Biden stresses taxpayer funds won’t be used in Silicon Valley Bank collapse – as it happened

Washington is on tenterhooks, waiting to see if the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the government’s efforts to ensure its depositors can get their money, cause wider chaos in the economy. Democratic senator and Wall Street foe Elizabeth Warren said the California-based institution’s debacle is a sign that rolling back financial regulations in 2018 was not a good idea, while Republicans are blaming everything from Twitter to the woke mob. And on the 2024 campaign trail, Nikki Haley described the government’s intervention with the most infamous b-word: bailout.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Joe Biden approved a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska while protecting the Arctic ocean and millions of acres elsewhere in the state from petroleum exploration. Environmental groups are furious.

• Social security is like Silicon Valley Bank: so says Republican senator Bill Cassidy.

• Barney Frank was a champion of financial regulation during his time in Congress, but then sat on the board of a now-closed bank and said he doesn’t think tighter rules would have stopped the recent insolvencies.

• Rupert Murdoch has not watched Succession, it turns out.

• Have you been affected by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank? Tell us.

The New York Times reports that after the GOP took control of the House, its oversight committee dropped an inquiry into whether Donald Trump profited improperly from his time as president.

The investigation had ensnared Mazars USA, an accounting firm used by the former president until they cut ties with him a year ago, and the oversight committee’s top Democrat has alleged that its Republican leader colluded with Trump in ending it.

“It has come to my attention that you may have acted in league with attorneys for former President Donald Trump to block the committee from receiving documents subpoenaed in its investigation of unauthorized, unreported and unlawful payments by foreign governments and others to then-President Trump,” Democratic lawmaker Jamie Raskin wrote to James Comer, the committee chair.

In an interview with the Times, Comer confirmed that the committee had dropped the inquiry, essentially saying they were now focused on scrutinizing current White House occupant Joe Biden.

“I honestly didn’t even know who or what Mazars was,” Comer said.

“They’ve been ‘investigating’ Trump for six years. I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.”

The consequences of the January 6 insurrection continue to reverberate across Washington, including among Republicans. Here’s The Guardian’s Sam Levine on the growing divide within the GOP over the attack:

Some Republicans have rebuked efforts by Donald Trump and Fox News host Tucker Carlson to whitewash the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, underscoring a significant split in the party over attempts to downplay the events of the day.

Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, turned over more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the Capitol to Carlson earlier this year. This week, Carlson aired selectively edited portions of that footage, falsely claiming the rioters were “sightseers” and “not insurrectionists”. At least 1,000 people have been arrested for their role in the January 6 attack. Five people died as a result of it.

More than 999 people have been arrested so far, according to the justice department. Around 518 people have pleaded guilty to federal crimes to date and 53 have been found guilty at trial.

For more on how Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors will be made whole, and whether or not what the government is doing constitutes a bailout, here’s the Guardian Edward Helmore:

When is a bailout not a bailout? It’s a question many people are asking after the dramatic collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the US’s decision to rescue depositors on Sunday.

Joe Biden, elected and appointed officials all insist the emergency interventions to protect deposits in Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, a second bank that failed on the weekend, or, indeed, any further bank failures, won’t come at taxpayers’ expense.

On Monday, Biden was at pains to say that “no losses” would be borne by taxpayers, and the money would come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund.

Republican senator Josh Hawley has spent the day accusing Silicon Valley Bank of promoting “woke” ideology, and now he wants to undermine the Biden administration’s efforts to make its depositors whole.

Based in Santa Clara, California, Silicon Valley Bank did a lot of business with the venture capital community, including startups focused on fighting climate change, according to the New York Times. To Hawley, that’s enough to earn it the amorphous “woke” moniker:

Now Hawley, who is perhaps best known outside his home state of Missouri for promoting Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and later running from the mob that attacked the Capitol, says he will stop the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from making a special assessment on American banks so that Silicon Valley Bank depositors don’t lose money:

The Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports on the changing fortunes of Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who is at the center of an increasingly intense controversy over his peddling of 2020 election conspiracy theories:

Tucker Carlson was once seen as untouchable. Now the most popular TV host on American cable news is at the center of a firestorm threatening to engulf Fox News and also anger Donald Trump, whose conspiracy theory-laden political cause he has long championed and who his audience loves.

Court filings attached to the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit accuse Fox News of allowing its stars to broadcast false accusations about rigged voting machines in the 2020 presidential election.

The documents contained numerous emails detailing the private views and concerns of senior Fox management and its stars, which often seemed at odds with what they were publicly broadcasting to their audience.

The hit HBO show Succession is loosely based on his life as the patriarch of an unruly billionaire family, but that doesn’t mean Rupert Murdoch watches it.

Though the head of the rightwing media empire is under growing pressure amid a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against his Fox News network, Murdoch recently took time to reveal that he has never watched the comedy-drama series that is set to launch its fourth season on 24 March, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports.

A reporter for the media outlet Semafor got the scoop having contacted Murdoch after his email address was revealed in court filings pertaining to the lawsuit. Murdoch’s reply to the reporter’s email asking if he followed Succession reportedly was: “Never watched it.”

An unlikely figure has found himself drawn into the recent wave of bank collapses: Barney Frank.

The former House Democratic lawmaker’s name graces the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which tightened banking regulations following the global financial crisis. It turns out, he was serving on the board of Signature Bank, which regulators on Sunday closed, making it the third American bank to fail in five days.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, he said he disagreed with the decision to shut down the New York-based institution. “I think that if we’d been allowed to open tomorrow, that we could’ve continued – we have a solid loan book, we’re the biggest lender in New York City under the low-income housing tax credit.”

More interestingly, he disputed that the 2018 rollback of parts of the Dodd-Frank Act played any role in the failures of Signature and other similar sized institutions – like Silicon Valley Bank. That legislation, signed by Donald Trump, raised to $250bn the level at which banks are subjected to the most strict oversight. Both Signature and Silicon Valley were below that amount.

“I don’t think there was any laxity on the part of regulators in regulating the banks in that category, from $50 billion to $250 billion,” Frank said in the interview.

Washington is on tenterhooks, waiting to see if the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the government’s efforts to ensure its depositors can get their money, cause wider chaos in the economy. Democratic senator and Wall Street foe Elizabeth Warren said the California-based bank’s debacle is a sign that rolling back financial regulation in 2018 was not a good idea, while Republicans are blaming everything from Twitter to the woke mob. And on the 2024 campaign trail, Nikki Haley described the government’s intervention with the most infamous b-word: bailout.

Here’s what else has happened today:

• Joe Biden approved a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska while protecting the Arctic ocean and millions of acres elsewhere in the state from petroleum exploration. Environmental groups are furious.

• Social security is like Silicon Valley Bank: so says Republican senator Bill Cassidy.

• Have you been affected by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank? Tell us.

Louisiana’s two Republicans senators have been getting a lot of air time on Fox News lately, with John Kennedy appearing yesterday to complain about how Joe Biden recently put the GOP on the spot over social security. Here’s Maya Yang’s story:

The Republican senator John Kennedy accused Joe Biden of “demagoguing” the issue of how to fund social security and Medicare and protecting the two programs from Republican proposals to cut them, calling it a “very immature thing to do”.

Speaking to Fox News Sunday, Kennedy took aim at Biden for mentioning in his State of the Union address last month that some Republicans have proposed to “sunset” social security and Medicare as part of attempts to balance the federal budget.

“The problem is that President Biden in his State of the Union Address decided to demagogue the issue,” the Louisiana senator said. “We all saw it.

“He basically said, ‘If you talk about social security or Medicare, I’m going to call you a mean, bad person.’ And that just took the issue off the table when the president decided to demagogue it … You can only be young once, but you can always be immature, and I thought it was a very immature thing to do.”

Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley is describing the US government’s efforts to stop Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors from losing their money as a “bailout”.

It’s a politically loaded word, considering how deeply controversial Washington’s 2008 decision to help large banks during the global financial crisis remain.

Here’s her statement, on Twitter:

Meanwhile, Republican senator Bill Cassidy has compared social security – the government program credited with keeping many elderly Americans out of poverty – to Silicon Valley Bank.

He made the comment in an interview with Fox News as he discussed social security’s very real problem of long-term funding:

Joe Biden today authorized a major oil drilling project in Alaska that has angered environmental groups, who see it as a setback in Washington’s fight against climate change. In an effort to temper those criticisms, the president also banned drilling in the Arctic ocean, and protected millions of acres of land in Alaska. Here’s the Guardian’s coverage of one of the Biden administration’s most significant environmental decisions, from Oliver Milman, Nina Lakhani and Maanvi Singh:

The Biden administration has approved a controversial $8bn (£6bn) drilling project on Alaska’s north slope, which has drawn fierce opposition from environmentalists and some Alaska Native communities, who say it will speed up the climate breakdown and undermine food security.

The ConocoPhillips Willow project will be on of the largest of its kind on US soil, involving drilling for oil and gas at three sites for multiple decades on the 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve which is owned by the federal government and is the largest tract of undisturbed public land in the US.

It will produce an estimated 576m barrels of oil over 30 years, with a peak of 180,000 barrels of crude a day. This extraction, which ConocoPhillips has said may, ironically, involve refreezing the rapidly thawing Arctic permafrost to stabilize drilling equipment, would create one of the largest “carbon bombs” on US soil, potentially producing more than twice as many emissions than all renewable energy projects on public lands by 2030 would cut combined.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is among the Republicans expected to soon jump into the 2024 presidential race, and in a Fox News interview yesterday, he blamed Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse on the liberal policies he’s built a reputation for railing against:

DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, the sorts of initiatives DeSantis’s administration in Florida has made a point of targeting. He also blames the “massive federal bureaucracy” for letting the collapse happen – which is interesting, because during his time as a House lawmaker in 2018, he voted for the legislation that rolled back some of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulations, which is now being blamed for Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.