Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal wrote one of his best columns. And the title of it: Silicon Valley Bank and Joe Biden’s $19 Trillion Money. And what Mr. Jenkins points out are things that really need to be pointed out about what Biden did and what the ramifications are and then whether or not what Biden did solved the underlying first mover problem.
Which it did not. I’ll give a little advanced warning that it didn’t solve the underlying problem. And he identifies the underlying problem. He goes on to say, and I will give some quotes here from the article, “If Monday’s routes and bank stocks further spooked uninsured depositors, it was just one more way government was working against itself.”
“Shareholders had a reason for fright as the government suddenly, and unilaterally rewrote the terms of their investment. In essence, out of the blue, the risks that large sophisticated, uninsured depositors had willingly accepted were shifted to bank shareholders and US taxpayers so Biden could have a pleasanter start to his week, and otherwise would’ve been the case.”
He says it goes on. Don’t buy the claim that bank shareholders and CEOs have been taught a lesson. He says the government doesn’t actually eliminate failure. It transfers the risk to itself with enough risk transference, government’s own solvency, and ability to maintain the value of its currency are placed at risk.
We aren’t there yet, but hard to miss are the whispers that the Fed should now back off the inflation fight to support the administration’s priority to avoid more political noise in bank failures. Here’s the key paragraph. When he gets into what the underlying problem is that is causing all of the distress across our economy.
The biggest problem of all is the size, inefficiency, indebtedness, and unsustainability of government. This is why I said earlier this week, the key is the governments of incredibly high government spending and incredibly high overreach by the bureaucracies of our country. Our political class has a silent strategy here too.
Hope it blows up on somebody else’s watch. Now that’s a key one. Hope it blows up on somebody else’s watch. If the politicians like Barney Frank who passed the Dodd-Frank Bill, then retired, oversaw them, and was responsible for the 2008 and 2009 mess. Then he goes on the board of Signature Bank in New York and watches it proceed to have a whole bunch of terrible woke policies.
He collected hundreds of thousands of dollars as a bank board of directors as a bank board member. The question is whether or not he’s gonna be sued, which he ought to be because he didn’t do his job. There are fiduciary responsibilities to being a board member, especially of a bank. Already written into law are set 25 percent cuts in social security benefits.
Medicare can always balance its books. Listen to this. Medicare can always balance its books by cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals and letting declining service and wait lists drive patients to seek care elsewhere. That’s what’s happened in Canada, by the way.
That’s what’s happening in Great Britain as we speak. Those are exactly the things that are going on, and anyone who does not understand that our biggest problem facing this country is the vast overreach of our federal government is simply wrong. It’s just that simple.
And unfortunately, saving Silicone Valley Bank and the depositors in the method that they’ve done it, kicks the can down the road. The question is, does it kick the can down the road a couple of hundred yards, in which case it’s gonna rear its ugly head fairly soon, or does it kick the can down a mile or so, which pushes it out? Maybe two or three or four years.
We will see. But, Kevin McCarthy has a chance with the Republicans on the debt ceiling increase to force the Biden administration to do the right thing and to cut government spending by at least half a trillion dollars which shouldn’t be that difficult because Biden’s increased government spending by at least one and a half trillion dollars. So in two years, it shouldn’t be very difficult to get him to give up a third of his increases. But we’ll see.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “U.S. Capitol” by The Free Birds.
