Free Republic

New York Community Bancorp sent its shares plummeting 26% on Friday after the regional lender said has discovered “material weaknesses” in the ways it tracks loan risks and that its CEO is leaving. The New York-based firm announced late Thursday that CEO Thomas Cangemi would be leaving NYCB — capping off a 27-year tenure at NYCB — and that Alessandro DiNello would take his place, effective immediately. DiNello, NYCB’s executive chairman, had been acting as the bank’s true boss since earlier this month ... One NYCB director, Hanif “Wally” Dahya, said in a Feb. 25 letter that he “did not...

New York Community Bank on Wednesday promoted its chairman to help stabilize the company’s operations. Late Tuesday Moody’s Investors Service downgraded NYCB’s credit ratings two notches to junk. The regional bank has been in free fall, shedding more than 50% of its market value across a punishing series of trading sessions, since reporting a surprise fourth-quarter loss last week. ... New York Community Bank on Wednesday promoted its chairman to help stabilize the company’s operations, hours after Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the bank’s credit ratings two notches to junk. Shares gained nearly 7% Wednesday after initially falling as much as...

Rising interest rates, the remote work trend, and the dominance of e-commerce sellers have combined to hammer the commercial real estate market over the past few years. Sky-high office and retail space vacancies are plaguing owners in this new environment, rents are plummeting, and borrowing costs have soared. As a result, U.S. commercial real estate prices have fallen 11% since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in March 2022, the IMF reported last week, the worst decline in over 50 years. The outlook for the sector is now so bleak that Cantor Fitzgerald’s billionaire chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick...

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman says the US government should consider a "highly dilutive" bailout of Silicon Valley Bank amid jitters about its financial position. The bank's failure "could destroy an important long-term driver of the economy as VC-backed companies rely on SVB for loans and holding their operating cash," Ackman said in a series of tweets on Thursday. "If private capital can't provide a solution, a highly dilutive gov't preferred bailout should be considered," he said.

The FDIC has accidentally released a list of companies it bailed out for billions in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse A document from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which the agency said it mistakenly released unredacted in response to a Bloomberg News Freedom of Information Act request, provides one of the most detailed glimpses yet into the bank’s big customers. BY Lizette Chapman , Jason Leopold , AND Bloomberg June 23, 2023 10:43 AM EDT Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California Philip Pacheco/Bloomberg - Getty Images When federal regulators stepped...

Robinhood said 24-hour trading is coming to its platform as the company that was at the center of the meme-stock frenzy aims to accommodate time-strapped customers while pushing for wider change in trading operations. A rollout of 24 Hour Market will begin May 16 to a "subset" of customers, followed by all customers getting access in June. Trading hours will be from 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday to 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday. "We've often heard from customers that it's tough to find time for investing during regular market hours with work, family, and everything in between," Robinhood said...

New York City teachers, cops and firefighters lost nearly $30 million in pension funds tied to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Critics accuse Comptroller Brad Lander, who is custodian of the pension systems, of favoring the “woke” bank over shareholders. Five city pension funds had a total of $41,867,214 invested in the doomed bank as of Jan. 31, according to data provided by the comptroller’s office under a Freedom of Information request by The Post. The comptroller’s Bureau of Asset Management oversees the investment portfolios. Among the largest funds left holding the bag were the Teachers Retirement System, which...

New York City teachers, cops and firefighters lost nearly $30 million in pension funds tied to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Critics accuse Comptroller Brad Lander, who is custodian of the pension systems, of favoring the “woke” bank over shareholders. Five city pension funds had a total of $41,867,214 invested in the doomed bank as of Jan. 31, according to data provided by the comptroller’s office under a Freedom of Information request by The Post.

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence April 27. *SNIP* When Javice was trying to sell her college financial planning startup, Frank, to JPMorgan Chase, she told an employee not to share exactly how many people used Frank’s service,...

Big US financial groups Charles Schwab, State Street and M&T suffered almost $60bn in combined bank deposit outflows in the first quarter as customers continued to move their money in search of higher returns. The deposit flight has been turbocharged by the collapse last month of Silicon Valley Bank and two other US lenders, with cash moving out of bank accounts at a pace not seen since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In a fresh sign of the threat to traditional banks, Apple and Goldman Sachs on Monday announced the launch of a new savings account in the...

...The deal for the bank... included the purchase of about $72 billion in loans, at a discount of $16.5 billion, and the transfer of all the bank's deposits, worth $56 billion. Roughly $90 billion in Silicon Valley Bank's securities and other assets were not included in the sale, and remained in the F.D.I.C.'s control.Silicon Valley Bank had roughly $175 billion in deposits before its collapse, an illustration of how extensive the withdrawals were before it was seized by regulators...As part of the deal, the F.D.I.C. will receive rights linked to the stock of First Citizens, which could be worth up...

Here comes the panic. Bloomberg just reported that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen – who was singlehandedly responsible for stoking and restarting the bank crisis on Wednesday which until that day was easing back, with her comments that nobody in charge was even talking about a uniform deposit insurance, let alone working on one – will convene the heads of top US financial regulators Friday morning for a previously unscheduled meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The meeting will be closed to the public, the Treasury Department said in a statement. The Treasury didn’t say what time the meeting would...

Silicon Valley Bank dished out $219 million worth of loans to officers, directors and principal shareholders in the months before it collapsed. The money was handed it out in the final quarter of 2022 and was three times higher than the amount borrowed by insiders in the three months before, marking a two-decade record high. It comes as the San Francisco Federal Reserve boss Mary Daly has felt the wrath of both Democrats and Republicans for her failure to act on signs of weakness at the bank, which caved on March 10. The unusually high number of loans is documented...

Wokeness has replaced competence and merit across the banking sector, and San Francisco Fed Chief Mary Daly is the poster child of this pernicious trend. A protege of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and short-list candidate for Federal Reserve vice chair, Daly was supposed to be supervising Silicon Valley Bank but apparently was too busy playing politics and pushing woke agendas to regulate rogue banks like SVB, the second-biggest bank failure on record. ... Daly missed all the warning signs of runaway inflation, which led to the steep interest-rate hikes that made SVB’s investments worthless. ... she said inflation didn’t affect...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on Monday decided to break up Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and hold two separate auctions for its traditional deposits unit and its private bank after failing to find a buyer for the failed lender last week. It will seek bids for Silicon Valley Private Bank until March 22 and for the bridge bank until March 24. The private bank, which is housed within SVB's retail operations, caters to high net-worth individuals. Bank and non-bank financial firms will be allowed to bid on the asset portfolios, the regulator said. ... First Citizens said in a statement...

Silicon Valley Bank failed just 14 days after KPMG LLP gave the lender a clean bill of health. Signature Bank went down 11 days after the accounting firm signed off on its audit. What KPMG knew about the two banks’ financial situation and what it missed will likely be the subject of regulatory scrutiny and lawsuits. KPMG signed the audit report for Silicon Valley Bank’s parent, SVB Financial Group SIVB Regulators seized the bank on March 10 after a surge of withdrawals threatened to leave it short of cash. “Common sense tells you that an auditor issuing a clean report,...

Americans need to have an important discussion about free speech now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so. The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public. To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals: Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers,...

One of the benefits of being a Washington insider, from the president of the United States to the lowliest bureaucrat, is never having to admit your policies are wrong. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) - the nation's 10th largest - the financial policy chickens of this, and previous administrations, have predictably come home to roost. Record debt, massive new spending, and the failure of regulators to see what was coming contributed to the run on SVB. It didn't help that in 2018 President Donald Trump signed the biggest rollback of Dodd-Frank bank regulations since the global financial...

The next logical step is for the government to insure all bank deposits, which is tantamount to nationalizing the entire banking system. But to what end? A collection of seemingly random crises can spell out a sinister “conspiracy theory” when you consider their connections and where they are leading. An overplayed plot? Perhaps, but how many so-called conspiracy theories have proven to be reality recently? First, the world economy shut down with the COVID lockdown. Manufacturing stopped and capital construction projects were put on hold. No one was making anything, and consumers were buying very little. The government injected huge...

One entrepreneur says the bank was offering ‘basically subprime business loans.’ ... If government funds it, they will come. That’s an overlooked story line in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. If Washington wants to point fingers, it should aim the biggest digit at itself. ... We serve those creating positive environmental change,” SVB’s website brags, noting that the bank worked with some 1,550 companies in the “climate technology and sustainability sector.” Most of these companies weren’t filling some vital market need. Rather .. SVB was beloved for its willingness to offer “banking services to startups that often weren’t profitable,...