The truth about SVB and the criminals who are running it

Silicon Valley Bank, founded in 1983, was born at a time when Silicon Valley was a synonym for “tech” and “innovation.”  This is no longer the case. Over the past 50 years, the tech community has evolved into a global system that supports many different kinds of innovation. SVB was the crown jewel of banks and the venture capital industry, not just in Silicon Valley, but globally.

CEO Greg Becker viewed SVB as a model twenty-first-century bank. He was relatively uninterested in mundane activities such as real estate finance, credit cards, and consumer loans. His goal was to finance the future. This meant cutting-edge technology above all.

SVB offered one-stop shopping to the tech community. They would make loans to tech startups. However, they required borrowers to deposit the loan proceeds in an account at SVB. Some loan agreements even prohibited any deposits by the borrower at other banks. This meant that SVB dominated Silicon Valley finance by controlling both sides of the balance sheet. Its assets were loans to entrepreneurs, and its liabilities were deposits from those same entrepreneurs.

This SVB high-tech financial concierge service was not limited to small start-ups either. Many companies that had been SVB clients in their start-up stage had gone on to great success and multi-billion-dollar cash positions. The CEOs of those successful clients including Roku, Vox, Etsy, Cisco, and Coinbase were loyal to SVB and continued to keep huge deposits there until the end. SVB was a financial cocoon in which the techies became comfortable. They saw no reason to go outside the cocoon.

A Climate Bank For Techies

Still, there was a fatal flaw in this business model. When everyday Americans hear the term “tech” they assume that SVB clients are working on operating systems, apps, improved search engines, semiconductors, and the like. That may have been true in the 1990s and early 2000s, but by 2020 SVB’s idea of tech was dominated by climate change initiatives. As Kiran Bhatraju, CEO of tech firm Arcadia said, “What’s missing from the narrative is SVB is a climate bank.”

This is not the place to review the many flaws in so-called climate change science. The hard data shows that the earth is cooling today after a mild warming trend from 1985 to 2005. Neither the cooling nor warming trends are historically unusual. There’s no evidence that CO2 causes global warming. It does have certain heat retention properties, but those properties are dominated by the true causes of climate change including solar cycles, ocean currents, and volcanic eruptions.

The United Nations climate models are so badly flawed that they can’t even backtest with actual data. The notion that those models can forecast is absurd. The models are designed to overweight certain factors, ignore others, and facilitate input of corrupt data to produce pre-determined outcomes. Those models are junk science of the highest order.

Yet, in Silicon Valley none of that matters. The Valley is not interested in climate science, they’re interested in how much money can be made catering to the elites who want soi-disant sustainable solutions. If the government is backing them and financing them, so much the better.