Aloha Suckers

Another bankster holiday is in the making because Americans never learn

“It is much better to be a financial cripple with a government guarantee than a Gibraltar without one.” – Warren Buffett

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Silicon Valley CEO Gregory Becker took a fabulous vacation in March 2023, leaving his underlings to deal with regulators as they sifted through the wreckage of his spectacularly failed bank.

The Daily Mail tracked him, paparazzi -style, to Lahaina, Maui, months before wildfires turned the town into a heap of ashes.

Becker showed no signs of distress in the publication’s surreptitiously taken photos. Why worry? He got a fat bonus for his hard work leading up to one of the largest bank failures in U.S. history. And just before this stunning crash he sold $3.6 million in stock. (The worst of it was finally having to tell probing U.S. senators that he was sorry.)

The Daily Mail headline blared:

“EXCLUSIVE: Aloha suckers! Silicon Valley Bank's failed CEO Gregory Becker escapes to his $3.1million Hawaiian hideaway days after being fired, leaving the chaos of the collapse in the dust”

America had forgotten the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis that nearly led to the Great Depression 2.0. Taxpayers spent billions bailing out the banking system as they lost homes, jobs and savings.

“Mahalo for the bailout. We just love our bankster holidays. Right sweetie?” (Illustration AI generated.)

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We’ve collectively forgotten what banksters do: They pay themselves millions for taking excessive risks, and after they blow up their banks, they take the kind of vacations most of us only wish we could afford after losing our jobs.

And they are set to do it all over again, according to a report released Tuesday by Better Markets, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group keeping watch on the U.S. financial system.

Better Markets is warning of a “coming crash” on its website:

“The Trump administration’s policies – driven by its allies in key regulatory positions and Wall Street financiers – are repeating the same dangerous mistakes that led to the 2008 crisis, the 2023 turmoil, and even the Great Depression of 1929. .. The financial industry is already dangerously under-regulated (as proved by the recent costly 2023 banking crisis) and … Trump’s promise to add another four years of deregulation on top of that will create a very high risk of another catastrophic financial crash.”

Better Markets blames the 2023 failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank on the first Trump administration’s deregulation efforts.

To be sure, these banks imploded during the Biden administration, which did little to reverse the trend, even after these debacles rang alarms about a possible bank-failure contagion like 2008. The banks, it seems, own almost everyone.

And now Trump is further easing bank oversight.

So Aloha suckers! (E kala mai ua luku mākou i ka ʻoihana).