March 17, 2023
SVB loaned millions to useless startups making greenie things no one wanted to buy --WSJ's Strassel
By Monica Showalter
Is there anything more ... Soviet ... than a bank that lends money to companies making things no one wants to buy?
That's the missing puzzle piece we needed on why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up, and Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has found it, persuasively arguing that yes, the failure of the bank was indeed premised on ESG, which descended into wokester lending priorities, creating the abnormal conditions that left the bank ripe for a meltdown.
In a non-firewalled piece featured at the top of Real Clear Politics: she writes:
“We serve those creating positive environmental change,” SVB’s website brags, noting that the bank worked with some 1,550 companies in the “climate technology and sustainability sector.”
Most of these companies weren’t filling some vital market need. Rather, as the Journal reported, SVB was beloved for its willingness to offer “banking services to startups that often weren’t profitable, in some cases didn’t have a product, and would otherwise have a hard time getting a line of credit or a loan from a larger bank.” One tech entrepreneur provided law.com a more scathing description of SVB’s products: “They’re basically subprime business loans. You’re talking about companies that have no credit profile, they’re burning cash and are unlikely to raise the same type of capital because of interest rates. . . . It was basically social credit.”
What inspires a bank to disregard risk and shower money on products or services that nobody is clamoring to buy? One answer is easy money and misguided regulation, which washed dollars into the economy even as it pushed banks like SVB to load up on sovereign debt, lulled by a Federal Reserve-fed belief that interest rates would stay near zero forever. The other? Washington handouts, via President Biden’s effort to engineer a climate industry that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/svb_loaned_millions_to_useless_startups_making_greenie_things_no_one_wanted_to_buy_wsjs_strassel.html
