Brooks Agnew – The first in a long list of box-checking financial institutions, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) just went bust in the amount of $212 billion. This is not just any bank. This is where the hottest tech startups in the world borrowed money to get started, and where most of them called home for all their online banking.
Remarkably, 93 percent of the bank’s $161 billion in deposits are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which only covers accounts up to $250,000. And Roku, to name just one many whales, had $487 million in Silicon Valley Bank. Continue reading
Graham Cunningham – Vladimir Putin may be a paranoid autocrat and a failing military strategist, but when he talks about people in the West who want to “destroy [its] traditional values and impose their pseudo-values … which would corrode [it] from within” you surely have to ask yourself if he doesn’t have a point.
Charles Hugh Smith – Here in the decay phase of Imperial Pretensions, The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It’s a line from Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, and it speaks to our current stumbling descent toward the abyss, where the worst invest their energies in virtue-signaling and the best retreat from the hopelessness of actually addressing our real-world problems.