Speaking of regulating banks...

Eight years before the second-largest bank failure in American history occurred this week, the bank’s president personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of his financial institution, citing the “low risk profile of our activities and business model”, according to federal records reviewed by the Lever.

Three years later – after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying – lawmakers obliged.

  Guardian

Jesus, these fuckers. 2008 wasn't enough.  This is exactly what people were warning about back then when banksters got bailed out instead of serving prison time they deserved.

[Failed Silicon Valley Bank] reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90% of its deposits were not insured.

In 2015, SVB’s president, Greg Becker, appeared before a Senate panel to push legislators to exempt more banks – including his own – from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

[...]

Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices”, Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50bn in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards”, including more stringent regulations, stress tests and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks.

In his testimony, Becker insisted that $250bn was a more appropriate threshold.

[...]

Becker, who reportedly sold $3.6m of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse...

Of course he did. And will he go to jail?

Two months later, SVB added the former Obama treasury department official Mary Miller to its board, noting she had previously helped oversee “financial regulatory reforms”.

And what's her cut?

[T]he Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 [...] was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump that increased the regulatory threshold for stronger stress tests to $250bn.

Trump signed the bill despite a report from Democrats on Congress’s joint economic committee warning that under the new law, SVB and other banks of its size “would no longer be subject to nearly any enhanced regulations”.

That was the fucking point.

The bill was supported in the Senate by 50 Republicans and 17 Democrats, including the Democratic Virginia Senator Mark Warner, for whom Becker held a fundraiser at his Menlo Park, California, home in 2016. [...] The bank’s political action committee also donated a total of $10,000 to Warner’s campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.

In 2019, when the Federal Reserve proposed regulations implementing the deregulatory law, financial watchdogs warned that its regulations on Category IV institutions – as SVB was later classified due to its size and other risk factors – were far too weak.

“The proposal to significantly weaken enhanced prudential standards for Category IV firms could be disastrous,” Better Markets, a non-profit advocating for stricter financial regulations, wrote in a comment on the Federal Reserve’s proposal. “Moreover, these are not small or insignificant firms. Recall that the smallest among this class of banks is over twice the size of the $50bn banks that automatically required enhanced prudential regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act as originally enacted.”

[...]

In 2021, SVB passed the threshold of $100bn under management, triggering some additional scrutiny as a Category IV bank but remaining exempt from the more frequent and detailed analyses that regulators perform to determine whether banks above $250bn of assets have sufficient capital to withstand a crisis.

[...]

SVB is the biggest bank to collapse since Washington Mutual failed in 2008 during the financial crisis, and the second-biggest bank failure in US history.

[...]

In 2019, Becker was elected to serve on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Becker left the board on Friday.

No need to go to a country without an extradition treaty. Nothing will happen to him here.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03/12/2023:

And, yes, the deregulation was signed into law by Trump.

Just like the railroad regulations were rolled  back by Trump.  But the fallout on both happened in the Biden administration, so that's who will take the blame.

UPDATE 03/13/2023:

And she's right.

UPDATE 03/14/2023:

There goes another one.  Signature Bank in New York has folded.