Whether It's Banks or Pejoratives...

our liberals just can't get things right

On the one hand, it seems that neither the regulators or the bankers saw the SVB or the Signature Bank meltdown coming. In a piece on the meltdown “retired federal financial regulator” Steve Dewey points out that if the management of SVB had followed the regulations the collapse would have happened anyway. And if the regulators had been paying attention they would not have noticed the warnings in the data. Because the “risk-weighted capital” notion preferred by the regulators is not that helpful.

[Former regulator Thomas] Hoenig notes in a March 10 article that SVB’s regulatory risk-rated “Tier 1 Capital Ratio” was around 16 percent, a presumably safe capital position, but the more market-realistic “Tangible Capital-to-Asset Ratio” was only around 5 percent.

The regulators have their rules. But are they any good?

Which is to say that regulations and regulators don’t work. What is needed in the management of a financial corporation is the instinctive knowledge of experience and “been there” rather than all the layers of supervision and rules and credentials.

Are you surprised? I’m not. The whole modern regulatory state framework is an attempt to impose ruling-class notions on the conduct of business, which is already heavily weighted by tax and regulatory and inflationary distortions — which all issue from the ruling class exploiting the business sector for its political power agenda.

On the other news front, our liberal friends are changing their identity and pejoratives on the “wokeness” front. Back in the day, liberals rather liked being “woke.” Then it became a pejorative. As Noah Rothman writes, this happens all the time.

These periodic crusades… bubble up from the partisan depths when the Left is losing a political conflict. Rather than change their tactics, they change the language.

A similar thing happened over gun control over a decade ago.

[Molly Ball] noticed that the Obama administration had ditched the phrase “gun control” in favor of a cavalcade of euphemisms. Anti-gun activists had begun toying with alternatives such as “gun-violence prevention,” “firearms regulation,” and, of course, “gun safety,” which edged out its competitors.

You can see why. “Gun control” wasn’t moving the needle for the liberal World War Guns. All liberals were trying to do was keep us “safe.”

The constant need to change even the name of their movement — from progressive to liberal to progressive to woke to ally — makes complete sense in the context of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and the political as the distinction between friend and enemy.

Our liberal friends keep coming up with some new political crusade in which their band of brothers will change the world. Of course they will, and they may well change it for the worse. But their band of brothers is experienced by the rest of the world as more like the enemy. Of course it is. If you do anything political the other guys will pretty soon start to experience you as the enemy. Because the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. Politics is all about defeating the enemy. Obviously, the enemy won’t like it.

Notice the fundamental problem here, that poisons the liberal project from start to finish. If you have great philosophical and social and moral ideas for making the world a better place you are hardly likely to do do it if your chosen means is political, because the enemy thing.

Philosophy is the dialog between equals on the question of the good, the true, the beautiful. What has politics to do with that?

Society is the universe of social cooperation between humans. What can politics do to help beyond keeping violence down to a dull roar?

Morality is the question of good and evil in every human breast and is the proper field of religion. We Americans decided to separate politics and religion, and in the age of the woke you can see why.

Because politics is the war on the enemy; because politics is not about agreement and cooperation but subduing the “other.”

I bring this all together, the mess on the banking front, and the eternal problem our liberal friends have with re-doing their definitions and slogans, to show how clueless our liberal friends are.

Look, this is not that hard. If you study our knowledge and our society with an open mind, ignoring the received wisdom from the rulers, you quickly understand that they know very little. They just know how to follow the received wisdom, recite the usual responses, beat up the peasants. But they have never read, learned, and inwardly digested the great mountain of knowledge.

And that’s why our liberal friends keep crashing and ruining our beloved America with their incompetence and their conceit.

I think it’s about time we put a stop to this foolishness.