Among current world leaders is one income millionaire: Lawrence Wong, the prime minister of Singapore. He brings in an annual salary of the equivalent of almost $1.69 million, which makes him the best-earning world leader. His remuneration places him far ahead of second-ranked Viola Amherd, president of Switzerland, who earns upwards of a converted $570,000 per year.
Year is indeed singular for Amherd, who started her term on January 1 and will end it on December 31. Swiss presidents are members of the country’s government cabinet voted in by the Swiss parliament for one year at a time. The cabinet consists of seven council members who can be re-elected, so it is possible that Amherd will serve another well-paid term as Swiss president in the future.
Many of the remainder of the world’s best-paid political leaders hail from Anglophone countries, including the American president, who earns $400,000 annually. As of August 29 currency conversion rates, this was less that what Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is making, but more than what the Prime Ministers of New Zealand and Canada, Christopher Luxon and Justin Trudeau, are bringing in per year. German-speaking countries also pay their leaders well, with Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer making slightly more than his German equivalent, Olaf Scholz.
Including leaders of non-sovereign entities, Hong Kong is applying a similar approach to Singapore’s, paying its current Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu the equivalent of almost $700,000 annually. While Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew was a proponent of competitive public sector pay, Hong Kong’s high remuneration has been tied to its history of high pay for colonial governors. Another leader that doesn’t helm a country, but is still handsomely rewarded is Ursula van der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. She is bringing in one of the European Union’s highest salary of approximately $358,000 per year.
Taking a different approach to determining the highest-paid world leaders on a level relative to their countries’ economic prowess, Kenyan President William Rutto is the biggest earner, bringing in the equivalent of almost 2,000% of his country’s per-capita GDP in 2023.
On the basis of 2023 average exchange rates, Rutto made the equivalent of $126,000 last year. This is in stark contrast to Kenya’s GDP per capita of just $6,300 annually. The Presidents of Tanzania and South Africa, Samia Suluhu Hassan and Cyril Ramaphosa, also crack the 1,000% mark, while aforementioned Singaporian Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and his $1.7 million salary stand at 1,158% of the per-capita GDP of the city state of $141,500.
Viola Amherd of Switzerland, Anthony Albanese of Australia and Christopher Luxon of New Zealand also reappear among the world leaders with the highest relative salaries, while U.S. President Joe Biden comes in rank 9 at a salary standing at 490% of per-capita GDP in 2023.
Author and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz added voice to the unhinged calls on the left for trashing the Supreme Court. As I discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal (and in my book), there is a growing counter-constitutional movement in the United States led by law professors, pundits, and celebrities. Lebowitz amplified those calls in a radical demand to simply get rid of the Court.
Lebowitz called for President Joe Biden to “dissolve the Supreme Court” despite the fact that it would violate the Constitution and remove one of the most critical protections against executive and legislative abuse.
Lebowitz insisted that the Supreme Court is a “disgrace” because, in a reference to Donald Trump, it is “completely his.” To the wild applause of the New York audience, she added: “It’s so disgraceful, this court, that it shouldn’t even be allowed to be called the Supreme Court. It’s an insult to Motown. Basically, it’s a harem. It’s Trump’s harem.”
Her views aligned with others on the left who have attacked the Constitution, the Court, and even rights like free speech as now threats to our democracy.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer previously declared in front of the Supreme Court, “I want to tell you, [Neil] Gorsuch, I want to tell you, [Brett] Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced that she wants the impeachment of all six of the conservative justices. She was immediately joined by other Democratic members.
Previously, Ocasio-Cortez admitted that she does not understand why we even have a Supreme Court. She asked “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.”
Other members, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called for packing the Court with additional members to immediately secure a liberal majority to rule as she desires.
UNHINGED: Fran Lebowitz to Bill Maher: “Biden should dissolve the Supreme Court.” pic.twitter.com/z6oe0VURIo
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., RI), has assured voters that Vice President Kamala Harris will support the packing of the Court with a liberal majority.
Despite supporting censorship to combat “disinformation,” many on the left now eagerly spread disinformation about the Court and its rulings. Lebowitz repeated false claims about the Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, stating that the decision makes the president a “king” who “can do whatever you want.”
In reality, the Court followed the same approach that it has taken in prior conflicts between the branches.
As it has in the past, the Court adopted a three-tiered approach to presidential powers based on the source of a presidential action. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which the court ruled against President Harry Truman’s takeover of steel mills.
In his famous concurrence to Youngstown, Justice Robert Jackson broke down the balance of executive and legislative authority between three types of actions. In the first, a president acts with express or implied authority from Congress. In the second, he acts where Congress is silent (“the zone of twilight” area). In the third, the president acts in defiance of Congress.
In this decision, the court adopted a similar sliding scale. It held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” while they enjoy presumptive immunity for other official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial or private actions.
None of this matters. Facts do not matter. Many on the left are calling for the trashing of the Constitution based on wildly inaccurate claims.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.”
In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.” She writes: “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.”
In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Lebowitz is also wrong about the voting record of the justices. In reality, the Court continues to rule largely by unanimous, or nearly unanimous decisions. After April, unanimity stood at 46 percent of cases.
Of the 22 6-3 decisions, only half broke along ideological lines. That is the same as the 11 such cases last term.
The average for unanimous decisions has been roughly 43 percent. The rate is back up to 48 percent for the last term. When you add the nearly unanimous opinions, it is the vast majority of cases. Moreover, Sotomayor agreed with Roberts in 71% of cases Kavanaugh and Barrett agreed with Sotomayor roughly 70% of the time.
In critical decisions, conservative justices like Gorsuch and Barrett have joined their liberal colleagues and the Court has repeatedly voted against positions supported by Donald Trump.
Again, none of this matters. Lebowitz and others are falsely telling the public that the Court is dysfunctionally and ideologically divided. Of course, even if you accept the false premise, the problem is not with the liberal justices always voting as a block but the conservatives doing so. The liberals are not robotic, they are simply right.
“We Have Her Underwater”: Michigan Lawmaker Admits Dire Internal Polling For Kamala Harris
In a Sunday bombshell, Axios reports that Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has privately warned donors that Vice President Kamala Harris is “underwater” in Michigan – a critical battleground state for Democrats – according to a video clip obtained by the outlet. Slotkin’s revelation comes at a time when the Dems are fighting tooth and nail to hold onto the Senate, and Michigan could be a deciding factor.
During a virtual fundraiser last Wednesday with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Slotkin didn’t mince words. “I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” she admitted, further stating that their internal polling shows Harris sinking in the Wolverine State. The news comes as a blow Democrats as they eye a tough Senate race where Slotkin herself is vying for a seat against GOP contender, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI).
Why It Matters
Michigan is a critical state for Democrats. If Trump sweeps the Sun Belt, taking Michigan – or any state in the so-called “Blue Wall” that includes Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it could pave his way back to the White House. Recent polling averages from FiveThirtyEight have Harris ahead by just 2.4 points, while a New York Times/Siena College poll puts her lead at a razor-thin 1 point.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans smell blood in the water. Slotkin’s Senate race has seen millions of dollars pour in, with GOP operatives sensing a prime opportunity to flip the seat. Republican internal polling suggests the race may be neck-and-neck, despite some public polls showing Slotkin with a narrow lead.
Money Talks, But Polls Walk
While Slotkin’s public polling paints a more optimistic picture, with RealClearPolitics giving her a 48% to 43% edge, Republicans are raising alarms. GOP strategists believe the Michigan Senate race is tightening, especially as Slotkin’s campaign fights off the GOP war chest. With Slotkin admitting Harris is struggling in Michigan, it’s clear Democrats have a lot to worry about in 2024.
The Senate map isn’t doing Democrats any favors either. While ruby-red Ohio and Montana have been getting attention, a surprise Republican win in Michigan could virtually guarantee a GOP majority come next November.
Equities this past week have been very quiet, with the SPX having a range of only 0.75% over the last 6 sessions.
In fact, the 0DTE SPX at-the-money straddle on Friday, in front of a key Core PCE data print, was a paltry $25.5 (45bps).
That pricing is as low as it gets, reflecting that traders think that markets will continue to do… nothing.
But here at SpotGamma, we think that is all about to change…
… AND we have a brand new way for you to watch it change AS IT HAPPENS.
Why this change?
Enter, the infamous JPM Collar Trade.
In what might be the most well-known option trade in existence, each quarter a large JPM Hedge Fund (JHEQX), sells ~40k contracts of an out-of-the-money call to fund a long put spread.
In this case, the call they are currently (heavily) short is:
40k contracts at the 5,750 strike, expiring tomorrow, Monday, 9/30.
That 40k short call position means dealers are long a literal ton of Gamma, which you can see on our brand new TRACE heatmap and strike plot, below.
TRACE is powered by SpotGamma’s new proprietary open interest models, allowing us to show you the latest in dealer hedging flows – flows that update throughout the day.
You see the changes as they happen.
This means that on Monday, when the existing JPM position(s) are closed, and rolled to new December strikes, you’ll be able to see it happen.
Further, you’ll see how it changes the dealer hedging position.
What does this matter?
We believe these trades will lead to a pickup in S&P 500 volatility.
Here’s why.
If one believes that positive Gamma is linked to low volatility (which we do), then the removal of a giant blanket of positive Gamma (AKA JPM’s short call) should open the door for volatility.
This is exactly what is set to happen on Monday, as the current JPM call is going to be closed and “rolled up and out.”
The implication is then, that the new call is going to be changed to a ~5% higher strike, out in Dec ’24. That is far less positive Gamma in the new position vs. the current position, expiring tomorrow.
Therefore, this expiration should allow for volatility (i.e. market movement) to expand, suggesting that starting Monday, the SPX will start moving and we’ll be relying on TRACE to show us the way.
By Marcel Kasumovioch, Deputy CIO of Coinbase Asset Management
“We need to establish a strong benchmark for selecting and employing people, conscientiously implement the ‘three exemptions,’ and support those who take responsibility and get things done.” This statement from the extraordinary Politburo meeting left no doubt about the leadership’s intentions.
Those who demonstrate “the courage to take responsibility and innovate,” in Xi’s words, will be rewarded, with exemptions, a “responsibility and punishment” waiver for those acting on policy guidance. The thousands of financial executives who exited their positions and the Party since August serve as a reminder to those who resist.
The Politburo followed sweeping actions taken by the central bank, in solidarity with PBOC governor joining the heads of the NAFR and the CSRC in announcing the measures. These included rate cuts, property loans for unsold homes, and equity buyback facilities – policies that underscore China’s desire for firm control over its economy, directing the capital of savers like the strings of a puppet rather than relying on the invisible hand of the market.
China’s economy is cluttered with unsold homes, unfinished projects, and unused land, totaling an astonishing $4.1 trillion at mid-year. This isn’t China’s first financial hurdle: restructuring the FX market in 1994, bank overhauls in 1998 and 2004, asset management crackdowns in 2015, and the COVID response all showcased the country’s approach to handling economic strains.
Financial repression and the central bank’s balance sheet softened these shocks before – and once again, this playbook of control is in motion. But as China’s economy grows more complex, maintaining this control becomes increasingly difficult. The global economy is infinitely more complex and managing it through sheer willpower alone is impossible.
Reform, not stimulus, requires real courage. And it’s a global issue. A good economy is one that works for the many, not the few. Markets have a way of identifying and enforcing necessary reforms for that outcome, and nations that heed this call will strengthen their standing – near-term pain for long-term gain. After all, no country can simply inflate its way to prosperity.
Courage:
“The vast majority of party members and cadres must have the courage to take responsibility and dare to innovate,” Xi conveyed with urgency at this week’s Politburo meeting. The timing of the meeting itself reflected the gravity of the situation, being held earlier than usual. The Politburo introduced a rare “responsibility and punishment” waiver, offering protection to officials willing to embrace Xi’s challenge. This marks China’s “whatever-it-takes” moment, where pragmatic policies take precedence: a good economy is one that works.
The foundation of Xi’s “courage economy” was laid the day before:
PBOC rate cuts will inject 1 trillion RMB in liquidity, while loans for unsold homes can now cover the entire purchase price.
The downpayment requirement for second-home buyers was reduced to 15%, in line with first-time buyers.
Meanwhile, bank regulators committed to a more gradual increase in capital requirements, and specialized refinancing facilities were established to encourage equity buybacks.
These coordinated actions signal a unified directive to stabilize the economy.
Deng Xiaoping famously quipped, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” as China began its economic reforms in 1979. Desperate for an effective economy, China sought to balance traditional goals with pragmatic policies. Unlike many emerging markets with lofty objectives, China has managed to execute with its share of world GDP rising from 2% in 1980 to nearly 20% today. How did it avoid the pitfalls of past crises? Through a strong emphasis on domestic control — a policy that does not scale well.
Mousetrap:
Take China’s navigation of the 1990s Asia crisis. While its neighbors experienced fierce capital outflows, currency devaluations, and bank failures, China maintained its FX peg at around 8.33 to the US dollar. Stability masked material internal strain, with non-performing loans for Chinese state banks surging to 24% in 1998. But it was a domestic issue—by 1997, FX reserves were eight times greater than short-term external debt. Banks were restructured, imposing losses on domestic savers through reduced returns and financial repression.
The repression strategy was repeated in 2004 and 2016 and now underpins the latest policy measures. China’s gross national saving rate is 43% of GDP, a captive audience given limited options for allocating their funds. As a result, these savers endure abysmal rates of return—the dark side of financial repression. It’s far from a free lunch. From bonds to stocks to real estate, this captive audience pays the price for policy through depressed returns. Market economies must do more with less, competing for global capital in freer environments.
Will the “courage economy” work? In the near term, almost certainly yes. But its limitations are equally clear. China’s gross national saving rate is falling, shrinking the pool of capital available to plug financial holes in an increasingly complex economy. Leaders cannot strengthen an economy by willpower alone—incentives do the heavy lifting. Financial repression merely defers problems to the next generation, a global issue with more immediate consequences for China’s shrinking population. The time for a new trap to catch the mice may soon come.
Anecdote:
“It’s not the mindset of an emerging market. It’s the mindset of an emerging superpower,” said one of the greatest macro investors of all time to me, his eager protege. This time, it was China’s FX revaluation making the headlines – not the investor’s famous predictions of devaluations in the past.
“The world mistakes China as ideological. 1979 marked the shift to pragmatism,” he continued, referencing the pivotal moment when Deng Xiaoping opened China’s doors to the world. “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” the protege eagerly recalled from Deng, encapsulating the shift to a results-driven economic policy.
China’s appearance at the 1979 World Economic Forum marked the beginning of its new economic era. Controlling inflation became a priority, achieved after 15 years of effort. The two-tiered foreign exchange system was replaced in 1994, laying the groundwork for a modern, integrated economy – though not without one last devaluation to prepare for the transition.
China managed banking crises internally, with bank recapitalizations in 1998 and again in 2004. These were not the actions of a typical emerging market. “Deng’s approach seems almost ruthless in its pragmatism,” I ventured. And only a decade after the last devaluation, the US Senate demanded an upward revaluation of the currency or else China would face a hefty 27.5% import tariff.
Learning from Japan’s painful experience after Plaza Accord, China adjusted on its own terms. “China is rewriting the rules,” the investor remarked, his eyes narrowing as if seeing the threads of history weaving into the present. “Markets must read them carefully…and politicians will need a heavy pen when editing.”
The revaluation proved a very profitable day. There were no celebrations, no false glory – just a relentless focus on what comes next, recognizing the shift in the global power dynamic. For China, it wasn’t about winning a battle. It was about redefining the entire game. And I realized the true lesson. This was not just about currency or trade, but about a nation’s unwavering commitment to its vision of the future, one strategic step at a time.
New bankruptcy filings and exclusive interviews with confidential sources suggest Silvergate could have survived if not for pressure from regulators, which allegedly included an informal mandate to cap its crypto deposits at 15 percent
Sen. Elizabeth Warren all but accused Silvergate of aiding and abetting FTX’s crimes, creating an “atmosphere of concern” around Silvergate that possibly contributed to a run on the bank
Sources told us the FHLB (Federal Home Loan Banks) refused to renew their monthly loan agreement with Silvergate due to political pressure from Warren, accelerating the bank’s losses
Claims of criminal wrongdoing related to Silvergate’s association with FTX have never been proven, and no criminal charges have ever been filed against the bank
Silvergate’s downfall may have been a primary cause of the 2023 regional banking crisis, which ultimately took down Signature, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic
In late 2022, Silvergate Bank was on top of the crypto world. Once a small California savings and loan association, Silvergate had transformed itself into the most important bank in the crypto sector, allowing it to stage an IPO and claim a majority of the sector’s institutional deposits. The bank’s Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) had grown to become a crucial piece of infrastructure for crypto’s institutional players, and shares in the company had surged from $35 at the end of 2020, to $220 at the end of 2021.
Today, Silvergate no longer exists. Although its depositors were made whole, common shareholders were completely wiped out, and preferred shareholders are getting back pennies on the dollar. The bank paid out large fines to its regulators: $43 million to the Federal Reserve, $20 million to California’s Department of Financial Protection, and $50 million¹ to the Securities and Exchange Commission. After having announced their intent to voluntarily liquidate in March 2023, they finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week.
Those who still remember Silvergate see the bank as emblematic of crypto’s worst elements and the most reckless behavior exhibited by regional banks during the crisis of 2023. A perfect storm of risk-seeking, turning a blind eye to crypto criminals, and compliance failures. Or at least — that’s how the story goes.
This story — today presented as established fact in the financial press and by the government² — goes like this:
Silvergate was a sleepy, small regional bank until it discovered crypto. When the space experienced surges of interest in 2017 and again in 2020, balance sheet expansion caused Silvergate’s deposits to swell. The bank then turbocharged its usefulness to the crypto space when it created SEN, allowing its clients — which now included many of the world’s largest crypto exchanges and trading firms — to settle between each other 24/7/365. (Because crypto settles 24/7, and bank wires only clear during banking hours, firms linking fiat and crypto often experience serious friction. SEN helped alleviate these issues.) Most crypto firms that mattered were clients of Silvergate, lending SEN powerful network effects.
In 2017, Silvergate onboarded Alameda Research, a secretive trading firm run by Jane Street alum Sam Bankman-Fried. Alameda quickly grew to become one of the most active trading shops in crypto, deepening its dependence on Silvergate. When Bankman-Fried launched FTX, a flashy offshore exchange in the vein of Bitmex or Binance, Silvergate started processing wires for them, too.
Silvergate grew to occupy a critical position in the domestic crypto industry. In the two years following Q4 2019, deposits ballooned from $1.8 billion to $14.3 billion. By year-end 2021, digital asset customers at Silvergate maintained $11.7 billion on deposit with the bank, equivalent to 82 percent of total deposits.
Not long after, things began to go south in crypto. In May, the ponzi-esque “stablecoin” UST, issued by Do Kwon’s Terra, went belly up. Then, over the summer and fall, lenders Voyager, Celsius, and BlockFi blew up in quick succession as a credit crunch hit the industry. In June, “proprietary” trading firm Three Arrows Capital collapsed due to its remarkably stupid long bets on Terra/Luna, causing further reverberations as the firm absconded with investor cash. The coup de grâce came in November 2022, with the messy and extremely public collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire in the Bahamas.
Throughout this period, balance sheets at crypto banks shrank as firms tried their best to satisfy their obligations and pay down their debt — or went out of business. Consequently, Silvergate suffered dramatic outflows, with non interest-bearing deposits (a large portion of which were attributed to crypto firms) falling from a peak of $14 billion in December 2021 to $7.4 billion in December 2022.
Silvergate faced significant problems on both the asset and liability sides. The liabilities were deposits owed to crypto firms in the process of shrinking their balance sheets or outright failing. The assets were treasury bonds, agency securities, and municipal bonds cratering in value due to dramatic federal interest rate hikes aimed at stemming advanced inflation. As the bank’s crypto depositors withdrew, Silvergate was forced to sell its newly depreciated long-dated bonds for a fraction of their original value, resulting in a net loss in calendar year 2022 of $948 million.
Simultaneously, questions began to emerge about Silvergate’s role in the FTX fiasco. Was it just a bank with a settlement network, or something more sinister? When Sam Bankman-Fried was processing funds in and out of FTX via Alameda, had Silvergate deliberately looked the other way? Had Silvergate been aware of the holes in Alameda’s and FTX’s balance sheets? Had the bank been party to the litany of ancillary crimes committed by SBF et al., which included campaign finance violations and bribing Chinese officials? As one of the most important banks for the Alameda/FTX apparatus, it was certainly plausible Silvergate was a co-conspirator.
These were the questions posed by an unlikely confederation of short sellers and high-level members of Congress. First, the bombastic short seller Marc Cohodes implied Silvergate was not only doomed, but actually implicated in SBF’s crime syndicate. Then, Cohodes’ claims found surprising support from one of the most important political voices in finance: Massachusetts Senator and member of the Senate Banking Committee, Elizabeth Warren. Warren wrote two letters to Silvergate CEO Alan Lane in December 2022 and January 2023, lambasting the bank and lending credence to claims that it might have criminal liability stemming from its relationship with FTX.
Reacting to these concerns, the Federal Reserve, FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), and OCC (Office of the Comptroller of Currency) issued a joint statement warning banks they faced significant risks if they served the crypto space. Two days later, Silvergate slashed costs and downsized to adapt to their shrinking depositor base. Another joint statement from federal bank regulators, again on the risk crypto posed to banks, soon followed. Meanwhile, shares in Silvergate were collapsing, falling to $16 by the end of 2022.
For the plucky Silvergate, this all proved too much to bear. On March 8, 2023, Silvergate leadership announced its intention to voluntarily liquidate the bank. This was an unusual move — normally failed or failing banks are sent into receivership (placed under the control of a government-appointed entity, typically the FDIC), then sold off to larger, sounder banks. But given the risks of criminal liability from the FTX fiasco hanging over the bank, perhaps it made sense to just shut it down completely.
To the average pundit, there’s nothing wrong with this story. Silvergate bet big on a risky industry and faced the consequences when a credit crunch led to a depository flight. It had onboarded the odious Sam Bankman-Fried, and possibly become party to his crimes. Meanwhile, the bank had greedily backed its short term liabilities (customer deposits) with long term, higher yielding instruments, and were forced to realize huge losses as they honored withdrawals. As a relatively small bank, Silvergate didn’t have the capital buffer to absorb these losses, so it chose to wind down.
The warnings from Senator Elizabeth Warren had proved prescient. By 2024, Silvergate had settled with the Fed, California’s financial regulator, and the SEC, with individual executives paying fines and being barred from the business. This was all the confirmation anyone needed that Silvergate had lied about its compliance program and had experienced significant surveillance failures in their engagement with FTX/Alameda. Silvergate took on inadvisable risks by serving the generally fraudulent crypto space, got greedy by betting on long-duration, higher-yielding bonds, and paid the ultimate price.
But what if that’s not the whole story?
What if there’s another version of events, in which Silvergate was a victim of FTX, not an accomplice to their crimes?
What if Senator Warren’s warnings about Silvergate served as a self-fulfilling prophecy, hastening the run on the bank?
What if the Biden administration deliberately killed off Silvergate — and some of its peers — in an attempt to decapitate the domestic crypto industry? What if this was the spark that lit the flame of a gigantic regional banking crisis?
And what if the settlements Silvergate made with its regulators effectively covered the government’s tracks, allowing it to continue to deny the existence of Operation Choke Point 2.0?
This is the version of events no one is talking about, and one that official government accounts rebuke, but it’s what I’ve come to believe. Aside from a relative few on Crypto Twitter, it’s a story no one seems interested in — the mainstream financial press most of all. But in my mind, the official narrative is historical fiction at best, and recent events have only further convinced me of the fact.
Until now, Silvergate executives have been muzzled by regulatory actions and litigation, unable to tell their side of the story. Based on conversations with confidential sources, and new revelations in Silvergate’s recently public bankruptcy filings, I believe Silvergate could have survived its drawdown — and was on a path to do so — before being hamstrung by regulators continuing to advance the covert Biden admin scheme to destroy the US crypto industry we now know as Operation Choke Point 2.0. In so doing, government officials eliminated Silvergate’s ability to operate as a bank focused on the crypto industry, and forced their “voluntary” liquidation.
I further believe the targeted harassment of Silvergate which led to its downfall was a primary cause of the 2023 banking crisis, which ultimately took down Signature, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic, and threw the broader banking system into disarray.
In short: the government’s desire to decapitate the domestic crypto industry through covert rulemaking aimed at crypto-focused banks both initiated and worsened the banking crisis of 2023, the largest since the great financial crisis in 2008.
I first started hearing from individuals at Silvergate, Signature, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic that they were under inordinate pressure from regulators in early 2023. At the same time, multiple regulatory agencies were firing warning shots across the bow of crypto-adjacent banks. There was Elizabeth Warren’s hostile letter to Silvergate, the January 2023 joint statement from three regulatory bodies regarding crypto risk to banks, the Fed’s denial of crypto-focused Custodia’s application to become a Federal Reserve member bank, and the National Economic Council (NEC) cautionary statement on banks and crypto.
In response, several banks that provided services to crypto firms began to curtail or eliminate their digital lines of business entirely. This retreat was reminiscent of Operation Choke Point, an Obama-era program aimed at marginalizing politically disfavored industries like firearm manufacturers not by passing legislation, but by using financial regulators to threaten banks providing services to those industries. In my first piece of reporting for Pirate Wires on the topic, I coined “Operation Choke Point 2.0” to describe how these same tactics were being used against the crypto space. At the time, Silvergate was under significant pressure, but still operational.
Thirty days after I published Choke Point 2.0, Silvergate would announce its voluntary liquidation. The following day, Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse began in earnest, and on Sunday night, New York regulators sent Signature Bank following into receivership, despite protests from board member Barney Frank that the bank was still solvent, and that the move was politically motivated.
Based on discussions with individuals with knowledge of the affected banks, I wrote a follow-up piece for Pirate Wires, alleging that Silvergate had been forced to close due to a secretly imposed 15 percent cap on crypto deposits, and that Signature had been wrongly put out of business. Additional provocations included the FDIC’s unwillingness to allow Signature to sell off its crypto-focused deposits or its SigNet product, a 24/7 settlement layer similar to Silvergate’s SEN. Instead of maximizing value for taxpayers by securing a price for the assets, the FDIC instead allowed these crypto-related lines of business to wither on the vine. Signature’s crypto deposits were forcibly returned to clients rather than being inherited by its acquirer, Flagstar Bank. By threatening the banks themselves, these actions not only looked like a covert attack on the crypto space, but they also potentially hastened, or even caused the demise of, the two most pro-crypto banks in the US.
The Silvergate story was particularly vexing because, unlike at Signature, no one was able to speak out and tell their side of the story. I later learned that key elements of the regulatory crackdown, in particular the 15 percent threshold on crypto deposits (conveyed to Silvergate by the SF Fed, with apparent assent from other regulatory bodies) were considered “confidential supervisory information” (CSI)³, and hence ineligible to be shared publicly. Perversely, CSI is intended to protect banks themselves from leaks of information surfaced in examinations — routine procedures where regulators evaluate bank management, safety and soundness, and regulatory compliance — that could hurt their standing, but in this case, it was weaponized against the banks to protect the regulators’ reputation in the eyes of the public.
So far, we have seen no acknowledgment from the Fed, its regional branches, or the FDIC regarding the 15 percent deposit caps, which government authorities primarily messaged verbally to a number of crypto banks, rather than in writing. Why did Silvergate and others feel compelled to comply with these informal deposit caps? An insider explained it to me this way: “They have eight million ways to shut us down, any way they want. When they say you gotta do something, you do it.” The caps were never publicly discussed or formally opposed as a rule, but when your primary regulator threatens you, you comply. “The regulators can pick anything and say, ‘Your compliance program is broken’ as a pretext for shutting you down,” the source told me.
According to people briefed on the situation, though the 15 percent threshold on crypto deposits was issued to Silvergate by the SF Fed, it originated in DC. It is now widely suspected that the architect of this policy was Bharat Ramamurti, then-deputy chair of Biden’s National Economic Council, a powerful advisory body that coordinates economic policy across many executive agencies. Ramamurti was senior counsel for banking and economic policy in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office from 2013 to 2019 and economic policy director on her 2020 campaign. Now, he’s an advisor to the Harris/ Walz presidential campaign.
When I reported on Choke Point 2.0, there was little on the record to corroborate my findings, as Silvergate leadership and other insiders were ensnared in regulatory settlements and litigation, prohibiting them from speaking publicly. But Silvergate’s recent bankruptcy filings allowed them to tell their side of the story for the first time.
The first-day bankruptcy filing from Silvergate Chief Administrative Officer Elaine Hetrick lays out the company’s side of the story, to the extent legally permissible. She starts by noting the difficulties Silvergate faced due to the crypto market downturn and the significant interest rate hikes, but maintains the bank had sufficient assets to operate as a going concern in early 2023. The bank’s challenges, however, “reached an inflection point in early 2023 following further regulatory scrutiny regarding its business model.”
Hetrick states that in early 2023, Silvergate “had stabilized, was able to meet regulatory capital requirements, and had the capability to continue to serve its customers,” but maintains that “the increased supervisory pressure on Silvergate Bank and other banks focused on servicing crypto-asset businesses forced Silvergate Bank to a point where it would have needed to remake its business model away from its focus on crypto-asset businesses.”
After the phrase “the increased supervisory pressure on Silvergate Bank,” Hetrick adds a footnote: “Silvergate is prohibited by law from disclosing confidential supervisory information, which broadly includes correspondence and communications with the Federal Banking Regulatory Agencies as well as reports of supervisory examination.” This means there’s more to be said about the nature of the pressure — which in my view would include the verbally-messaged 15 percent cap on crypto deposits — but Hetrick is prohibited from going into detail here, due to the supervisory pressure being considered CSI.
Hetrick is adamant that sudden regulatory shifts, not the financial difficulties it had faced from the drawdown in deposits, forced Silvergate to shutter. In initial filings, she explains: “This public signaling and sudden regulatory shift made clear that, at least as of the first quarter of 2023, the Federal Bank Regulatory Agencies would not tolerate banks with significant concentrations of digital asset customers, ultimately preventing Silvergate Bank from continuing its digital asset focused business model.”
She also points to the failure of Signature Bank as indicative of an anti-crypto stance on the part of regulators, referring to Chair Barney Frank’s comments that its closure was at least partially due to a desire to “send an anti-crypto message.” Hetrick notes that, tellingly, the FDIC refused to include $4 billion in crypto-related deposits in the sale of Signature to Flagstar Bank. As one confidential source told me regarding the FDIC’s refusal to sell crypto-related deposits or Signature’s SigNet, “The government is setting policy not based on law, but through selective sales.⁴”
For now, Hetrick is unable to share the full extent of regulatory pressure the Fed applied to Silvergate, but her testimony, given under oath, is still extremely revealing. Notably, it’s a stark departure from the official government account as written by the GAO (Government Accountability Office), which makes no mention whatsoever of the novel regulatory pressures that ultimately doomed the bank.
One of the first clues something with Silvergate’s downfall was suspicious was that it chose to voluntarily liquidate in March 2023, rather than entering FDIC receivership. This is so uncommon that I had to dig deep to find similar examples, and even then, I could only identify a tiny handful in the last 30 years. The most notable was West Virginia’s First National Bank of Keystone, a small bank with $1.1 billion in assets which voluntary liquidated in 1999 before eventually being taken over by the FDIC. Aside from First National, I couldn’t find any voluntary liquidations of banks with over $100 million in assets. It’s truly a rare thing. In fact, a source told me that when Silvergate leadership expressed its intention to voluntarily liquidate the bank, their California regulator, having no experience with the procedure, was completely unsure of how to proceed.
Why is this notable? In my view, how rarely banks choose voluntary liquidation is further evidence Silvergate was ultimately killed by regulatory mandate, not the bank run it suffered. After all, in March 2023 — when the bank voluntarily liquidated — it had already survived the run. In fact, deposits had ticked up quarter over quarter from Q3 to Q4 2022.
Instead, I learned the economics of the business simply didn’t make sense after regulators imposed the new 15 percent crypto deposit limit. SEN would be rendered useless, as the bank wouldn’t be able to maintain accounts with all the relevant firms that would be transacting. And the drastically reduced revenue streams would no longer justify the high fixed costs of supporting crypto firms (especially from a compliance perspective). Sources told me leadership even considered charging large clients high fixed fees for banking access — believing they would be willing to pay, since so few other banks served crypto at that time — but they couldn’t make the numbers work. So they chose to wind the bank down in an orderly manner and make all depositors whole, which they were able to do.
We don’t know what would have happened had Silvergate been given the opportunity to rebuild its business after it right-sized following the bank run, rather than being permanently hamstrung by the 15 percent crypto deposit cap. We do know that the balance sheets of crypto firms recovered strongly in the US in 2023 and 2024, as the credit crunch ended and large caps like Bitcoin rallied once again.
“If the [15 percent] limit hadn’t been imposed, Silvergate would be thriving right now,” someone familiar with the matter told me. I tend to believe this. There has been a gaping hole in domestic crypto banking since the imposition of Choke Point 2.0, and any firm brave enough to offer banking to crypto firms would have done tremendously well — had any been allowed to survive. Anecdotally, connections to domestic banks willing to onboard crypto clients is the number one request from portfolio companies at my blockchain-focused venture capital firm Castle Island. Unfortunately, regulators haven’t allowed the market for crypto-friendly banks to recover. As a result, crypto startups are moving offshore, where more banks are willing to support digital asset firms.
On the first day of 2023, there were three major banks commonly known to serve crypto firms: Silvergate, a smallish bank almost exclusively focused on crypto; Signature, a relatively large bank with a significant but not exclusive concentration of deposits from crypto firms; and Metropolitan Commercial Bank, another boutique with a crypto arm. Silicon Valley Bank also had a single large crypto client in stablecoin network Circle. Four months later, they were all gone, reminiscent of the Henry VIII nursery rhyme about his doomed wives — “divorced, beheaded, died.” In this case, it was “liquidated/ collapsed/ acquired, exited the crypto business, and collapsed/ acquired.” At the two most notable crypto boutiques — Silvergate and Signature — there is strong evidence they were actively destroyed by regulators, rather than dying of natural causes.
Any bank looking to fill the hole left by these three institutions would have faced a frigid regulatory environment and the presumed informal 15 percent cap on crypto deposits that rendered the economics infeasible. Previously, a bank could orient itself toward the crypto space and justify the investment in a tech stack and compliance overhead if they could expand their depository base, as Silvergate and Signature did. They could also create valuable intra-bank settlement networks like SEN and SigNet if they were able to get a meaningful share of the crypto industry under one roof.
With hundreds of crypto firms in the US suddenly without banking access after Signature et al. went down, many chose to move over to fintech firms like Mercury, but things were still extremely tenuous. Even today, few banks are willing to onboard crypto firms, especially if they need more bespoke services beyond simple cash management. Those that serve the crypto industry do so quietly, cognizant of the fact that if they become known as a “crypto bank,” they’ll be maimed by regulators.
This is exactly what happened to the two banks that tried to fill Silvergate’s and Signature’s shoes. After they ceased operations, Customers and Cross River were the two firms known to still bank crypto firms. And both were punished by their regulators.
In May 2023, the FDIC hit Cross River with a consent order, which kneecapped the bank’s crypto efforts. Although the order didn’t mention Cross River’s crypto business, and it covered the bank’s fintech partnerships, it’s still plausible that it came on the FDICs radar due to its prominence as one of the few remaining pro-crypto banks.
More directly, in August 2024, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia issued an enforcement action against Customers Bank, citing deficiencies with the bank’s “risk management practices and compliance with the applicable laws, rules, and regulations relating to anti-money laundering” in connection with its digital assets business. Just like Silvergate’s SEN and Signature’s SigNet, Customers operated an instant settlement business for clients called Customers Bank Instant Token (CBIT).
Such intra-bank settlement networks appear to be utterly toxic to regulators. Sources with knowledge of the Cross River and Customers matters to whom I spoke surmised that the Fed’s July 2023 release of FedNow — an instant payment service that allows banks and credit unions to settle transactions in real time, 24/7 — could explain the Fed’s particular hostility toward banks that had created their own instant settlement networks. Certainly many view the timing as suspicious. I’m not entirely persuaded by the theory, but the fact that SEN, SigNet, and CBIT were all eliminated or defanged around the time FedNow launched did raise eyebrows.
Since the imposition of Choke Point 2.0 in early 2023, other banks have tentatively sought to fill the gap left by Silvergate and Signature, and later by Customers after it curtailed its crypto efforts. It’s become a running joke at this point — I periodically hear about certain banks launching a crypto practice, then invariably, months later, they will abruptly reverse course. I can personally attest that this has been the case at MVB Bank and Axos Bank, but there are undoubtedly more.
These days, if a bank does serve crypto clients, it keeps the service to a deliberately small portion of its depository base, and tends to downplay it in public. As a result, crypto startups find it difficult to even identify banks willing to serve them, and the few banks who still support institutional crypto clients are slow-moving, expensive, and unwilling to offer services beyond mere cash management.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that in 2023 and 2024, the FDIC extended its Choke Point 2.0 playbook from banks serving crypto to banks serving non-crypto fintech startups as well. In April 2024, the American Fintech Council (AFC) wrote a letter to the FDIC accusing it of using its enforcement powers to quietly curb fintech activity in the US by bringing selective enforcement against banks serving fintech firms. As the AFC said in their letter: “While your agency has not issued public guidance or other statements explicitly admonishing or limiting banks from engaging in partnerships with fintech companies we have identified a distinct ‘regulation by enforcement’ approach from the FDIC.” The AFC noted that banks not partnered with fintechs had a 1.8 percent chance of facing an enforcement action from the FDIC, whereas fintech-partnered banks had a 15 percent chance of a regulatory rebuke.
Just as with Choke Point 2.0 efforts against crypto, the government’s mode of engagement with fintech has been unusually antagonistic and ideological in nature. Instead of proposing new legislation and hosting a public debate, or even engaging in notice-and-comment rulemaking where affected parties would have the right to provide feedback, these agencies make arbitrary new rules and impose them by enforcement — and whispered “advice” which banks have no choice but to follow.
Critics reading this article could point out that Silvergate did end up facing a consent order from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (CA DFPI), which carried a $20 million fine. They also paid a $43 million fine to the Federal Reserve, and settled with the SEC for $50 million (though the bank was able to ‘apply’ the $63 million it had already paid to the latter, so they never actually paid the SEC anything). It’s worth noting that Silvergate has well over $100 million remaining on the balance sheet and has already paid out the $63 million in fines, so these fines would not have put them out of business had they still been operational.
So what if regulatory pressure doomed Silvergate? They clearly made mistakes, and so the short sellers and Senator Warren were right… right? If you dig into the settlements, the actual charges against the bank fall short of the critics’ worst claims — and none are criminal. (In February 2023, the Justice Department initiated a fraud probe to investigate the bank’s dealings with Alameda/ FTX, but nothing has since materialized.)
As for the SEC and California Fed settlements, Silvergate neither admitted nor denied any of the allegations made.
The SEC case against Silvergate hinges on the fact that the bank and its CEO Alan Lane made “misleading statements to the investing public that the bank’s BSA [Bank Secrecy Act]/ AML [Anti-Money Laundering] compliance program was adequate,” a far cry from the most hysterical charges levied by Warren and the bevy of critics. As one source briefed on the situation explained to me, the core of the SEC’s allegation was that Silvergate’s regulatory examinations showed “matters requiring attention” in their BSA program, so it was misleading to represent to the public that they had a “robust AML program.” However, virtually every bank examination includes some nominal “matters requiring attention,” as there are always areas for improvement.
Regarding Silvergate’s failure to detect FTX’s various schemes, banks are not expected to catch every single instance of suspicious activity among their clients, although leaders at the bank did tell me they regretted not detecting FTX’s sketchy behavior. The SEC did initially attempt to claim that Silvergate was aiding and abetting the fraud at FTX, but they were unable to prove anything to that effect.
“Where we were not as buttoned up as we should have been was in regards to the FTX/Alameda clients. That was a function of the bank growing incredibly quickly,” a Silvergate executive told me. “Probably we could have figured out FTX was brokering deposits via Alameda. In retrospect I think we could have pieced this together and figured it out. But this is not a legal failure and we’re not required to catch everything. Our program passed legal muster. That’s something we could have done a better job of. But there was no intentional wrongdoing or cooperation with the bad guys.”
In the FTX investigation, Silvergate was listed as a victim, not a co-conspirator.
Of the three settlements, executives at Silvergate felt the SEC’s case was the least warranted. “The SEC was crazy. They wanted headlines. They were hitting us unnecessarily,” one told me. As I mentioned above, the SEC’s case didn’t concern Silvergate’s compliance failures, but instead perceived falsehoods in what their leadership said about its BSA/ AML program. According to a Silvergate executive that I spoke with for this story, “The SEC was stretching mild conclusions from the Fed and exaggerating them.” One wonders why the SEC would invest energy in suing a defunct bank that did not lose money for depositors — especially if the agency didn’t actually collect any fines for the trouble.
The Federal Reserve settlement hinges on “deficiencies in Silvergate’s monitoring of internal transactions through the SEN.” As one source described it: “When you read the language, it’s pretty milquetoast” — the settlement contains no allegations of affirmative wrongdoing. The actual issue, I discovered, was that Silvergate’s transaction monitoring system for SEN had gone through an upgrade and experienced an outage. Because SEN was a settlement network for Silvergate’s own clients, every transaction on SEN was between clients known to the bank that had gone through rigorous KYC (Know Your Customer) and onboarding processes. So even during the monitoring outage, it’s not like the transactions were between unknown firms. One source told me that SEN volumes were around $2 trillion in the aggregate; massive transfers were common, so FTX/Alameda transfers would not necessarily have stood out as suspicious.
Why would three regulators sue a bank that had already agreed to voluntarily liquidate, and ensured that depositors were made whole? The fines came out of investors’ pockets, mainly hurting common shareholders — ordinary members of the public. Deterrence, perhaps. But there’s a darker interpretation: regulators wanted to publicly establish unlawfulness to stand in for the real reason Silvergate was doomed — the secretly-imposed crypto deposit limit. “The Fed changed their policy based on OCP 2.0, but they don’t want to admit that,” a source told me. “So they looked around and tried to find wrongdoing. The settlement is a big number — but they didn’t find anything.” It makes sense: if the Fed could extract a settlement from a defunct bank, they could point to it as evidence the bank failed through mismanagement, rather than due to regulation-by-bullying.
Another source told me, of the settlements: “For people in Congress, the fact that Silvergate got fined ‘proves wrongdoing’ and vindicates their anti-crypto stance. They wanted to be able to show people they had gotten justice for FTX.”
The settlement with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation is almost identical to the Fed complaint, citing “deficiencies with respect to Silvergate’s monitoring of internal transactions.” Initially, sources told me, California wanted a $200 million fine, even though they couldn’t prove negligence or any wrongdoing beyond “deficiencies.” The governor’s office was directly involved, and the first set of proposed charges included “elder abuse” and “elder fraud” — despite the fact that Silvergate had no retail customers.
In all the settlements Silvergate ultimately assented to, there was no accusation of a criminal violation nor any claim that Silvergate had knowingly facilitated money laundering.
One particularly bizarre subplot in this entire affair is the intersection of short seller Marc Cohodes and Senator Elizabeth Warren. As we now know, Senator Warren wrote a letter in December 2022 to Silvergate accusing the bank of breaking the law. From the letter (superscript removed):
The arrangement between FTX and Alameda, which depended on your bank’s depository services, is just one example of the “lax record-keeping and poor centralized controls at the heart of the [FTX] empire’s unraveling” – and may have been illegal. Alameda’s depository account with your bank appears to be at the center of the improper transmission of FTX customer funds. Silvergate’s failure to take adequate notice of this scheme suggests that it may have failed to implement or maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, as required under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). What’s more, your bank’s failure to report these suspicious transactions to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) may constitute yet another violation of the law.
On January 30, 2023, Warren wrote a second letter, complaining about Silvergate’s responses to her first one, this time appearing to pressure the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB), which Silvergate was using for last-resort liquidity. It seems her objective was to get the FHLB to pull the rug on Silvergate, forcing them to close. The FHLB eventually declined to renew their monthly facility with Silvergate, which may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Someone was putting pressure on the FHLB,” one person familiar with the situation told me. “If Silvergate had been allowed to hold to maturity the government-backed securities, they would have been able to stem their losses. They were trying to liquidate them slowly to minimize losses. But the FHLB started getting pressure, so they pressured them to pay back the loans.” To me, it certainly appears like the FHLB responded to Warren’s pressure campaign and cut Silvergate loose. (At the time, FHLB claimed it “did not request or compel” the bank “to prepay its outstanding advances.”)
At the same time, Cohodes was also waging a public campaign against Silvergate, writing numerous memos and tweets, and making video appearances containing all sorts of allegations about the bank.
Cohodes went far further than simply claiming Silvergate (and Signature, his next target) would collapse. He had a habit of calling the two banks “publicly traded crime scenes.” “You have terrorists, you have drug dealers, you have human traffickers,” he said in one interview, referring to SEN. In another interview with The Block, Cohodes repeated the “publicly traded crime scene” aphorism and argued that Silvergate CEO “Alan Lane belongs in prison.”
These extraordinary claims, of course, have never been proven. Silvergate has not faced any criminal liability for either FTX/ Alameda (the DoJ came up empty after its highly touted investigation), nor has any liability regarding human trafficking or terrorism since materialized. Obviously this could change, but as of yet nothing has validated Cohodes’ most extreme claims.
We also know that Cohodes reached out to Warren’s office directly. In January 2023, he emailed her staffer a link to a DoJ complaint (which does not mention Silvergate). “Have you seen this?” he wrote. “Would not be all that surprising if money from ISIS moved through Silvergate, and that would be attention getting.”
Sources with firsthand knowledge told me that Cohodes emailed a slide deck entitled “Silvergate-101” with his allegations against the bank to various members of Congress around the same time. The deck, which I have reviewed, cites anonymous Twitter accounts like @bitfinexed, an account known primarily for spreading conspiracies about the stablecoin Tether.
One individual told me about the Warren-Cohodes relationship: “For sure Warren’s letters intensified the run [on Silvergate]. What makes me sick is that Cohodes put together a deck and was shopping it to members of Congress including Warren. Much of his information was crowdsourced from Twitter.” Regarding Cohodes’ claims that Silvergate had done business with terrorists or human traffickers, the individual told me “there’s no basis for that whatsoever.”
Cohodes doesn’t appear to be particularly shy about his role in Warren’s December 2022 letter. “Who do you think inspired that letter?” he wrote in a quote tweet of the letter in June 2024. Whether or not he actually spoke with Warren’s office, he appears happy to take credit for her work harassing the bank. Cohodes is also a Warren supporter, having told the New York Times during her 2020 presidential run, “She would be great, I think she would be a breath of fresh air.”
Cohodes certainly has a habit of trying to enlist regulators in his short selling campaigns. In January 2023, he sent the Federal Reserve a memo with accusations against Silvergate, and one to the OCC in March 2023 regarding Signature. He also admits to having sent memos to the SEC and FDIC. Many of these celebrity short sellers try to make their predictions into self-fulfilling prophecies by looking for allies in their campaigns; Cohodes appears to have played the game very well.
We don’t know if Warren reciprocated Cohodes’ entreaties. But we do know that she either wittingly or unwittingly helped short sellers by launching a campaign against Silvergate with two blistering letters in which she effectively accused them of aiding and abetting FTX’s crimes. Arguably, she also precipitated the ultimate collapse of Silvergate by pressuring the FHLB to cut off its line of credit, which was the thrust of her second letter. Her standing as member of the Senate Banking Committee gave her words huge weight. If she actually did coordinate with Cohodes to destroy a bank — causing losses to shareholders and creditors, and orphaning depositors — it would be extremely troubling.
After Silvergate filed for voluntary liquidation, Senator Warren pounded her chest, tweeting, “As the bank of choice for crypto, Silvergate Bank’s failure is disappointing, but predictable. I warned of Silvergate’s risky, if not illegal, activity — and identified severe due diligence failures. Now, customers must be made whole & regulators should step up against crypto risk.” Far from being “disappointed” by Silvergate’s failure, she seemed practically thrilled by it. To her, the bank’s failure was evidence that crypto was an unacceptable risk to the banking sector, and so should be ringfenced from the financial system. Of course, she wasn’t a mere impartial observer — her own allegations against Silvergate helped create the atmosphere of concern around the bank that led to the run, especially her claims that they were engaged in illegal activity. It’s easy to take credit for predicting a bank’s collapse when you may be, in fact, one of the reasons the collapse occurred.
This isn’t the first time a Senator has been accused of fomenting a bank run. In June 2008, Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to federal regulators expressing concerns over IndyMac, which likely hastened that bank’s collapse. Consequently, he faced a serious backlash for his role in the failure. But Warren hasn’t been dealt any such recriminations. A Senator can question the solvency of a bank, but it’s self-evident such statements risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, especially when made so bombastically, as Warren did.
The collateral damage wrought by the Silvergate wind down was catastrophic. The immediate effect was the destruction of shareholder capital in the business. Additionally, depositors were left scrambling to find new banking partners. The loss of SEN also hurt stablecoin liquidity and likely intensified the liquidity issues faced by USDC as it temporarily de-pegged during the SVB crisis. More damagingly, Silvergate’s collapse was the first trigger in a grave banking crisis that would ultimately take down SVB, Signature, and First Republic, banks which had $538 billion in deposits at the time of the collapse.
Would these banks have collapsed, anyway? It’s possible, but the fact remains: Silvergate was the first bank to suffer a run in that volatile spring of 2023. Banking panics are contagious. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Warren’s fear mongering caused more than a few depositors to pull their funds from Silvergate. Whether or not she actually colluded with Cohodes — and the public deserves to know the extent of their relationship — a powerful Senator effectively encouraging a bank run which escalated into a serious banking crisis is a complete betrayal of duty.
Sticking up for a bank that did business with FTX, suffered a bank run, was voluntarily liquidated by management, then settled with three different regulators is not an enviable task. But an injustice visited upon a flawed subject is no less of an injustice. Silvergate could perhaps have tightened up its money laundering controls or detected SBF’s improper transfers earlier. But that doesn’t mean it deserved to be harrassed out of existence. One Silvergate insider told me: “We were a group of people that were trying to do the right thing and we understood risk management. It really was a pretty conservative place. And that stems from Alan Lane, and his 40 years of banking expertise.”
Even when I was initially investigating Silvergate and Signature, a number of bankers, sympathetic to my cause, told me it wasn’t worth publicly supporting Silvergate, muttering ominously that the bank may have indeed done some reprehensible things. But this ended up not to be the case. Silvergate was the victim of a scathing and unconstitutional regulatory crackdown — an imperfect victim, but a victim nonetheless. What’s more, Washington’s desire to take down the crypto banks — which they accomplished deftly in March 2023 — was the spark that lit the fire of a massive regional banking crisis, which spread far beyond crypto. Yet today, no one levels criticism at President Biden, Senator Warren, or the Fed for starting a banking crisis in their attempts to stymie the crypto sector.
At the end of the day, if policymakers in Washington want to ringfence the crypto industry and withhold its access to traditional banking, there’s a valid way to do that: through public debate and legislation. If they had passed a law through Congress limiting crypto firms’ access to banks, it would have been devastating to the sector, but it would have at least been valid under the rules of our democracy. But that’s not how the Biden administration officials went about doing things. They effectuated their crackdown through covert backroom dealings, by deputizing the bank sector, and using threats and intimidation rather than public rulemaking. Some portion of the crackdown was disseminated through various agency statements, but much of it was simply handed down verbally with no paper trail, like the presumed 15 percent cap on crypto-related deposits. Other measures were simply taken in the ordinary course of business, such as the refusal to sell on any of Signature’s crypto business.
Ultimately, it’s precisely these marginal cases — the ones that no one wants to stick up for — where we have to draw the line. What happened to Silvergate was a travesty, and the public deserves to know the truth. Sympathetic members of Congress should hold a hearing and give executives at affected banks the chance to testify, with a waiver on criminal liability for sharing confidential supervisory information.
¹ The SEC fines did not involve the transfer of value, as Silvergate was able to ‘apply’ credit for the fines already paid.
² The GAO’s post-mortem on Silvergate blamed rising rates alongside idiosyncratic crypto risks and flighty depositors for the Silvergate collapse. They did not mention regulatory changes which adversely affected the bank’s business model.
³ Note that criminal liability for sharing CSI can be waived if, for instance, the House or Senate calls a hearing on the topic of the banking crisis and offers immunity to individuals invited to testify.
⁴ It’s also worth noting Silvergate purchased the Diem (stablecoin) IP from Facebook based on recommendations made by Biden’s Presidents Working Group, seemingly giving the green light to bank-issued stablecoins. This stance shifted dramatically in 2023 as the Fed ended up effectively banning banks from engaging with stablecoins. This caused the Diem assets to become effectively worthless.
Musk Warns “If Trump Is Not Elected, This Will Be The Last Election”
Elon Musk has argued that the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States, “something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible,” will effectively establish a ‘one-party state and Democracy is over.‘
Responding to a thread on X in which Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pointed out that the DOJ is suing Alabama for trying to remove noncitizens from its voting lists, and blocked the SAVE Act – Musk noted that “Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.:
Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!
Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be about 2 million new legal voters in 4 years.
The voting margin in the swing states is often less than 20 thousand votes. That means if the “Democratic” Party succeeds, there will be no more swing states!!
Moreover, the Biden/Harris administration has been flying “asylum seekers”, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election.
America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over. The only “elections” will be the Democratic Party primaries. This already happened in California many years ago, following the 1986 amnesty.
The only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America. Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape.
Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.
Yet the media gaslights and continues to say this is a conspiracy theory.
Here is the Democrat nominee saying she wants to give millions of illegals citizenship. pic.twitter.com/orWoqsFzp0
Iran Confirms Top IRGC Officer Killed Alongside Nasrallah, Vows Revenge
On Sunday Iran vowed severe revenge against Israel not only for the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah during massive bombings on Friday in Beirut’s southern suburbs, but for the death of a top Revolutionary Guard official in the same airstrikes.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi gave high level confirmation for the first time that IRGC Deputy Commander, Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan – who apparently was meeting with Nasrallah at the time – was killed.
Araghchi warned that this “horrible crime of the aggressor Zionist regime” will “not go unanswered.” However, he stopped short of specifying whether it would be a military response.
“The diplomatic apparatus will also use all its political, diplomatic, legal and international capacities to pursue the criminals and their supporters,” he said. But he also stipulated that Iran has a legal right to respond militarily under international law if it wished. Nilforoushan was a top commander within the IRGC’s foreign intelligence and operations arm, the Quds force.
Simultaneous to the warning from the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry, Iran’s vice president for strategic affairs, Javad Zarif, said a response “will occur at the appropriate time and at Iran’s choice, and decisions will definitely be made at the leadership level, at the highest level of the state,” according to state IRNA.
Iran’s Guardian Council meanwhile said that Israel will “receive a forceful answer” and ultimately threatened “the destruction of the Zionist regime” – as cited in Fars news agency.
Meanwhile, more Israeli reservists and tanks have appeared along the Israel-Lebanon border in a sign that the IDF could be preparing to start a ground offensive, Al Jazeera has observed. Inbound rocket alarms have continued sounding in parts of northern Israel, particularly the Safed area, on Sunday.
Israel’s Haaretz has also said the following: “U.S. officials say ‘small-scale border movements’ into Lebanon may have begun.”
Israeli strikes on Beirut, the south, and Bekaa Valley area have continued for seven days straight…
On Sunday, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said it’s as yet unclear what Hezbollah or Iran might do next. “The rhetoric certainly suggests they’re going to try to do something, coming out of Tehran,” adding that it’s “too soon to know how Iran’s going to react to this,” he said.
Kirby called for restraint, also saying that Israel “will not be able to safely get people back into their homes in the north of the country by waging an all-out war with Hezbollah or Iran.”
On Sunday Israel conducted fresh airstrikes on Yemen, in response to Houthis firing ballistic missiles targeting Tel Aviv:
Israel targets the port of Hodeidah following ballistic missile attacks on Tel Aviv.
This is Yemen’s fourth largest city. Serious implications for the civilian population. The port is a lifetime for aid, food and power. pic.twitter.com/S5m7rjemBe
The Pentagon has in the last days sent additional troops and assets to the region, with some going to Cyprus, ready to assist in Israel’s defense or also help evacuate American citizens from Lebanon if things continue to spiral. The war could spread to also engulf Yemen, Syria, and Iraq in the scenario that Iran and Israel enter a direct war.
Below are some further weekend developments via Al Monitor correspondent Joyce Karem:
As we accelerate towards whatever disastrous outcome awaits our debt-ridden, delusional, decadent, despairing society, I seem to be drawn to the anti-establishment lyrics of Bob Dylan, written during the turbulent 1960s. Maybe it’s the assassinations and unpopular war in the 60s that have triggered my focus. You certainly don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing today. A gale force wind is blowing the nation towards civil and global war, simultaneously. And it is not a naturally occurring wind, but an artificial storm created by the ruling plutocracy in a last-ditch traitorous effort to retain their wealth, power and control over our lives.
They have kept their evil machinations and malevolent schemes hidden from the view of the masses through their control of mass media, politicians, the financial system, and corporate entities, all doing their bidding in our corporate fascist totalitarian state, disguised as a democratic republic.
After twenty years of schoolin, they have propagandized and indoctrinated generations into believing whatever they are told to believe by their overlords. They have been taught to feel, emote and embrace delusionary falsehoods, rather than think critically, analyze and embrace truthful reality. The question of our time is whether enough people can be awoken from their government induced mass formation stupor to reverse our downward spiral into the abyss.
I believe I’ve known which way the winds have been blowing for the entirety of this Fourth Turning, but my expectations regarding the timing of major events have been inaccurate. My impatience is a result of not having lived through a Fourth Turning and accepting the crisis will last twenty to twenty-five years.
I should be happy the violent, bloody phase of this Fourth Turning has been delayed, as it has given me more time to prepare by acquiring more firearms, ammo, supplies, and precious metals. But a feeling of melancholy engulfs me on a daily basis, knowing there is no exit strategy for avoiding what lies ahead. If anything, the delay in any significant level of violence thus far probably ratchets up the intensity and explosiveness when it does commence, like a pressure cooker ready to explode.
If you don’t sense the impending volatility of our current state of affairs, you are either willfully ignorant, too dumbed down and distracted by your techno-gadgets to notice, or a participant in the machinations to undermine our civilized society and replace it with an authoritarian new world order of CBDCs, social credit scores, censorship, fifteen minute cities, techno-gulags, pervasive surveillance, and eating zee bugs.
The plutocrats have been utilizing their vast wealth and control over politicians, bankers, and media moguls to impose their demented psychopathic vision upon the masses, blatantly trampling upon their rights, liberties and freedoms, with no fear of retribution or consequences for their treasonous acts. They believe they are invincible, as their hubris grows to colossal levels, portending their eventual downfall. We are hurdling towards our rendezvous with destiny, for good or for ill.
The last two books I’ve read have further contributed to my sense of foreboding, as they confirm the historical fact of man’s inhumanity to man, insatiable greed driving those in power, and the willingness of the ruling elite to use violence as a means to achieve whatever outcomes they desire. The two books are Dune, by Frank Herbert, and End Times, by Peter Turchin. Dune is a science fiction novel published in 1965, capturing the corruption and duplicities practiced by the ruling classes as they fight for control over land, resources and wealth, during the waning days of a formerly great empire.
The tone of the novel is dark, ominous and gloomy. The characters seemed resigned to their tragic fate, as melancholy pervades their world, and they are powerless to change the catastrophic events which are unfolding according to an immutable destiny. I have a similar feeling regarding the events unfolding on a daily basis, as we head towards a cataclysmic climax to our empire of debt, domination, delusion, and destruction. As Frank Herbert noted, there is no escape from the choices we have made over time.
“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”― Frank Herbert, Dune
The non-fiction – End Times – was published in 2023 by Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist studying the dynamics of historical societies, further painting a very bleak picture of our current historical paradigm, with little opportunity to alter the violent upheaval about to engulf our decaying society. Him and his team created a quantitative model that analyzed complex societies across thousands of years and discovered predictable waves of political instability brought about by the same forces in a predictable pattern. Based upon this model, in 2010 Peter went on record predicting major instability in the U.S. in the early 2020s. The basis for his prediction was as follows:
“When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.”– End Times – Peter Turchin
I know many people don’t trust academic created models, especially when they attempt to predict future history and sociological trends. Many dismiss Strauss & Howe’s Fourth Turning generational theory as voodoo and making history fit into their model. I’ve been convinced since reading the book in 2004 of its validity, and nothing that has occurred since the start of this Fourth Turning in 2008 has convinced me otherwise. Turchin’s model, based on entirely different criteria, essentially predicts violent upheaval, war and societal collapse on the same timeline as the Fourth Turning theory.
In addition, I have been following the daily writings of Martin Armstrong, a non-academic investment manager, for a decade, and his Socrates model also predicts civil war, global war, economic collapse and a turbulent outcome by 2032. In fact, all three models are in alignment regarding the degree of violence, bloodshed and turmoil, with clear winners and losers by the time this crisis period resolves itself. This is a naturally occurring phenomenon as described by Turchin.
“All complex societies go through cycles of alternative stretches of internal peace and harmony periodically interrupted by outbreaks of internal warfare and discord.” – End Times – Peter Turchin
The level of gaslighting, propaganda, misinformation, censorship of the truth, and blatant mistruths being peddled to the masses by the plutocrats pulling the levers of this shitshow has reached epic proportions. This is being perpetrated as a last-ditch desperate effort to maintain the control they have been exercising since the 21st Century commenced. The upcoming election in five weeks has accelerated their efforts to derail Trump’s election at all costs.
Two attempted assassinations by Deep State patsies, after a half dozen failed efforts to imprison Trump, and the ascension of Saint Kackler by the Deep State and controlled regime media using fake polls and trying to duplicate the Biden basement dummy strategy has failed. The vote margin in the swing states appears to be too large for the Democrat cheating schemes of illegal immigrants and dead people voting, mail-in ballot fraud, and Dominion vote switching to overcome. The plutocrats thought they had covered all their bases but are in danger of seeing their best laid plans self-destruct.
“The plutocrats can use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and to handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages. In other words, they wield enormous power to sway the electorate toward the opinions that promote their interests. The plutocrats can afford to plan, and implement their plans, for the long term.”– End Times – Peter Turchin
I believe the tapestry of history will be stained by the traitorous machinations of the nefarious Deep State forces controlling Biden, Harris, Congress, and every governmental department in the next five weeks. Spineless Jerome Powell has done as he was told by producing a crisis level interest rate cut when stock and housing markets are at all-time highs and unemployment is near all-time lows. They will stop at nothing to retain rule over our nation, even risking nuclear annihilation in their game of chicken with Putin.
They believe their 3rd assassination attempt will be a charm. We should be vigilant for whatever false flag or new “deadly” pandemic they can activate in the coming weeks. Will it be another FBI created “white supremacist” Trump supporter terrorist attack on people of color? Or will they initiate a false flag in the Middle East with their Israeli co-conspirators to launch the neo-con dream war with Iran? They launched the Covid scamdemic in a matter of weeks, so a new terrifying super virus isn’t out of the question. Anything they can do to interfere with a smooth election will be attempted.
They believe they can’t allow Trump to take office in January 2025. We all know the uni-party does as they are told by the monied interests. The plutocrats don’t spend $4 billion per year “lobbying” politicians for nothing. The election of Trump would not materially change the course of this titanic ship of debt. We’ve already struck the iceberg and are taking on water. Economic catastrophe is a certainty.
Trump may only delay the inevitable. Turchin’s book explains what is really happening out of sight of the masses. Super-elites (Trump, Musk, Carlson versus Obama, Soros, Gates) are battling for supremacy, while the little people are nothing more than pawns in the chess game of world domination as our nation rots from within.
“The social pyramid has grown top-heavy. We now have too many ‘elite aspirants’ competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intra-elite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within.”– End Times – Peter Turchin
Turchin’s model revolves around what he terms an oversupply of super-elites who are created when a country/empire devolves into a plutocracy, where the rich get richer by rigging the system in their favor, while the rest of society sinks into immiseration (impoverishment). Every empire goes through the same cyclical process, which eventually leads to its decline.
Turchin marked the 1970s as when the tide turned heavily in favor of the elites, with the middle and lower classes slowly and steadily sinking into despair, as their standard of living has degraded year after year, while being lured deeper and deeper into debt by the ruling elite who have profited mightily from their indebtedness. The Establishment/Deep State/Plutocracy/Ruling Elite or whatever other term you want to use for the evil psychopaths running the show and telling their Biden and Harris puppets what to say and do, are all part of George Carlin’s Big Club – and you ain’t in it.
“The business and political elites knew each other, went to the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, married into the same families, shared the same values – in reality, formed the phenomenon which has lately been dubbed The Establishment.”– The Triumph of Conservatism – Gabriel Kolko
As the younger generations are enslaved in student loan debt to obtain degrees from left wing universities, controlled by communist academics, older generations are mired in debt from McMansions, $60,000 SUVs, outrageous medical expenses, and plain old grocery bills. For the past forty years, the relative wages of the average American have been in decline, while the wealth of the elites, controlling the mega-corps, too big to fail banks, media conglomerates, and political system, have risen to obscene heights on the backs of the working-class peasants. Life expectancy has been in decline, depression and suicides on the rise, discontent and anger reaching acute levels, and an oversupply of elite aspirants, created by all that newly printed fiat, have created a combustible mixture on the verge of erupting like Mount Saint Helens.
Those who currently benefit from our utterly corrupt plutocracy of psychopaths and deviants, pretend everything is normal and anyone questioning their provably false narratives are dangerous conspiracy theorists who must be censored, silenced and prosecuted for thought-crime. Their arrogance towards the common man and hubris in believing their own bullshit has left them susceptible to the vengeance of those they have scorned, ridiculed, and belittled, while pillaging the wealth of an empire in its death throes.
A feeling of despair leading to a revolutionary vibe is in the air, as sides have been drawn, no compromise is possible, and those 300 million firearms are poised to be put to use. The debased establishment doesn’t think enough people have the gumption and courage to step up and call their bluff. If they are able to steal this election again and install another actual moron in the White House, the country will begin to implode, with chaos, violence and much bloodshed likely.
“Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in previous eras similarly didn’t imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them. States die in a great variety of ways. Some go out in a bang of violence; others unravel quietly and die with a whimper.”– End Times – Peter Turchin
I tend to lean towards the American empire going out with a bang, rather than a whimper. I’ve referenced this level of normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance among the masses previously with regards to the last two Fourth Turnings. In late 1859 there was virtually no one who foresaw the devastation and death that would engulf the nation in the next five years, with over 600,000 killed and 500,000 wounded. Over 8% of the white male population between the ages of 13 and 43 died in the space of those five years.
In early 1938 very few people expected a global conflagration involving virtually every country on earth to result in the deaths of 65 million people (3% of the global population). We are now at another turning point in human history. When enough critical thinking citizens become convinced there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means, like the ballot box, because the system is unfixable and corrupt, violent upheaval will consume the nation, with an unknowable outcome. As Turchin has documented, this societal implosion has occurred on a regular basis across the centuries. The only difference is previous regimes didn’t have the means to destroy the planet with the push of a button.
These periodic societal implosions are entirely the result of plutocratic greed, where the ruling elites feel impelled to rig the financial and political institutions in a way that pumps immense wealth into their pockets, creating a chosen few who see their mega-yachts rising on a tide of Fed created fiat, while the dinghies of the impoverished many sink to the bottom of the sea. This predictable devolution of every empire is what destabilizes their society and leads to discord, violence, and the overthrow of the existing social order.
The “Haves” have so much wealth, so much control over our media, so much unwarranted influence over our political system, so much dominion over our intel agencies and military, and complete domination over central banking, while the “Have Nots” have little chance to succeed or even maintain their standard of living, as their anger towards the “Haves” reaches the boiling point. You can feel it. It will only take one spark to ignite this powder-keg of engineered wealth imbalance to initiate Civil War 2.0.
Turchin’s model predicts a grim future, with an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s. Based on the current trajectory of our societal disintegration, his model paints a dark, bleak future for the United States, and probably the entire world when the USA does everything in its power to maintain world domination through military means. Based on hundreds of previous empire collapses, Turchin provides this assessment:
“The probability of ruler assassination was 40%. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75% of the crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. 60% of exits led to the death of the state – it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments. The overall conclusion is grim. In most cases, several disasters combined, and some societies experienced really severe outcomes – End Times – Peter Turchin
Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory predicts war and bloodshed on a grand scale in the second half of this crisis period (2024 – 2032). Turchin’s model predicts the same. Martin Armstrong’s Socrates model also predicts the same. I find it interesting that Neil Howe and Peter Turchin, both academics, choose to disregard the unequivocal outcome of their models and pretend a positive outcome is a possibility. Hope is not a strategy, and denying the reality before our very eyes, benefits no one except those in power.
Armstrong, an investment manager, shows no inclination to not trust his model. He expects civil and global war, while predicting this will be the last presidential election in U.S. history. What will happen between now and November 5, to ignite the next bloody phase of this crisis? Will they shoot Trump’s plane out of the sky? Will they blatantly cheat on election day through fake mail-in ballots and Dominion vote switching, installing kackling Kamala as their puppet? Will they provoke Russia and/or Iran into launching World War 3? We know for sure these societal storms will only intensify until a climax is attained, with distinct winners and losers.
It has been a slow train coming, but it is picking up speed as we enter the final stages of this journey. The Deep State has had control for too long and their time has come. They have disregarded and torn the U.S. Constitution to shreds. We are no longer bound by their illegal laws, regulations and rules. They don’t apply no more. We’ve been standing around and waiting for someone else to do the dirty work.
The Founders, like Jefferson, risked their very lives to give us this country. It is time to make a brave and courageous stand against the forces of evil and take this country back from the super-elite fools glorifying their traitorous deeds in the name of Satan. The slow train of justice is coming around the bend, and anyone who cares about the future of this Republic needs to hop on. The times that try men’s souls have arrived. The choices we make will matter.
Man’s ego is inflated, his laws are outdated, they don’t apply no more
You can’t rely no more to be standin’ around waitin’
In the home of the brave, Jefferson turnin’ over in his grave
Fools glorifying themselves, trying to manipulate Satan
And there’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend
China Launches Massive Military Drills In Disputed South Sea Hours After Blinken Tries To “Reduce Regional Tensions”
China didn’t just fire the proverbial stimulus bazooka targeting its markets and economy last week: it also fired a literal bazooka in preparation for the inevitable showdown with the US, which is not a matter of if just when.
On Saturday, China’s military said that the country’s air and naval forces are conducting manoeuvres in a disputed area of the South China Sea, just hours after the country’s top diplomat discussed ways of reducing regional tension with his U.S. counterpart, confirming yet again that the world literally can not wait to make fun of Anthony Blinken.
The news, first reported by Reuters, comes after Australia and the Philippines said their militaries would hold a joint maritime activity with Japan, New Zealand and the United States in the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.
The announcement of the manoeuvres came shortly after China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in New York for talks that covered ways to avoid conflict in the South China Sea.
In March, Blinken had assured the Philippines its defence partnership with the United States was “ironclad,” after Manila accused Beijing of aggressive deployments in the South China Sea of its coast guard and fishing vessels suspected of being a maritime militia.
On Friday Wang “emphasized that China insists on resolving differences with countries directly concerned through dialogue and consultation,” during the meeting, his ministry said in a statement.
While Blinken said he raised China’s “dangerous and destabilizing actions” in the South China Sea and discussed improving communication between the two nations’ militaries, Wang responded that “the U.S. should not always stir up trouble in the South China Sea and should not undermine the efforts of regional countries to maintain peace and stability,” and launched the drill just to confirm how little it thinks of US attempts at deterrence.
The Chinese drills will include “routine” early warning and reconnaissance exercises as well as patrols around Scarborough Shoal, the Southern Theatre Command of the People’s Liberation Army said in a statement, but gave no details.
“The theatre troops maintain a high degree of vigilance, resolutely defending national sovereignty, security and maritime rights and interests, (and) are firm in maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea,” it said.
One of Asia’s most contested features, the Scarborough Shoal is 200 km (124 miles) off the Philippines, within its exclusive economic zone. At the same time, China also claims almost the entire South China Sea, including the atoll, coveted for its bountiful fish stocks and stunning turquoise lagoon, despite overlapping claims in the busy waterway by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. While in 2016 the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled that China’s sweeping claims were not supported by international law, Beijing refuses to recognise the decision. The tribunal did not determine sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, which it said was a traditional fishing ground for several countries.
In a report on Friday, a thinktank based in Beijing estimated that warships of various nations spent more than 20,000 days annually in the South China Sea, while more than 30,000 military aircraft traverse it. U.S. navy ships spent about 1,600 days at sea in the region, said the thinktank, the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative, as well as an undisclosed number of submarines.
