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:
– – –
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.
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 openthebooks.com Founder Adam Andrzejewski to the newsmaker line to unravel Silicon Valley Bank’s ties to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Leahy: To the issue of honesty, cover-up. Silicon Valley Bank, all the roads are leading to Governor Gavin Newsom. Adam, thanks for joining us.
Andrzejewski: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate coming back on the program.
Leahy: Crom and I were here talking; there’s a lack of honesty and integrity. I think in your latest column at Openthebooks substack, you’re pointing out that there’s a coverup about Governor Gavin Newsom’s involvement with the Silicon Valley Bank. Which as everybody knows, failed spectacularly. Adam, tell us more about that.
Andrzejewski: So incredibly Silicon Valley Bank through their investment banking arm bought stakes in three of Governor Gavin Newsom’s private businesses. That was broken by The Intercept.
Here’s what we broke at openthebooks.com. We put the other half of the story together that the president of the Silicon Valley Bank’s investment banking arm, his name is John China.
Leahy: Whoa, whoa. No.
Carmichael: Are you making that up?
Leahy: Are you making that up?
Andrzejewski: I’m not. I’m not making it up. His name is John China. It is.
Carmichael: At least you didn’t say his name was Hunter China. (Laughter)
Andrzejewski: There is a real question. Is the Chinese influence being funded out of that investment banking arm as well? But no, his name is actually John China, and he’s a good friend of the Newsom’s. He’s right in the mix of Newsom Inc., as we call it, at openthebooks.com. We found that he is a founding board member of Newsom’s nonprofit, the California Partners Project.
What is the California Partners Project? It’s a nonprofit expressly created to push the public policy agenda of Jennifer Siebel-Newsom, the wife of Governor Gavin Newsom. She calls herself the first partner. The first thing Governor Gavin Newsom did when he was inaugurated was he established this public office for his wife.
A subdivision of the office of governor, it’s called the office of the first partner. It’s got nine staffers and a million-dollar-a-year appropriation of taxpayer money. Five million dollars since 2019 has gone into this office, but it wasn’t enough. They established this nonprofit to bring in more funding, more staff, and more political lobbying muscle behind his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s public policy agenda.
The first thing they passed incredibly was gender quotas on corporate boards, and they were patting themselves on the back with Silicon Valley Bank’s John China, the Newsom’s, when they passed, signed this into law, but even a California court threw it out because obviously, it was discriminatory. Judicial Watch sued them and got that law thrown out.
Carmichael: I’m really interested in this thing where you’re saying the Silicone Valley Bank in their private investment arm invested. When they collapsed, did they still own interests in three of Newsom’s companies?
Andrzejewski: Yes. They disclosed it on their website. And this begs a lot of questions. We know what the questions are, right? They’ve got the regulators, now that the bank has failed, they’ve got to open the books on the good friend of the Newsom’s, the head of the $5.5 billion investment pool of money that bought stakes in three of his businesses.
Did they overpay for the governor’s business? Was he able to pull chips off the table, pull money out of, take money and risk off the table for himself personally, because of the deep relationship with the head of the Silicon Valley Bank’s investment business? We don’t know the answers to that, but we need that transparency.
Carmichael: So you’re saying the Silicon Valley bank had a $5.5 billion private investment organization or entity within their holding company or within their bank that took $5.5 billion and made direct investments in private companies, three of which were in entities where Newsom was a material shareholder. Do we know the names of those three companies and the amount of the investments?
Andrzejewski: We don’t know the amounts. That’s not disclosed, but we do know the names. There are three wineries, I forget the third one, but the second one is Plump Jack. Two of the wineries are pretty well-known brands and so we don’t know the amounts, but certainly, all of this needs sunshine on it.
Leahy: If you look at this, will the equity interests of the Silicon Valley Bank and these three businesses owned by the governor of California be liquidated?
Carmichael: And then the question is whether or not they’ll be liquidated at a preferential rate if these wineries are doing well. (Andrzejewski laughs) If the voters get angry…
Andrzejewski: It will really open a can of worms. What if Newsom buys back the interest from Silicon Bank in his own business at a discounted rate than what they purchased it for? It gets really interesting very quickly.
Carmichael: John Steinbeck wrote a book for if the voters get mad about these winery deals The Grapes of Wrath. (Laughter)
Leahy: Boom, chakalaka.
Carmichael: This is very interesting, especially if those numbers. If it’s a couple hundred thousand dollars each, it’s not that big a deal. But if it’s five or $10 million that’s real money.
Leahy: By the way. Adam, can you find out how much was spent, and how much was invested by Silicon Valley Bank in those three businesses owned by Gavin Newsom?
Andrzejewski: They’re private transactions, but now that the Fed has taken over the bank, look, we need to know. I think there needs to be transparency on this, and the regulators and law enforcement need to start asking the proper questions because here’s what we do know.
The governor himself solicited, he requested a six-figure $100,000 gift for his nonprofit from John China through Silicon Valley Bank, and they paid it. They gave $100,000. It was so close to Newsom that under California ethics law, they had to post that $100,000 gift as behested, as a requested gift on a state ethics website.
That money should be paid back to the bank from Newsom’s nonprofit. And we’re issuing the clarion call that they paid $100,000 back. This was given in 2021, so not that long ago. The depositors, the investors, and now the taxpayers, deserve to have that six-figure gift back in the bank.
Leahy: Absolutely. Adam, a great reporting on your part. Hey, can you come back and tell us what the resolution of this is going to be?
Andrzejewski: Absolutely. I look forward to it.
Leahy: It’s a lot of money and this needs to be transparent, Adam, with Openthebooks.com. Thanks so much for joining us. Come back again if you would please.
Andrzejewski: Thank you so much for having me.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
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 “Adam Andrzejewski” by Adam Andrzejewski. Background Photo “Silicon Valley Bank” by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.
Live from Music Row Thursday 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 all-star panelist Roger Simon in studio to comment on the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and how it could invoke nationwide digital currency.
Leahy: In studio right now, our very good friend, all-star panelist, and my former boss at PJTV. That was 14 years ago.
Simon: Is that what it is? I can’t count that far back.
Leahy: Fourteen years ago when we first met. Also an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. In addition to being a novelist and depending on the day, the most-read columnist at The Epoch Times, Mr. Roger Simon. Good morning, Roger.
Simon: Good morning to you!
Leahy: It is a delight, as always, to have you here in studio. You have a very interesting column just published at The Epoch Times about where this current banking crisis, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, is going to lead us. And it’s not a very good place.
Simon: No. And it’s not just the Silicon Valley Bank, as everybody knows. It could be your bank and Credit Suisse and various other things. And something called Signature, which is about as woke as you could get. The problem I’m talking about is, you remember how this guy, Ram Emanuel said, never miss an opportunity for a crisis to do something new and dangerous.
Well, there’s a crisis going on, as we all know, and the thing that I think a lot of them have in mind is moving us all off of the banks that we may love or hate to digital currency. That means no cash and lots of conveniences, everything happens very quickly, and it means every single penny you spend even a candy bar at a 711 is recorded and known by the government.
Leahy: I cannot think of anything worse than to get rid of cash.
Simon: As I say, it’s communism beyond the wildest dreams of Karl Marx.
Leahy: Yikes.
Simon: Really, if you think about it, I mean, everything is under their control now. Then they can shut anything off if they don’t like a single thing you do. Boom. It’s gone in a second. Is your carbon footprint is too high? You can’t get gas today. That’s an example.
Leahy: Yes. They can control everything if we go to digital currency. How does that happen in a worst case scenario?
Simon: The famous phrase is, I think it’s from, how did you go bankrupt? It’s in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Slowly, but then all of a sudden, or something like that. That’s how it would happen, I believe. I think we’d wake up one morning, and it would be like that.
Biden or whoever runs Biden is doing everything by Executive Fiat. They might find a way to do that. They might declare another crisis. It’s COVID time and I guess because there’s a new pandemic it simplifies everything if all the currency is digital, and we can keep an eye on who is getting them the new shots or not.
There are lots of ways this could happen. And I think that everybody listening should be on what we used to call the French kevee, or something like that should really pay attention. Because this could happen in a lightning second.
Leahy: What a wonderful way to start the program.
Simon: On the other hand, spring will eventually come.
Leahy: Everybody’s drinking their coffee thinking, you know, Roger might be right here. Oh my goodness! But let’s try to see, well, okay. We see that as a possibility. What can be done proactively to stop that possibility?
Simon: Putting it out in the public and that you hate the idea. That’s really it.
Leahy: I totally hate the idea.
Simon: So do I. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have written the column.
Leahy: Thank you. I get my Captain Obvious award for that one.
Simon: So do I. I think that’s all we can do at the moment. I think it’s essentially evil, and you have to just keep your eye on evil because it’s everywhere in our culture right now.
Leahy: And growing.
Simon: Speaking of the spring, it just popped into my head that one of the things that have been canceled is one of my favorite songs. Zippity Do Dah.
Leahy: That’s been canceled?
Simon: Song of the South. That wonderful moment. You know, I remember as a kid when I watched it, I was just so happy.
Leahy: Why was it canceled?
Simon: Oh, because it’s a black guy singing it, and it hearkens back to slavery.
Leahy: But there’s nothing in the lyrics.
Simon: No. Nothing in it.
Leahy: Oh my goodness.
Simon: No. It’s just cancel culture.
Leahy: Okay, we’re gonna come back with some more positive opportunities for the future.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
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.
Live from Music Row, Wednesday 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 the founder of CapWealth Management, Tim Pagliara in studio to explain how Silicon Valley Bank failed.
Leahy: Right now we are joined in studio by our very good friend, Tim Pagliara, the founder of CapWealth Management. I think Tim, you’re what the number one rated wealth management company in Tennessee for five years running. Is that right?
Pagliara: I’ve been there a few times.
Leahy: You’ve been there more than once! That’s true. Look, my eyes glaze over—a little bit when we look at all this financial stuff because I’m a media guy. I’m a political guy. I report on it and sometimes the financial stuff gets a little bit in the weeds. However, this thing I can’t avoid.
Silicon Valley Bank is the 16th largest bank by assets in the country and the second largest bank failure that happened on Friday, then Signature Bank, where our good friend Barney Frank’s on the board of directors, failed too! What’s going on and what happened? Why did Silicon Valley Bank fail?
Pagliara: It’s great to be with you, Michael.
Leahy: It’s great to have you here.
Pagliara: Let’s try and unpack this in a simple way. First, this was only the very first bank failure in the history of the country that had nothing to do with credit losses. This was about asset management. Banks make money off of interest float, they make money off of loans, and then they make money off of the treasury bills and the treasury that they can buy, and they have to keep those in two different counts.
One’s available for sale, and the other one’s held to maturity. And so they didn’t respond quickly enough to the problems associated with the rapid rise in interest rates with the Federal Reserve, and they didn’t pay their depositors enough.
And so when six-month treasury bills hit percent, they started to experience a tremendous outflow much faster than anything ever experienced. Deposits are usually very sticky. They lose no more than one percent at a time in a year. That’s called deposit beta. They went up to over 30 percent. Silicon Valley Bank lost $42 billion in deposits over a two-day period of the $160 million that they had.
Leahy: That’s what you call a bank run, right?
Pagliara: It was a run, and it was accelerated by fears associated with the run. So one of these things have an avalanche effect to them. I have this vision of Jimmy Stewart in A Wonderful Life.
Pagliara: Exactly.
Leahy: Accept Silicon Valley Bank guys, not exactly Jimmy Stewart, right?
Pagliara: No, they’re not. But they didn’t manage the bank. That’s what is common. Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were poorly run. In fact, at Silicon Valley Bank, the position of risk officer had been vacant for over a year, which is gonna be a chief part of the investigation.
Leahy: Why was the chief risk officer position vacant for over a year?
Pagliara: It’s a great question, and that’s one of the things the regulators look at.
Leahy: That’s a little suspicious, isn’t it?
Pagliara: It is. Because a lot of times risk officers leave over controversy related to the performance of their duties. And so when they had to sell that available-for-sale account of $22 billion, they lost over 10 percent of it.
Leahy: A couple of billion bucks.
Pagliara: Those losses, then they were losing deposits and it just collapsed on top of it.
Leahy: So here’s how I look at this. Joe Biden gets elected president. At that time, what long-term interest rates on 10-year treasury bills were half a percent?
Pagliara: Three quarters.
Leahy: Okay, so Biden gets elected. It’s a Democrat Congress, and a fifth grader could figure this out. These guys are gonna spend a lot of money. Inflation’s gonna go up, and the fed’s gonna raise interest rates. Was that an obvious thing to think about as a bank risk officer at that time?
Pagliara: Absolutely. And so this term duration that you hear, they needed to shorten their maturities every time a rate increase occurred.
Leahy: They were stuck with these long-term bills and what you’re saying is they need to get out of those quicker than they did.
Pagliara: That’s right. And long terms is two years. This unprecedented increase in interest rates, the two year went from somewhere under half a percent to almost five percent.
Leahy: Very quickly.
Pagliara: Very quickly.
Leahy: Thank you, Joe Biden.
Pagliara: And so they ended up losing a lot of money.
Leahy: Boy, did they.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
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 “Silicon Valley Bank” by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.
Live from Music Row, Wednesday 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 the founder of CapWealth Management, Tim Pagliara in studio to discuss how the Silicon Valley Bank crisis revealed flaws in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation structure.
Leahy: In studio, our guest, our good friend, Tim Pagliara, founder of CapWealth Management. Often the number one-rated wealth management company here in Tennessee. I think you’re this year again, too, right?
Pagliara: We’re waiting to see.
Leahy: Waiting to see. I think my prediction, my predictions, by the way, are better than Jim Kramer’s predictions. (Laughter) My classmate who a month before said you should buy Silicon Valley Bank.
Pagliara: Two days before.
Leahy: Two days before, buy Silicon Valley Bank at $260. And what’s the value of it today, Tim?
Pagliara: It’s a goose egg. Zero.
Leahy: Zero. Okay, so I just have to talk about this. Supposedly the top government official who handles financial matters is the Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen. I noticed that as Silicon Valley Bank was starting to melt down, she decided it’d be a good time to go to Kyiv, Ukraine. (Laughs) I don’t know. You can’t make this stuff up. Was she able to help any of the banks there?
Pagliara: I don’t think so.
Leahy: I don’t think so either. Now let’s talk about Silicon Valley Bank and how our listeners have their demand deposit money. This is like if you go to a bank and you have a checking or a savings account, that’s what you call a demand deposit, right?
Pagliara: Yes.
Leahy: Which means you can demand that deposit back and you get it, you’re supposed to get it right then. If you’re an FDIC-insured bank, the demand deposits are insured up to $250,000, is that right?
Pagliara: That’s correct.
Leahy: So if you’re at a bank that fails and you had $250,000 in your bank account, you could get that money ultimately from the FDIC insurance mechanism. But if you had $260,000, in theory, you could get $250,000 back, but you’d lose $10,000 bucks. But that’s not gonna happen here, is it?
Pagliara: No, they’ve guaranteed the deposits. And what this has revealed is a structural flaw in the FDIC system. It’s going to have to be revamped because part of those demand deposits that you were talking about payroll falls into that category. And so the biggest problem that they had closing on Friday and reopening on Monday was there were companies that were not going to be able to meet payroll.
Leahy: That would not have been good.
Pagliara: No. And that’s why you think of $250,000 as a great savings account, but it really doesn’t match what flows through a bank with payroll.
Leahy: If you’ve got a company of the business side, a business account in order to be able to meet payroll, sometimes you need to have what, a million bucks? Two million bucks? Five million bucks depending on the size of the company.
Pagliara: The estimates to the people that I talked to in New York that they will have to extend insurance on payroll accounts when they revamp this $100 million.
Leahy: That high?
Pagliara: That high because you’ve got just tremendous amounts of money that flow through banks, and we have to have the confidence. That when we put it in there and we need it for payroll, for rent, or whatever, is a small business, it’s going to be there.
Leahy: The governing body is a federal deposit insurance corporation, FDIC that was founded in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression after a whole bunch of banks failed and people lost their demand deposits. But right now, how is that money funded? In other words, where do you get the money to cover the $250,000 or more? Where does that come from?
Pagliara: It’s a tax on banks. And so they pay a percentage of their deposits and their profitability, et cetera.
Leahy: There’s a little fund that the FDIC has?
Pagliara: Yes.
Leahy: And when the bank fails, they go to that fund. And that fund is then used to cover all those demand deposits. Is that right?
Pagliara: That’s correct.
Leahy: I’m told that fund doesn’t have enough money right now to cover all the demand deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. Is that true?
Pagliara: That’s true.
Leahy: Uh, oh.
Pagliara: This is what Warren Buffet always says. Now we know who’s been swimming naked because the tide’s gone out.
Leahy: Is that what he says?
Pagliara: Oh, yeah.
Leahy: That’s funny.
Pagliara: It is. Especially this time in the morning. So it’s a structural flaw in the system that’s been revealed by this massive rapid increase in interest rates and then the policies.
Leahy: So this fund is not gonna have enough money to cover all the demand deposits et cetera in Silicon Valley Bank. What’s gonna happen to cover them, then?
Pagliara: You’ve gotta focus on how much money was really lost. And I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of money lost unless they get into the loan portfolio. That’s where the big losses occur.
Leahy: In other words, when you say the loan portfolio, it’s, I loan money to a business, and they’re not able to pay it back. That’s the risk. And then you lose all the money.
Pagliara: That’s a historical risk. That’s why I said this is unique. It’s the first time a bank has ever failed in this country that wasn’t credit risk related. It wasn’t because loans failed.
Leahy: It was, it’s because they made bad investment decisions.
Pagliara: They made bad investment decisions. They didn’t manage their investment portfolio correctly. They didn’t have a risk officer for over a year.
Leahy: Okay, so now it’s almost impossible for me to wrap my head around this idea, right? A fifth grader could have figured out, oh, interest rates are going up. I gotta get out of these low interest-rate treasury bonds.
Pagliara: That’s right.
Leahy: How hard is that to figure out?
Pagliara: It’s not, it’s something you would do every month, and on top of everything else, they were not paying their depositors. They weren’t ramping up payments to depositors. When is the last time you got a call from your banker, and he said, hey, why don’t you put your money in a six-month treasury bill at five percent instead of the one percent I’ve been paying you?
(Leahy laughs) So enough people got together on the golf course and over coffee and dinner, and they said, what are you getting at your bank? I just moved my money to treasury bills at five percent. I’m only getting one percent. What do you think happens?
Leahy: Boom. Money moves.
Pagliara: Now you start a behavioral move; money goes in motion. That’s why that deposit beta accelerated so fast beyond anything that they could have anticipated.
Leahy: So the investigators are gonna look at this and, oh, by the way, the CEO, Greg Becker, this guy. Do you see he sold like $3 million bucks of stock which is like a couple weeks ago, wasn’t it? He can read the balance sheet.
Pagliara: That’s gonna lead to some really interesting questions and depositions.
Leahy: Does he go to prison?
Pagliara: I don’t think so. Tell me the difference between stupid and unethical and I could send my brother-in-law to jail as that saying, went in The Big Short. (Leahy laughs)
Leahy: But he went to a top business school, Tim. I don’t know which one it was. Probably Stanford, probably the same one I went to. He’s stupid with a Stanford MBA or whatever the MBA was, right?
Pagliara: I guess. Yes.
Leahy: It seems to me it is just so obvious. This risk officer thing. If you’re running a big bank, the 16th largest bank in the country, why do you leave the risk officer position open for a year?
Pagliara: That’s gonna be a very interesting question that they’ll have.
Leahy: I can’t imagine that.
Pagliara: I know. Part of the responsibility for this is the regulators. How do the regulators allow a position, an important position like that to be vacant for a year?
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
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 “Tim Pagliara” by Tim Pagliara. Background Photo “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation” by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.
