The banking crisis in the United States has added a degree to the already tense international situation due to the Ukrainian conflict. It’s understandable when the world’s largest economy is in a fever, especially in a place as sensitive as the financial sector, the whole world begins to tremble. On March 11, Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest asset in the United States, went bankrupt in less than two days. Today, the expert community is discussing the possibility of another 50 US banks failing. At least that’s what former vice president of Lehman Brothers financial firm Lawrence McDonald says. It is assumed that the First Republic Bank is under imminent threat of becoming the next bankrupt.
Maksim Krivelevich, candidate of economics, financial consultant, associate professor in the finance and credit department of FEFU School of Economics and Management, told DEITA.RU if the failure of major banks in the United States would be the start of a new Great Depression and what caused the crisis.
What do you think was the main reason for the collapse of American financial institutions, which, by the way, mainly served the so-called new economy?
- There are several reasons for this. The first is the lack of risk control, the second is the incompetence of the personnel. If we take the British branch of this bank – Silicon Valley Bank, which, in fact, made noise, then the head of the risk department of this branch in his application for employment indicated his sexual orientation, some somewhat atypical, and his racial identity, somewhat non-white, as accomplishments. And these two qualities were enough to take her, or rather her, to control the risks of the English branch of a bank with a turnover of 20 billion US dollars.
- Is what is happening in the United States a truly global event and how will it affect the global financial system as a whole?
- The events are extremely interesting and indeed they will not leave anyone out. But so far it is, you might say, not a wave, but just slight ripples on the surface of the sea. There are distinct financial institutions in America that have specialized in serving the new economy (blockchain, cryptocurrencies, etc.). And the Democratic Party, the swamp that Donald Trump says now rules the American financial system, has very generously subsidized these structures to keep them faithful and not stray from the general party line. For example, Sexual Minority Months, African American Population History Months, etc. were regularly organized. And this is not a joke, but a harsh reality.
But you have to understand how this system worked. And she worked in the service of the so-called new economy. For example, you have a Mexican drug cartel, due to the opening of the borders, your amount of money increases dramatically, you have to put it in cryptocurrency and vice versa, or you have to somehow give it l appearance of a legal origin.
What are you doing? You set up a certain Horns and Hooves LLC there, turn it into a corporation, go public, and suddenly that company has a billion dollar capitalization. And now there is no need to explain where the money comes from, because the money is completely clean and untaxed. Because if you showed it as income. Taxes come from the product, and the money collected during the IPO process is pure money, you don’t have to pay anything from them. Here is the same entry into cryptocurrency, exit. That is why the main customers of this system were figures in the format of Latin American drug lords, Iranian rocket scientists and Russian oligarchs. As a result, there was so much money accumulated that this money could be invested in US government bonds, because no other market could accept more money.
- And what did it lead to?
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What happened was as expected: two predators collided – the first is all this microcrime we are talking about. And the macro predator is the US Democratic Party, which has started printing money to spend trillions of dollars. And suddenly it turned out that two people could not get along in a den. The Democrats spent so much money that to stop the destruction of the economy, they started raising the rate. An increase in the rate is an increase in the price of money, which means that the bonds you have, for example, with a yield of 3%, no longer make sense, because the new bonds will have a yield of 5 -7%. And when you have 20 billion bonds and they lose value, what happens? Natural things happen, your investors look at this situation and think how long will you last in a situation where your security is constantly being eroded.
Relatively speaking, you have 20 pawn shops. And your investors are watching how your store burned down, how the second one burned down, how the third one burned down. Sooner or later they realize that this is a trend, and they come to the bank and say to return the money. And here is the conflict of interest. We have, on the whole, a market economy. Yes? If you won billions when you were lucky, then you should start losing money when you were unlucky. But that’s impossible, if the main thing the bank was valued by the federal government for was holding months of sexual minorities, months of African American population history, then you can’t let the management of such a bank go bankrupt.
And now people are coming out of the treasury and saying, and you know, sure, deposits are insured with us for the first $250,000, but we made a philanthropic decision to reimburse everything and everyone. And it turns out that the situation is very interesting – all these drug cartels, these underground oligarchs, some kind of businessman will be paid with taxpayers’ money.
– Including the Russian oligarchs?
- Well, where would we be without them, they take their rightful place in this food pyramid. And it’s hard to squeeze more out of the taxpayer, despite remembering well the story of 2007, when exactly the same thing happened. Then normal mortgages were mixed with extremely abnormal mortgages. And in the end, the same crisis situation occurs.
The taxpayer asks: what tax increase? Last year you said that everything is moving forward in our country and that there is no recession, that you even changed its definition in American textbooks. Where did they remove the simple wording “three quarters of GDP down” and replace it with a more complex one – “an expert assessment of the state of the economy based on the behavior of various economic personnel”. If everything is going so well under our socialist leadership, then why is everything so bad, right? And if it’s all bad, then how good can we be and why should we vote for you in 2024?
- Haven’t such advanced American financial authorities seen this situation?
You can’t say they weren’t warned. If we look at the news now, the owner of the well-known chain store Home Depo spoke on Fox News nearly a year ago and said the US banking system needed to be saved. They (the financiers) care much more about the global climate than about their shareholders. That is to say, ordinary American businessmen have seen it all, forewarned. But, of course, when gigantic sums of state money can be allocated, all these warnings turn out to be unnecessary.
- Well, will the White House finally save the depositors concerned?
“Now the story of Too Big to Fail is repeating itself – too big to let you die, then interesting games with a tambourine begin. British monetary authorities say, but we won’t save our branch of this bank, say Americans , but we will not save either, but we will only pay all the depositors. Very interesting. But if you pay the depositors of this bank, then the depositors of the other banks will do the same, they will now run to their banks with the words “give us the money”, because if it doesn’t cause the bank to go bankrupt, they will get their money and sit down, but even if they don’t get it, they will still get it back a hundredfold. And they will be able to put that money, which is at 3%, at 9% And it turns out that the American monetary authorities are thus provoking an attack on their banks.It is clear that these are not banks of the size of GP Morgan Chase, City Groups, but these are such medium banks, in general, they are quite large. And most importantly, each of them has its own branches in England, Germany. And all this can only affect the world situation. Since it is a new economy industry, all cryptocurrencies are linked to it. Imagine for a second that the situation spirals out of control, that Trump comes along and says, “No, it would be dishonest to save the robber capitalists at the expense of taxpayers’ money.” And it becomes impossible to do so, so what? Then all the cryptocurrencies, the mining projects will start to collapse and huge capacities of electricity will be released, and we understand that now the volumes of electricity spent on the mining of cryptocurrencies are greater than those consumed by underdeveloped countries in total. Then we will see a drop in oil prices, and that will not seem enough to anyone: not Saudi Arabia, not Russia, not Norway.
So now we have every chance to become witnesses of an interesting situation in which the US monetary authorities will be forced to save the whole world. And their own actions. At least it won’t be boring.
