On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) pushed back on President Joe Biden blaming the rollback of some financial regulations — which Gottheimer voted for — for the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse by stating that the regulators “should have caught” problems with SVB.
Host Jake Tapper asked, “So, today, President Biden placed some of the blame on this move by President Trump and Republicans in Congress to roll back some of the financial regulations in 2018. I think it was some of the Dodd-Frank regulations. You just heard Mark Zandi say that that change, that weakening of the financial regulations didn’t help what happened in the last few days. I should note you joined Republicans in passing that bill. Do you regret it?”
Gottheimer responded, “No, for the same reason that — you had a set of rules that literally applied to the largest few institutions in the country and also to our small and medium-sized and regional banks, it was impossible. They were all actually merging and selling to the larger banks and you had no community banks left in this country. And you need good community healthy banks for local businesses and for families and for farms. You need that. It’s really important.”
He continued, “What happened in the Silicon Bank situation was their investments weren’t smart. So, they had put a ton of their money, they had plenty of — their balance sheet was strong, the ratios — my understanding is the ratios from their holdings were strong. The issue is they put so much of their money that had been deposited into longer-term treasuries. And as interest rates went up, of course, the value of those treasuries went down. And then when everybody — this was just a classic run on the bank, everybody wanted their money out in a few hours, there just wasn’t money there to give because they wanted their money out so fast. So, the FDIC and the OCC and other regulators, in my opinion, should have caught that. They should have said, wait a second, the asset mix here doesn’t make sense. It’s at risk. And obviously, they had a very — they were concentrated in a few industries like tech, which have faced some headwinds. So, to me, this was just a matter of we should have had regulators on top of that.”
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