In this episode of Right Angle, what happened to Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank or how government makes everything better.

Hi, I'm Scott Ott with Bill Whittle and Stephen Green, and this episode of Right Angle is brought to you as all the others by the members at Bill Whittle.com.

Gentlemen, I'd just like to break down a couple of segments in the drama that was happening over the weekend

or we became aware of over the weekend regarding Silicon Valley Bank and then signature

bank and the role at various stages that government played in it and just get your reaction.

And we can make this a little bit more loose and free-willing

than we normally do rather than me posing questions to each of you if we want to kind of jump

in and deal with this. But I've kind of broken this thing down into phases from reading in

various places, including the Wall Street Journal, about what happened here. And so for those of you who are financial wizards or banking

experts, this is your opportunity to hit the stop button and go to some other video where

somebody's going to impress you with their knowledge. This is more in every man's layman

kind of read on this thing. So first of all, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the

shutdowns of all kinds of things, tech companies did very well. And deposits surged in Silicon Valley

Bank, with incredible boost in deposits. So I'm not going to get into

particular figures on this. So really, government plays a role here in what they did by having

mandates or guidelines that suggested that companies shut down their operations. Therefore, tech

companies boom because people were spending more time at home.

Therefore, this bank that focuses on tech companies gets a surge in deposits. In 2018, the President Trump

signed some legislation to loosen regulations on smaller banks because it was thought that they

should only really apply to larger banks. And it was some legislation that had passed in the after the great meltdown that followed the Lehman Brothers crisis back in 2008. Now, lest you leap to the assumption that President Trump is to blame for this, my understanding is signing legislation is not an executive order. And also that

former bank, I believe he was the chairman of the banking committee, was Representative Barney

Frank, who after retirement from the House, became a member of the board of signature bank.

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