SVB gave a$100,000 donation to the Newsom nonprofit, California Partners Project, in 2021.
The $100,000 donation was “behested,” meaning it was solicited by the governor himself, Gavin Newsom, and the disclosure was forced by state ethics relations on state websites.
The SVB investment banking president, John China, is a founding director at the Newsom nonprofit, California Partners Project.
The Newsom nonprofit was founded in 2020 to expressly push Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s public policy agenda at the Office of First Partner.
Gavin Newsom established The Office of First Partner as a taxpayer funded subdivision of the Office of Governor so Jennifer Siebel Newsom could push her public policy issues.
Taxpayers pay for nine staffers — $1 million per year for the Office of First Partner.
The Newsom’s first victory in tandem with their nonprofit, California Partners Project, was legislation which mandated gender quotas on corporate boards… the legislation was ruled discriminatory and tossed out by California courts after litigation by Judicial Watch.
The investment banking arm of SVB helped finance THREE of the governor’s private businesses!!
In 2018, Newsom said he would NOT sell his private businesses and called them “my babies, my life, my family… I can’t sell them.”
However, Newsom did sell interests in his businesses and presumably took home cash after SVB stepped in. All of this trading among insiders, friends, family, and acquittances needs scrutiny by regulators.
As reported by Just Security, at the time of the intercept, the Reaper was flying ~60 km (~35 miles) southwest of the Crimean Peninsula, Ukrainian territory that Russian lawfully annexed in 2014.
In this regard, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, declared, “American aircraft have no business being near the Russian border.”
It is universally accepted that aircraft, including military platforms, enjoy the right of high seas overflight. This right is codified in Article 2 of the 1958 Convention on the High Seas, to which the United States is Party, and Article 87(1)(b) of the 1982 Law of Sea Convention (UNCLOS), to which it is not.
Russia is Party to both.
Despite UNCLOS non-Party status, the United States recognizes its navigational provisions as reflecting customary international law. Indeed, the DoD Law of War Manual and the U.S. Navy/Coast Guard/Marine Corps Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations both emphasize the right of military aircraft to conduct operations over the high seas (§ 13.2.3.1 and § 2.6.3, respectively).
As to the mission, Ambassador Antonov correctly noted that the Reaper is “a multipurpose [drone], with strike capabilities of up to a 1,700 kilograms explosive payload.”
The Reaper is also used for reconnaissance which, in this case, was actively supporting a belligerent in a war zone making it a belligerent performing an “internationally wrongful act” (Articles on State Responsibility, art. 2) in the form of a neutrality law violation.
The DoD’s Law of War Manual states that, during an international armed conflict, “[t]he principal duties of a neutral State are to abstain from any participation in the conflict and to be impartial in conduct towards contending parties” (§15.3.2). Intelligence sharing with one of the belligerents can certainly run afoul of this principle.
During an armed conflict, belligerents may create “operational zones” to prevent interference with their operations.
In fact, this is the claimed justification for the Russian intercept. According to Ambassador Antonov, the Reaper “was moving deliberately and provocatively towards the Russian territory with its transponders turned off [and] violated the boundaries of the temporary airspace regime established for the special military operation, which was communicated to all the concerned users of international airspace in accordance with international norms.”
United States legal doctrine recognizes operational zones for both aerial and naval operations. For instance, the DoD Law of War Manual (§ 14.7) provides,
During armed conflict, States may establish airspace zones and associated procedures intended to prohibit aircraft from entering or flying in designated areas, including areas in international airspace. Such zones may be established for a variety of purposes, including to decrease the risk of inadvertent attack of civil or neutral aircraft, to control the scope of the conflict, or to enhance the predictability and effectiveness of ongoing operations.
The United States claims it may establish such a zone in the “immediate area or vicinity” of naval operations “to ensure the security of its forces and its right to conduct hostilities without interference from neutrals” (id.).
The “immediate” area or vicinity “is that area within which hostilities are taking place, or belligerent State forces are actually operating” (§ 13.8.1).
As to the consequence of violation, the DoD Manual cautions that “[a]ny transmission to an opposing belligerent State of information concerning military operations or military forces is inconsistent with the neutral State’s duties of abstention and impartiality and renders the neutral State’s vessel or aircraft making such a communication liable to capture or destruction (§ 13.8.2; see also Commander’s Handbook, § 7.8).
This would apply if the Reaper was transmitting intelligence to Ukrainian forces — directly or indirectly.
If the Reaper was supporting Ukrainian operations as it most certainly was, it would seem to qualify as a “military objective” (see Additional Protocol I, art. 52(2), which reflects customary law).
Turn off your drone’s transponder, head into a bear’s den, and poke it, and bears may just poke back.
BTW, here’s warships from the Black Sea Fleet recovering the Reaper
First thing’s first, some important updates on the ‘drone incident’. The US has now released their version of the footage, which can be seen here: VIDEO 1.
They appear to still be tenuously clinging to the claim that the plane ‘struck the drone’s propeller’, yet that is not evident in the video at all. Much more likely the plane merely bucked the drone from sheer turbulence and jet-wash, causing it to flip over—but I’m not discounting that the prop was clipped. It is strange that the drone camera continues to ‘malfunction’ each time the planes come close. Is the turbulence jostling the camera electronics too much, or the Su-27’s giving off some type of jamming signals at such proximity? Hard to know.
Some have pointed to this before and after shot, showing what appears to be like a deformed prop blade after the Russian fuel dump. However, props can look that way on cameras depending on the sync between the camera framerate and propeller speed, and there’s a chance that the propeller changed speed (perhaps due to slight throttling down by the operator, etc.) causing it to appear differently at that point on video. Maybe there are some better video experts that can chime in. But perhaps a chance exists that the ‘heavy’ fuel load ricocheting off the propeller at such squirted speeds caused it to deform. This would lead to eventual catastrophic failure of the prop due to vibratory forces in the uneven distribution of weight/aerodynamics, etc.
What we do know now however is that the MQ-9 Reaper is from one of the latest and most advanced Blocks, equipped with a highly advanced/sensitive ‘Gorgon’s Stare’ electronics suite.
Along with the Gorgon Stare, the drone had a variety of sensors which could do everything from record pinpoint video footage, thermal footage, Synthetic Aperture Radar snapshots of Russian bases/assets, record electronic emissions and signal data from Russian command HQ’s (C3), radar sites, and their positions. The Gorgon Stare itself, if you read the supplied wiki article, is run through a devious DARPA A.I. program called Mind’s Eye, which does all the things I once described in this article—basically: neural-network ‘smart’ analysis of recorded ground data where the AI can track/locate/assess/transmit targets on its own, all while geo-tagging them with various meta-data, etc. With these tools the drone is said to transmit many gigabytes of data per minute.
“The spy mission here is not even 100% visible, but 1000%. This is tactical reconnaissance – a fairly powerful high-resolution video camera and equipment that allows you to record the frequencies of radio stations, missile guidance stations, radar stations, determine the location of air defense systems, air defense systems, determine the location of headquarters, command posts and, due to visual reconnaissance, take pictures of a sufficiently high permission, ” explained Knutov.
Getting their hands on this Gorgon suite would be a huge boon for Russia. Which is why they have now positioned their ships and as of this writing are getting ready to lift the drone from what is said to be 900m depth.
American drone MQ-9 found at a depth of 900 meters. Above it, the duty of the Black Sea Fleet ships was established in order not to let anyone near the crash site. The issue of its rise is being resolved.
There is a ship in the Black Sea Fleet that is capable of doing this – the legendary “Kommuna” built in 1913. Rebuilt many times and having a huge track record of underwater work (including the recovery of several submarines, as well as aircraft and ships), it has deep-sea vehicles capable of operating at a depth of up to 1 km.
By the way, Kommuna has experience in lifting foreign equipment. In 1928, it raised the sunken British submarine L-55 in the Baltic, which was blown up by mines while evading Soviet destroyers.
The US however has claimed that they’ve done a ‘remote wipe’ on the Reaper’s data. This is questionable for a variety of reasons. Firstly, wiping data just once will never delete it, recovery specialists, particularly Russian ones which are likely the best in the world, can easily recover the data. But full industrial data-stripping takes many recurring passes of data writes to the memory chip over and over for it to be truly irrecoverable. But this takes time—time that the drone likely didn’t have as it was going down into the sea, at which point its batteries would have been flooded and likely any ‘data wipe’ operation stopped. So, the verdict is: data is probably recoverable unless the US has a special detonating self-destruct device planted on the data chip just for these types of circumstances.
To save face, John Kirby tried to pretend that US still has the ability to recover the drone. He hemmed and hawed and temporized when asked during a press conference if the drone can be recovered, stating that US “isn’t sure it can do it” in that region and at that depth, veiling the fact that the Russian fleet has already positioned itself entirely above the site and US isn’t even allowed to bring warships through the Bosporous as per the Montreaux Convention.
Satellite images of ships of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Navy near the crash site of the American MQ-9 Reaper UAV in the Black Sea.
Speaking of which—one very intriguing oddity should be mentioned. For the many months that US has flown its drones over the Black Sea, it has always strangely had to ‘go around’ Turkish territory.
Notice how the direct flightpath is always broken up by a necessary rerouting to the north into Bulgaria, just around the tip of Turkish territory near the Bosporous. It’s clear that Erdogan does not allow US war assets to bypass his territory enroute to monitor Russian SMO.
Now onto other things. One update as regards the last report about the purported Russian Kinzhal strikes on NATO assets. There is some chance that the drone incident is related.
As others have keenly noted, there is a strangely linked series of events which began with Russia’s very large missile strikes last week. There was something particularly painful and special about these strikes as several Ukrainian ministers/sources referred to the strikes with uncommonly strong words, some stating they were the most powerful strikes since the start of the SMO. Even Zelensky called it a ‘very strong signal to Ukraine’.
Then, as explained in our last report, we got word that 6 Kinzhals were used, and that a NATO HQ was possibly hit with 40+ dead. What is intriguing is, those strikes occurred on March 10th. Immediately following them on March 12th, the US sent an extremely provocative message by simulating a nuclear bombing run on St. Petersburg when they sent a B-52 bomber directly towards St. Pete in an unprecedented maneuver.
The nuclear-capable bomber cut away just before the Russian maritime border, down into Estonia. Why would they send such a direct and obvious message right after the March 10 attacks? It seems to me, those 6 confirmed Kinzhals were not sent in vain, or against unimportant targets. This likely confirms that 40+ NATO/CIA officers were infact liquidated as reports suggest, and the US deepstate is extremely bothered by this.
The US Air Force’s B-52H Stratofortress strategic bomber, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, developed the training for launching missiles into Russian territory, according to Military Observer.
About two hours ago, the plane entered a missile launch position in St. Petersburg in the region of the island of Gotland, located at a distance of about 200 km from the northern capital.
After this maneuver, the American bomber made a sharp turn and departed in the direction of Estonia. The plane is now entering Lithuanian airspace, the source said.
Only a day after that, they now suddenly send one of their most advanced drones directly toward Crimea/Sevastopol in another extremely aggressive and angst-ridden ‘message’.
They’ve never taken such a trajectory before, AND in darkmode with transponders turned OFF. Once again—it’s clear that the March 10th strikes really burned them badly and they are desperate to escalate or strike out like a wounded animal.
The logical explanation is that, there were some ‘unspoken’ agreements or red lines between the two Great Powers. And Russia finally broke that red line with the sextuple Kinzhal sneak attack.
Now that we filled in some blanks, let’s add some color, courtesy of ZH
Gavin Newsom Kept SVB Ties Secret While Lobbying For Bailout
Multimillionaire California Governor Gavin Newsom failed to disclose his ties to Silicon Valley Bankwhile lobbying the White House and the Treasury Department over a pending bailout, The Intercept reported on Tuesday.
The White House “acted swiftly and decisively to protect the American economy and strengthen public confidence in our banking system,” Newsom said in a statement. What Newsom didn’t mention is that it also protected his own companies if they held over $250,000 in deposits.
CADE, Odette, and PlumpJack, three wineries owned by Newsom, are listed as clients of SVB on the bank’s website. Newsom also maintained personal accounts at SVB for years, according to a longtime former employee of Newsom’s who handled his finances, and who requested anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.
Newsom also failed to mention his wife’s professional ties to the bank. In 2021, SVB gave $100,000 to a charity founded by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the California Partners Project, at the request of Newsom. SVB Capital President, John China, sits on the Board of Directors of the charity.
On Monday, Newsom said that he had “been in touch with the highest levels of leadership at the White House and Treasury.”
“Governor Newsom’s business and financial holdings are held and managed by a blind trust, as they have been since he was first elected governor in 2018,” said Newsom spokesman Nathan Click.
Of note, when asked during his 2018 campaign whether he would divest from his companies which might pose an ‘ethics challenge,’ Newsom reportedly replied: “These are my babies, my life, my family. I can’t do that. I can’t sell them.”
Instead, he announced the blind trust, which would be controlled by family friend and attorney, Shyla Hendrickson – an arrangement under which Newsom’s sister, Hillary Newsom, would retain her role as president of PlumpJack Group – a Newsom owned company which includes hotels, restaurants, wineries, bars and liquor stores.
No surprise, swaps on five-year debt rose to 450 basis points on €10,000 of CS’s senior debt against default for a year.
Wanna graph?
Got ya covered.
How’s that for going ballistic?
For context, here’s the index spread.
Unlike Silicon Valley, Eurobank balance sheets tend to be diversified with high loan to asset ratios and regulatory liquidity coverage ratios.
All that said, as Senator Connolly said of the dollar in 1971 at the G-10 after Nixon closed the gold window, “The dollar is our currency and your problem.”
While CS took it on the chin today, lots of Eurotrash right there with CS:
Credit markets blew out today (on a spread basis), exceeding (relatively) the shift in equity risk…
Source: Bloomberg
Bonds were aggressively bid across the curve with the short-end a massive outperformer over the last three days.
Source: Bloomberg
On the day, the 30Y yields ended unchanged with 2Y down over 50bps..
Source: Bloomberg
The 2Y yield is down almost 100bps in the last three days, dropping back below 4.00% – its lowest since Sept 2022…
Source: Bloomberg
…the biggest yield drop since ‘Black Monday’ in 1987…
Source: Bloomberg
The yield curve steepened dramatically with 2s30s up over 50bps today to their least inverted since mid-Nov…
Source: Bloomberg
Well, Powell is officially Volcker: the 2s10s just steepened at the fastest pace since the Volcker economic crematorium unleashed the worst recession since World War 2
Source: Bloomberg
The market’s inflation expectations (1Y CPI Swaps) plunged…
Source: Bloomberg
Bond volatility (MOVE) exploded today to its highest since June 2009…
Source: Bloomberg
Shorter-term, the decoupling between VIX and MOVE from late Feb is starting to unwind, but equity risk has a long way to go…
Source: Bloomberg
The dollar dumped down to three-week lows…
Source: Bloomberg
As alternative-currencies were sought as safe-havens, sending bitcoin soaring higher (above $24,000)…
Source: Bloomberg
And gold spiked above $1900…
Oil prices puked overnight, with WTI down to a $72 handle before bouncing back, but late on, it started to slide again, ending down over 3%…
Finally, systemic risk indicators are starting to flash red with FRA-OIS spiking (signaling stress in the banking system)…
Source: Bloomberg
And global dollar liquidity is drying up fast…
Source: Bloomberg
But “10% for the Big Guy” Biden said “the banking system was safe”
Whether it’s Bailey Bros Savings & Loan or Silicon Valley Bank, the fastest way to trigger a bank run is when the word gets out you are illiquid.
The duration gap is a financial and accounting term used to measure their risk due to changes in the interest rate. This is one of the mismatches that can occur and are known as asset–liability mismatches.
Another way to define Duration Gap is the difference in the price sensitivity of interest-yielding assets and the price sensitivity of liabilities (of the organization) to a change in market interest rates (yields).
Risk management 101.
You can get a gap a lot of ways — your credit losses can rise (the GFC scenario), your unrealized losses can rise from interest rate hikes (the current banking sector scenario).
The Lehman death scenario – funding long-term liabilities with short-term assets.
The duration gap measures how well matched are the timings of cash inflows (from assets) and cash outflows (from liabilities).
When the duration of assets is larger than the duration of liabilities, the duration gap is positive. In this situation, if interest rates rise, assets will lose more value than liabilities, thus reducing the value of the firm’s equity. If interest rates fall, assets will gain more value than liabilities, thus increasing the value of the firm’s equity.
Conversely, when the duration of assets is less than the duration of liabilities, the duration gap is negative. If interest rates rise, liabilities will lose more value than assets, thus increasing the value of the firm’s equity. If interest rates decline, liabilities will gain more value than assets, thus decreasing the value of the firm’s equity.
By duration matching, that is creating a zero duration gap, the firm becomes immunized against interest rate risk. Duration has a double-facet view. It can be beneficial or harmful depending on where interest rates are headed.
Some of the limitations of duration gap management include the following:
the difficulty in finding assets and liabilities of the same duration
some assets and liabilities may have patterns of cash flows that are not well defined
customer prepayments may distort the expected cash flows in duration
customer defaults may distort the expected cash flows in duration
convexity can cause problems.
Let’s try an example.
When the duration gap is zero, the firm is immunized only if the size of the liabilities equals the size of the assets. In this example with a two-year loan of one million and a one-year asset of two millions, the firm is still exposed to rollover risk after one year when the remaining year of the two-year loan has to be financed.
Got it now?
So, what’s going on?
A lot of stuff like this as Lew Ranieri just posted (Lew of the South Ozone Park, Queens Ranieri’s — not to be confused with the Greenwich Ranieri’s).
And as Lew observes, that’s NOT the first floor.
And this
Lines were seen outside a First Republic Bank branch in California, with worried customers wanting to withdraw funds after the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. SVB Group on Friday became the largest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis https://t.co/YQyF6dE5vipic.twitter.com/f8robxtwrw
And Signature Bank just announced they’re closed by state authority.
Here’s the pre-crash story — a lot of uninsured depositors appropriate to a business backed with high-end individuals.
Deposits are a smaller fraction of the portfolio
With a growing fraction of long-dated assets.
The dough had to go somewhere — so they went to long-dated securities like government paper — and then insanely held them to maturity as the Fed started raising interest rates.
Like climbing out on a limb while Jay Powell spins up a chain saw to cut the branch.
Here’s the effect of Jay’s cutting — AOCI starts piling up unrealized losses.
As Jay cut, the blood flowed all through 2022 while NOBODY did anything.
SVB was posting long-dated assets to back short term loans as the value of those assets plunged.
Duh!
Here’s SVB in the context of others from The_Real_Fly’s tweet
How did we get here? Let’s go to the tape.
Got it?
SVB was getting a slug of cash from Federal stimulus deposits over the last few years.
But, now the Congressional paydays are done and that cash is disappearing along with VC money — just like George Bailey when “Mr. Potter stole the drunk’s dough”
Normally, you would have a Chief Risk Officer with quant skills sufficient to anticipate these dynamics, and capable of advising how best to head them off.
Well, SVB’s last CRO left a year ago as the rats were starting to jump, leaving risk management in the hands of this thing — someone who could give you her pronouns before she could spell convexity:
I once had to work for a couple of unskilled “here are my pronouns” people at a company that went insanely woke. Fortunately, I worked for them for just for a short time.
Too long a story how it happened but it began with a class-act president leaving, replace by a wokester, my boss retiring, and well, you get the picture.
I saw the handwriting on the wall early but hung around to see what would happen. It was a surreal experience.
“Go ask Alice – when she’s 10-feet tall.”
Anyway, let’s go to the 2 minute “elevator pitch version” of what has happened and is currently happening, graciously provided by my trusted Mexican risk advisory
SVB was full frontal woke, managing their portfolio on ESG, watching their unrealized losses pile up on their Treasuries as Powell drove interest rates back into the historic normal band.
As Jay hiked, SVB saw their deposits plunge as the Federal welfare wagon slowed.
And they did nothing.
Let’s recall the Clown Car exec team asleep at the switch — or sitting in DEI conferences 24×7:
Chief Risk Officer: Kim Olsen (led credit ratings in 2007 at Deutsche)
Chief Legal Officer: Michael Zuckert (General Counsel at Citibank in 2008)
Over the last 2 weeks, management sold nearly $5 million in stock.
Here’s Greg “Fearless Leader” Becker speaking at the “you’re fired/thanks for the memories” call (note the Gleneagles logo on his jacket – a primo golf resort in Scotland)
Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, reportedly sent this to employees after the collapse of the bank.
"My unfair ask is can you guys just hang around, try to support each other, try to support our clients… which may be a slightly better outcome than where we are now." pic.twitter.com/3mcVTOZtim
How about the ratings agencies? Where were they? Any “early warning”?
Nope – investment grade all the way up to the moment the FDIC stepped in, halted the bleed, and delivered the merciful kill-shot.
Let’s put this all in context by reviewing the week just ended:
$200 billion collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 24 hours
Crypto market lost over $100 billion
Bank stocks lost $100 billion in value
Mortgage demand hit 30 year low
Fed said 2 million people will lose jobs
Who’s now at risk of a haircut or worse. Well, everyone with SVB balances over $250K are uninsured.
That includes:
Circle: $3.3 billion
Bill․com: $670 million
Roku: $487 million
BlockFi: $227 million
Roblox: $150 million
Sunrun: $80 million
Ginkgo Bio: $74 million
iRhythm: $55 million
Rocket Lab: $38 million
Sangamo Thera: $34 million
Lending Club: $21 million
Huuuge Inc: $24 million
Payoneer: $20 million
Ambarella: $17 million
Protagonist Thera: $13 million
Oncorus: $10 million
Eiger Bio: $8 million
Repare Thera: $7 million
Anybody you know?
And these are the only companies REPORTING exposure so far – ~$4 billion.
Yet SVB has $170 billion in uninsured deposits.
50% of all VC-backed startups in the U.S. have exposure to SVB.
97% or so of the deposits uninsured.
But there is a bright side — chatter has it Harry and Meghan had a lot of dough in cash in SVB along with Oprah.
We can dream, can’t we?
Clearly, the shareholders are wiped out. A lot of vendors stiffed. And, with haircuts all around, depositors will scramble to deal with their payments issues, take their haircuts, and move on.
So how does the US banking sector look this Sunday afternoon?
But, as our Mexican risk advisory said, “don’t panic” — Auntie Janet says there will be no bailout – just a “Special Monetary Operation” in the form of an SPV that looks like a bailout, smells like a bailout, and quacks like a bailout.
After all, a lot of California money on the table – that’s a lot of Progressive political power with substantial “value at risk”.
Here’s Auntie:
BREAKING: Janet Yellen Says No Bail Out for SVB But Has Concerns About Contagion to Other Banks
“We’re not going to do that [bail out] again…let me just say that we want to make sure that the troubles that exist at one bank don’t create contagion to others” pic.twitter.com/6aZUlBu5KG
Translation — my “Special Monetary Operation” is a bailout.
For one thing, Jennifer Newsom has some “dough at risk”.
So Gavin says: “Mi problemo es tu problemo.”
After all, in the People’s Republic of California with $568 billion in debt, recall that 1% of the population pays most of the taxes. And a lot of that tax dough is — or was — parked in SVB.
Meanwhile, in the real world, notes the Treasury dumping since the Biden Regime unlawfully seized power.
Not expecting the bank runs will do much to head this all off. And with China brokering peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, any surprise China is no buying oil in Chinese yuan?
And the contagion risk is rising — HTM and AOCI are bleeding as interest rates rise, even as that portion of bank balance sheets gets bigger.
52 regional banks lost >10% market value last week with a combined market cap of $369 billion.
FDIC says the US banks are sitting on ovr $620 billion in unrealized losses.
As Winston Zeddemore famously said: “That’s a big Twinkie.”
Now, in fairness, some people did call this.
FLASHBACK: If you put the wrong person in office you’ll see a STOCK MARKET CRASH that could look like 1929…
First came the bankrun about a month ago triggered by guidance that losses would continue.
A couple weeks later came the next drop after chatter hit the street that regulators were digging into what Axel Lehmann (Board Chair) knew about the run and when he knew it.
So it’s like on schedule that CS stock craters 7% to a record low, following some bad press, courtesy of Reuters and Bloomberg.
For those scoring this game, recall CS has a book per share of ~15.25 and tanking fast.
Lords knows what’s in that pile of toxic waste charmingly labelled “held to maturity.”
So, no surprise, Reuters reports CS is frantically buying deposits at any price – offering 6.5-7% annual rate on new three-month deposits of $5 million+ for one-year deposits.
That’s a Big Twinkie – 100 to 200 bps above JPM, UBS and Citi.
Hilariously, new deposits cost CS more — per Reuters higher than Credit Suisse’s lending rates in Asia.
Do they plan to make it up in volume? Old joke, just kidding
Per Bloomberg, dozens of CS “scalp hunters” have bailed out since September “and are likely to take at least a quarter of the funds they manage to their new employers, rising to as much as 60% in some cases, according to people familiar with the hires.”
Russia Tells UN That Ukraine Crisis Is A “War With The West For Survival”
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, FEB 24, 2023 – 06:55 AM
In two days of United Nations special sessions this week related to Ukraine as well as the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, Russia mounted a robust defense, arguing that it sees its ongoing military action in Ukraine is a matter of “survival”.
Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya voiced the stark perspective on Wednesday, casting the war as one against the collective West. “As for our country, we see all of this as a war with the West for survival, for the future of our country, for our children, for our identity,” he said.
He stated that “Ukraine is nothing but a bargaining chip in this plot” – part of a broader plan which was long in implementation, going back to 2014.
The Russian diplomat’s words followed a surprise admission by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who in a Feb.14 press conference in Brussels described that “the war didn’t start in February last year. The war started in 2014.”
The day prior to Nebenzya’s remarks, the UN Security Council had convened at the urging of permanent member Russia to consider fresh allegations surrounding the Nord Stream sabotage. Nebenzia during that session called for establishing an independent investigation.
He specifically invoked Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report which said the pipelines were bombed as part of an elaborate covert CIA operation involving the US Navy and help from the Norwegians:
“This journalist is telling the truth,” Nebenzia said at the meeting. “This is more than just a smoking gun that detectives love in Hollywood blockbusters. It’s abasic principle of justice; everything is in your hands, and we can resolve this today.”
Crucially, China immediately backed the call. “As the most authoritative and representative international organization, the UN can play an active role in conducting an international investigation and ensuring the security of transboundary infrastructure,” the Chinese ambassador told the Security Council.
But US Ambassador John Kelley slammed what he called Moscow’s attempts to obfuscate and deflect blame from its aggression in Ukraine, saying that “today’s meeting is a blatant attempt to distract” from the forthcoming emergency meeting of the General Assembly. The US at that upcoming meeting is expected to rally in favor of a scathing UN condemnation of Moscow to mark one-year since Moscow’s Feb.24 invasion.
“That is what our focus should be on,” Kelly said. “Russia desperately wants to change the subject.”
But also addressing the council as outside experts were American economist Jeffrey Sachs and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and author Ray McGovern. They made compelling cases during their presentations, saying that the Hersh report is accurate also on account of recent statements from US officials. Those presentations before the UN body be viewed below:
Econophysics2020 
