regulatory reform, which would prevent future similar crises from recurring. With Silicon Valley, the government is treating the symptoms. With East Palestine, the government is telling suffering residents that the symptoms are

all in their heads. In neither case is Congress likely to actually tackle prevention because that would require taking industry head-on, which is hard, versus giving them bailouts, which is so easy. All I'm saying to the masters of the universe who converted from Ayn Rand to Marx in the course of 48 hours is that your socialism for the rich would go down a whole lot easier if you came through with a little bit of socialism for the rest of the country when they really, really need it. And I have been struck by the contrast. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Matt Taibbi went scorched earth in Congress, and Congress did their best to try to discredit him.

So he's joining us now. We're very excited to welcome him back to the show. Matt Taibbi, so-called journalist, welcome back. How's it going, Simon, Crystal? Oh, it's great, man. We were absolutely outraged on your behalf, even though you handled yourself with great aplomb, I will say. Yeah, I hope I hope it helped out. And I'm sure many of our audience was very much with you, Matt. We wanted to just have you on to talk about the actual content of what you were testifying before in Congress, because apparently many Democratic members were not actually interested in that.

Wow, that's new. I'm not even sure I'm prepared for this interview because I haven't had one of those. No, the content is, I would say, shocking. You know, the Twitter files originally, when we did the first couple of threads on them, they seemed like it was a pretty limited topic that we were looking first at the Hunter Biden story. I was hoping to answer a pretty small question about whether or not the DHS or the FBI was in any way contacting these companies with recommendations. And then about, I would say, a month into the process, we discovered that not only was there a very formal system of transmitting, sort of mass transmitting those requests, but that there was a deeper layer of it where the

government was connected to all these NGOs that were also sending huge numbers of requests to these companies. So, yeah, it's a very serious, I think, deep problem. And I wish we had gotten an opportunity to talk about it more. Yes. Well, it's one of these and there's one of many issues where the partisan coding of it, first of all, is bizarre, but also it completely misses the point because no one has argued this only happens under Democratic administrations. No, to the contrary. I mean, a lot of what you revealed was happening during the Trump administration. So it speaks to a deeper collaboration between what some might call the deep state and these incredibly powerful tech companies. Can you just help people understand what you find as a journalist and as an American citizen so troubling about some of these interactions?

Well, the First Amendment expressly prohibits the government from getting involved in barring speech. And what we see here is they're trying to do an end around in a number of ways. First, by sending very carefully worded letters to these companies, you know, for your consideration only, we believe that these accounts may violate your terms of service. Or they will send something like, you know, of course, you will only remove accounts at your own sole discretion. But, you know, here's a list of 3,000 accounts that we think are foreign threat actors or potential foreign threat actors, right? Right. So that's deeply troubling.

But, Crystal, to your point, you know, one of the people that I talked to about this had a really interesting way to describe this phenomenon, saying that it was counterterrorism and counterpopulism. Because what we had was the war on terror machinery kind of ran out of gas after the isis problems started to recede and the money still needed to be spent so they just reconfigured the mission to anti-disinformation and the problem with that is that the reason the republicans are more interested in that is that in the United States, the bigger threat to the establishment populism-wise is the right wing. But in the Twitter files, you see they're very worried about the left in Europe, in Africa, in South America. So I think that's a misconception. As you say, the right-left coding of this has been an obstacle.

Yeah, it's really troubling. And one of the things that I was driven mad by was the also partisan coding in the hearing itself, where they both wanted to say censorship wasn't happening and that when it was, it was good. So they were like, no, no, no, no, actually, there's a real bias here in protecting it. And so the censorship, it wasn't happening as Taibbi was saying it was, but when it did happen, it was in the defense, quote unquote, really of like good information and reality, it's the right wing or whatever. And taking the partisan coding out of it. I mean, one of the things that you unveiled here with the Twitter files was how much time and man hours are spent on censoring absolute bullshit as in like small accounts with no following that are

supposedly either spreading disinformation. Or making some bad joke. And we're like, how is it your job to go through and comb through six follower accounts and then flag it and try to get those taken down? Was there any interest in that, apparently, for many of these people at the hearing? No. And that's an interesting point because, you know, satire is one of the big problems for AI. It doesn't know how to handle things that are jokes, clearly, to a human being. But a computer doesn't understand that. So all it sees for instance is they there is a an account um peter douche i think is what he calls himself uh and he was making these sort of fake biden videos where the tongue was really long and it was clearly a joke but there was this whole back and forth between like the you know the Democratic Party or the campaign representative and Twitter's government liaison about whether or not they should ban this.

And this is taking up lots and lots of time. Stuff like this is all over the Twitter files. You know, jokes by who is it? Mike Huckabee made a joke. Oh, I guess I should get my dead parents to vote now, right? Like, it's a joke, clearly, right? I mean, look, maybe he's a jerk to say it, but they had a long discussion about it. They sort of pre-gave him a strike for saying that.

And that is a huge part of the problem, too, is that they're trying to apply machine learning to human conversation and you can't do it, really. Yeah. And that's going to be, you know, continue to be a really important problem, you know, that I wish we were thinking harder about as we move forward. You know, have you thought much about solutions? Because I think a lot of folks on the right, like they kind of put their faith in Elon that this would be like free speech panacea once he took over the platform. It's a sort of libertarian view, right? Of like, oh, if we have a new startup

that is like Twitter, but different, or if we have the right, you know, pro-free speech billionaire owner of Twitter, then maybe things will be different. But ultimately the incentive structure is still the same. They're still really controlled by what advertisers are gonna be comfortable with in terms of their speech valence. So have you thought about what some more workable, intelligent solutions might look like? I would say my primary, my first concern is that we get the government out of the business of organizing some kind of pan platform censorship processing system because there's some evidence that they've already done that and created a processing system that works between the companies and that is publicly funded. So that would be very

troubling if that existed. I think the libertarian point of view in this that has a little bit of merit in my point of view is this idea that if there was no organized government system, then they would at least compete and there would be some platforms that would do that less than others maybe, right? And you wouldn't have this universal cooperation, which is what we saw in the Twitter files. However, I don't know. I mean, you're absolutely right. The incentives are what they are. People are always going to do this if they have the power to do it. And that's a problem because distribution is now so concentrated that even shows like yours, writing like mine, even though it's on email, it's always going to be subject to these distributors.

Yeah, and that was one where I had to bring this up, but one of the worst parts to me was when Debbie Wasserman Schultz attacked you from the idea that you might have made money by doing your job, when they have no questions about, you know, corporate media, whenever they get aligned with some major advertiser and they happen to take that line, oh, that's totally fine. But can you just talk about why, I think at least, it was a big moment for independent journalism, regardless of really what the attack was or not, to have these sitting up there, to have these revelations to be at the center of the story, and even for the people in Congress

to kind of show their true colors on this. You know, in some ways, it was a disgusting attack, but like I said, actually, in our video defending you, I was like, you know, this just shows you that they have to attack the character whenever they can't actually attack the content. So to me, it was almost like a we've arrived time moment. Yeah, I mean, it's funny.

We found a flow chart that the Stanford Internet Observatory put out that talked about all the different stakeholders in the content review process. And it was something like government, companies, NGOs, and media. And it showed all the content flowing back and forth, reports both going to media and from media to these NGOs. But what that showed is that they view the media, especially the traditional corporate media, as part of this system, which makes them inherently trustworthy, which I think is why people, it was all independent journalists

were chosen to do this project because there's an inherent trust problem now with the corporate press. So look, the press is supposed to adopt a separate adversarial posture to all of these institutions. And if they're viewed as partners, they can't be trusted. And so I think that was an important point.

I think that's one of the main things that this project, I hope, has achieved. I hope so, too. As we always say, go ahead and support Matt's work. We've got a link down in the description. Really appreciate you joining us and breaking it down. I know it was an annoying moment, I'm sure, but overall, I think it worked out to your benefit. Thanks so much, Sagar Crystal.

Take care. Great to see you, Matt. Good to see you. Thank you guys so much for watching. Really appreciate it. As always, if you can, we got the new Spotify full show out there. I know a lot of people are really loving it.

Just for premium members, you can subscribe, breakingpoints.com, support the show, get the full show on Spotify, video, audio, all at the same time. People are absolutely loving it. So enjoy, people. We'll see you guys on Thursday. We got a great CounterPoints show for you guys tomorrow. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right.

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