Dem Rep. Gottheimer: We Still Don’t Know What Regulators Did During SVB Collapse

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) stated that we still don’t know what regulators did over the weekend that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.

Co-host Tyler Mathisen asked, “Chairman McHenry was incensed, I guess is a possible way of putting it, over what he described as a lack of transparency over the weekend when SVB was engineered out of existence. He says there are no notes publicly available from the regulators’ emergency meetings over the weekend, and that lack of transparency has a negative effect on the public view of the safety of the financial arena. How do you feel about that? Was there — is there enough transparency about what was going on on that weekend when regulators finally stepped in?”

Gottheimer answered, “Not yet. Which is why I and others have called for an investigation. It starts with this hearing, but it’s got to go a lot deeper. There [were] a lot of question marks. We were all talking over that weekend, and I spoke to the chairman, I spoke to the ranking member, I spoke to a lot of banks, small or medium regional-sized regional banks. We’re all having — and investors and consumers and many non-profits, and we were all having the same discussion of what — they were all panicked, what’s going on. Because it was quiet for a long period, as you know, over that weekend, and a lot of money left small or medium regional banks over the weekend, as we have seen in the numbers. That’s a problem. We should understand why we didn’t have better information, especially those of us on the committee. And we’re going to want to have answers, which is why we’re doing this in-depth investigation.”

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