We're still suffering from the 4 year Trump disaster as his deregulation caused Silicon Valley Bank to collapse.
US Fed points finger at Trump-era rollback for SVB demise
(Reuters) -The Federal Reserve on Friday blamed the deregulatory zeal that occurred during the Trump era for contributing to the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, appearing to take a clear stand on an acrimonious policy divide in Washington.
Amid the turmoil that Silicon Valley Bank's implosion unleashed on the financial system last month, some Republicans and industry advocates have argued strenuously that a 2018 roll-back of post-financial-crisis safeguards was not to blame.
But the Fed's searing 100-page post mortem says bipartisan legislation in 2018 loosened post-financial crisis safeguards, undermining oversight by hindering the work of bank supervisors and encouraging the capital weakness that ultimately proved fatal to SVB.
Greg Baer, president of the Bank Policy Institute, a lobby group, said the Fed had blamed the 2018 changes when the results of its own review showed "the fundamental misjudgments made by its examination teams."
According to the Fed, SVB's management bore significant blame and bank examiners also made grave missteps. The report, however, also pointed to the Fed's vice chair for supervision at the time, without naming him, for creating what it said was a culture of weak and lax supervision that favored inaction.
Randal Quarles, who was appointed to the Fed by President Donald Trump in 2017, oversaw the Fed's bank supervision until his resignation in 2021.
Quarles rejected the report's findings about his work, saying it cited "no evidence at all" that Fed supervisory policy had gone astray during his tenure.
"Having acknowledged that there is no evidence, the rest of the 102-page report makes no effort to pretend to find any," Quarles said in a statement he shared with Reuters.
The Fed did not offer any further comment on criticism of its report and actions.
Elsewhere, the report appeared only to harden long-set policy positions. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who serves on the Senate Banking Committee and has led post-crisis reforms to rein in financial sector excesses, said the report "clearly identified" 2018 legislation among the "major contributors" to SVB's demise.
Patrick McHenry, the Republican chair of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, blasted the Fed report as a "thinly veiled attempt" to justify positions like those of Warren.
In 2018, Senate Republicans began rolling back key provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms enacted after the global financial crisis. Among other things, the new law raised the threshold at which the most intensive oversight is required to $250 billion in assets, from $50 billion, a key point cited in the report.
The reforms ultimately meant looser regulation and lower capital requirements at precisely the wrong time, according to the report.
"While higher supervisory and regulatory requirements may not have prevented the firm's failure, they would likely have bolstered the resilience of Silicon Valley Bank," the report said.
The collapse of SVB and Signature Bank last month burned a $23 billion hole in a government fund for deposit insurance, which officials are preparing to recoup in special fees expected to fall most heavily on the largest U.S. banks.
It was unclear on Friday whether the Fed report made it more likely lawmakers could ultimately undo 2018's deregulation, with a narrowly divided Congress consumed by a battle over raising the government's borrowing limit to avert a default on U.S. sovereign debt in the coming months.
According to the report, the 2018 law caused the Fed to raise the supervisory threshold for large banks, i.e. those smaller than the "global systemically important banks," to $100 billion in assets from $50 billion - delaying stricter oversight of SVB "by at least three years."
Had SVB been subject to the capital and liquidity requirements that existed before, the report said, SVB "may have more proactively managed its liquidity and capital positions or maintained a different balance sheet composition."
© ReutersWorried prosecutors want to stop Trump from endangering witnesses at his criminal trial
Prosecutors fear former President Donald Trump will use his criminal trial to attack and threaten witnesses — and they are moving to try to prevent that from happening, reported the Associated Press on Friday.
Trump faces dozens of felony counts of business record fraud related to his alleged $130,000 hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, which helped conceal the scandal from the public during the 2016 presidential cycle. Trump has denied anything illegal took place and claims the whole story was a shakedown.
"The Manhattan district attorney’s office filed court papers Monday asking Judge Juan Manuel Merchan for a protective order that would put strict guardrails around Trump’s access to and use of evidence turned over by prosecutors prior to trial. That kind of evidence sharing, called discovery, is routine in criminal cases, and is intended to help ensure a fair trial," reported Michael R. Sisak. "Prosecutors want to block Trump from posting evidence to social media or providing it to third parties. They also want to restrict how he views certain sensitive material, asking that he do so only in the presence of his lawyers — and that he not be able to copy, photograph or transcribe those records."
"Trump 'has a longstanding and perhaps singular history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, trial jurors, grand jurors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him,' Assistant District Attorney Catherine McCaw wrote," said the report. "That behavior, she said, has put 'those individuals and their families at considerable safety risk.'"
Trump has been publicly attacking legal officials involved in litigation against him for years. In 2015, he infamously attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing the Trump University lawsuit, claiming that he couldn't judge him fairly because Curiel is of Mexican descent and "I'm building a wall." He has already gone on the offensive in this case, making several racist attacks against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and posting a social media image of himself facing down Bragg with a baseball bat.
"With Trump sitting at the defense table just feet away from her, McCaw told Merchan that a protective order was needed to 'ensure the sanctity of the proceedings as well as the sanctity of the discovery materials,'" said the report. "At the time, McCaw said prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers were close to a joint agreement with many of the restrictions prosecutors are now asking Merchan to impose. Negotiations later broke down, leading prosecutors to seek the judge’s intervention."
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-could-endanger-witnesses-at-his-criminal-trial-and-prosecutors-want-to-stop-it/'Expect decisions soon’: Experts say Jack Smith could decide on charging Trump now that Pence has testified
Former Vice President Mike Pence's "historic" testimony before a federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump's efforts surrounding the January 6, 2021 insurrection and to overturn the 2020 election should allow Special Counsel Jack Smith to reach a decision "soon" on whether or not to charge the ex-president.
"Expect decisions soon from Jack Smith. Very little reason to dawdle now, particularly on MAL charges," said Andrew Weissman, referring to Trump's unlawful retention and refusal to return classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago. Weissman is a former FBI General Counsel, served two decades at the Dept. of Justice, and was the lead prosecutor during Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
'Another historic benchmark: Donald Trump’s VP, Mike Pence, just testified in the grand jury about the crimes of his former boss," said Glenn Kirschner, a federal prosecutor for 30 years who is now an MSNBC legal analyst. "Take it from this old prosecutor-Pence’s testimony is sharply incriminating of Trump & moves the needle further in the direction of a Trump indictment."
"You want to hear it through Pence's eyes," said former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance on MSNBC Thursday afternoon, explaining that Smith needed to understand Trump's actions as his vice president saw them. She noted it's likely "close" to the end of Smith's investigation, but hedged, "I'm not sure that I would want to go that far," as saying it's the end of the process, before going to the grand jury to ask for an indictment. Vance noted there are "procedural" issues to address, including being able to hand over discovery and "negotiating" with witnesses to ensure they want to testify.
MSNBC anchor and chief legal correspondent Ari Melber offered additional details on why Pence's testimony is so critical, including that with it Jack Smith can now make decisions not only on charging Trump, but others who may have been involved.
Watch Here: https://twitter.com/i/status/1651711165662208000Watch: Trump mocked over his baffling mispronunciation of 'Lenin'
Donald Trump used a baffling pronunciation of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin's name at a campaign stop in New Hampshire.
The typical American pronunciation for the communist revolutionary is "Lennon," but the former president repeatedly pronounced it as "Leneen," and it's not the first time, reported the Washington Post.
“You know Leneen — did anyone ever hear of Leneen?” Trump said in New Hampshire. “He said, the vote counter is far more important than the candidate. Has anyone ever heard that — Lennon. Leneen, as they say, as they say in Russia.”
Trump used the same pronunciation during a campaign rally for Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz in September, and he called attention to the way he said it, which he implied was fancier.
“Did you ever hear the statement by, I believe it was Leneen," Trump said at the time. Did anyone ever hear of Leneen? People would say it with less sophistication: Lennon. Leneen! I like the way they say that.”
The Post's Philip Bump pulled up video of Lenin's current successor, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and found he pronounced it as "Leenin," more or less, and spoke to a woman at London’s Russian Language Centre who said it the same way, although she pointed out his last name started with a "soft L," which resulted in something like an L-Y combination.
It turns out that Trump's attribution of his quote about vote counting didn't actually come from Lenin, and most people commonly misattributed it to another Soviet leader -- Joseph Stalin.
"Or as sophisticated Russians say: Joseph Staleen," Bump wrote.
Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1651697446634881026
