Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said in a tweet Monday that the Biden administration refused to commit to not bailing out Chinese companies that invested in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) with American taxpayer money.
“It’s well known that SVB funneled American money into Chinese companies,” Cotton tweeted.
“I pressed the Biden administration today to commit not to bailout Chinese companies with money from Arkansas’s taxpayers, but they refused. Which tells you that’s exactly what President Biden plans to do,” he said.
Silicon Valley Bank had supported many start-up companies, including those from China, according to a CNBC report.
According to the report, the bank allowed Chinese mobile numbers to be used for opening accounts and allowed for a week-long vetting period for new accounts for start-ups compared to the three to six months for traditional banks.
Having a bank account with SVB allowed these China-based start-ups to tap funding from U.S.-based investors, the report said.
The report notes that a Chinese biotech company called Everest Medicines said it expects to recover most of its deposits at the bank through the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
As Breitbart News’s John Hayward reported Monday, Chinese firms rushed over the weekend to reassure their customers and investors that their exposure in the SVB collapse is minimal, or that they have enough cash on hand to weather any loss of access to their SVB funds.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday said the federal government would not bail out the investors and owners of the bank, but the Federal Reserve moved to set up an emergency lending program for banks. She claimed on CBS’s Face the Nation, “the American banking system is really safe and well-capitalized, it’s resilient.”
President Joe Biden on Monday tried to reassure Americans that the U.S. banking industry is safe in a brief statement on Monday.
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