Quick Hits

Poll: Most Americans fear expressing their real political opinions in the workplace.

A majority of Americans are afraid to express political or religious views in the workplace, according to an Ipsos poll released Tuesday sponsored by the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

More than 60% of respondents said that expressing political or religious views at work would result in negative consequences, while approximately 25% admitted to knowing someone who experienced negative responses for expressing such views, according to the results. The findings mirror data collected through the Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index which rates "viewpoint diversity in corporate product and service offerings, workplaces, and in the public square," according to its website.

Respondents are also hesitant to post political content on social media and would prefer companies include a wide range of beliefs in its commitment to diversity, according to the results. A plurality supports companies adopting policies that protect viewpoint diversity.

The GOPe will continue championing laws that protect Democrat groups from non-existent corporate discrimination against them, but will scream that corporations must be free to discriminate against Republican groups.

Let's keep sending them money!

Wellesley College, allegedly a women's college, admits that men are better at womaning than women..

Wellesley College, an all-women's school that has long prided itself as a place for "women who will make a difference in the world," has truly lost the plot. Currently, the school's policy is that students who were "assigned female at birth who identify as men are not eligible for admission," but students who were "assigned male at birth who identify as women are eligible for admission."

So, in reality, Wellesley hasn't truly been an all-women's college since 2015, when it last updated its policy to accept applications from biological males who identify as women. But even that policy allowing biological men to attend wasn't woke enough for the student body, which, on Tuesday, voted in support of a non-binding resolution to allow "trans men and nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth" to be admitted as students.

The Discoverer of Peruvia himself, the circumnavigator of the toilet, MSNBC diversity hire and diversity failure Tour&eactue; says that "woke" is "jut a polite way of saying the n-word," but with the special advantage that it let you cover even more ground.

Touré @Toure

At this point woke is a slur. The way the right uses it is an undercover way of saying "those people," or "non-white people." It's a polite way of saying the n-word but in this case the n-word includes Blacks, LGBTQ folks, and other marginalized groups.

NPR: Michelle Yeoh, who is obviously of Chinese descent, who has a Chinese name, and who was in fact born in Malaysia (which has a large population of Chinese descent), merely "identifies as Asian."

If she identified as a black man, presumably she'd be the first person identifying as a black man to win Best Actress.

Tucker Carlson: The financial industry made itself woker and woker since the days of Occupy Wall Street to insulate itself against the next leftist protest/Democrat legislative attack.

We are now living with the consequences of the Wokification of Money.

FNC's Tucker Carlson suggests the "woke-ification" of the financial industry was a defense mechanism against "Occupy Wall Street."

"Clearly, the bank had a lot of money because trans pronouns experts are not cheap at all, but Signature did have a lot of cash, of course, because the Federal Reserve was printing it and they got the first pass. That's what low interest rates for 13 years means. So, again, this was going on for years," he said. "Anything about economics was boring, because who cares about carried interest? What's that? What we really want to talk about, they told you, is racial oppression and your role in it, and so we got a lot of that, only for, like, 12 years now, an endless parade of lies about this or that."

...

Now, that's the question you would have asked if you were paying attention both from inside SVB or from the federal regulatory agencies in Washington, but it turns out nobody was paying attention. Nobody thought to ask that or many other questions. Nobody thought to stress-test Silicon Valley Bank in the middle of a boom and of course, that turned out to be a grave mistake, but the remaining question is, what were they doing at SVB and at the other banks that have either failed or come close to failing over the last week?

Well, they were doing what you would do if you were a mediocre but highly credentialed, irresponsible person with a narcissism complex who talked a lot about your ultra-marathons and your commitment to climate change if the central bank handed you trillions of dollars free with no strings attached. You would party like it was 1999. Or to update the reference, you would virtue-signal like it was 2023. You would spend hundreds of millions of dollars bragging about what a good person you are and that, of course, is exactly what they did.

Consider Signature Bank. Now, Signature Bank was shut down by federal regulators this weekend on Sunday because it posed an imminent threat to the entire financial system. Its demise marked the third-largest bank collapse in American history. Why did Signature Bank fail? We could give you the technical, math-based answer, but here's the real reason. Signature Bank failed because it was corrupt. That's a strong charge. How do we know that? Well, simple. Its directors gave Barney Frank a board seat. That's it. Frank is the same person who was a member of Congress from Massachusetts, wrote the banking regulations imposed on Signature Bank and all the other banks by Washington after the collapse.

Barney Frank has never had a real job. He has spent his entire life in politics. He's elderly now, but he has no relevant experience or expertise. The only reason that Signature Bank hired him is because he once regulated Signature Bank. Now, if we were looking at a foreign country, we'd describe that instantly as what? A pay-off. The people who actually ran Signature Bank meanwhile, the so-called bankers, did not seem to spend a lot of time banking and of course, they didn't need to bank really because the Fed was guaranteeing them a never-ending torrent of cash in the form of free money.

So, what did they do? Well, here is Scott Shay, the chairman of Signature Bank, welcoming his employees to a meeting of the bank's critical Pride Council. This video is from last December, just months before Signature Bank slipped beneath the waves, and the Pride Council in question, as you will see in a moment, featured a self-described gender-queer, transmasculine person called Finn Brigham, who arrived to teach employees about pronoun use.

Read the whole thing. Video at the link.

He continued this theme.

FNC's Tucker Carlson examines the newly returned banking crisis as a panic in regional banks could become a catastrophe.

TUCKER CARLSON: It has been 15 years since the global financial crisis of 2008 -- a long time -- but it hasn't gone away.

Its consequences, in fact, still define our world. Why is the U.S. government so deeply in debt? How does Wall Street get so much money? What do they do exactly? Why are housing prices so high? Why do our leaders stoke racial conflict? Why have so many Americans concluded that their system is rigged? In every case, the answers to those questions is the same. It all began in 2008. Now, 2008 and its aftermath is a complex story, but let's just sum up in the broadest possible terms what happened.

Big financial institutions took foolish risks and nearly blew up the entire U.S. economy. We knew right away what had happened and who did it, but nobody was ever punished. The reckless bankers responsible got off; so did the politicians who encouraged the reckless bankers to be reckless. Nobody went to jail. Nobody was even banished from the industry. In fact, some of the wrongdoers even got their bonuses that year. So, we had an economic collapse, but it didn't hurt them at all.

Why? Well, simple. The government bailed out the banks. That was controversial, but bipartisan and at the time, they told us in bipartisan fashion that they were saving capitalism. But they weren't. In fact, they were inverting capitalism.

What happened next is very simple. Wall Street was allowed to privatize its gains but socialize its risks. That meant if things went well, the finance people got rich, in fact, richer than any group in human history, but if things went south, the government, you, would swoop in to save them -- pretty good deal. But for more than a decade, very few complained about this arrangement because things went very, very well. Wall Street boomed and the root of Wall Street's success, no matter what they tell you, was low interest rates, not new innovation, low interest rates. Low interest rates make a bull market inevitable.

So, in a normal, non-distorted capitalist economy, companies become valuable, more valuable, when they produce more goods and services that people want to buy. But in an economy controlled by monetary policy run by the Federal Reserve, companies become valuable when interest rates decline.

For 13 years, interest rates remained near zero. In retrospect, now that it's ended, this was crazy behavior. These were emergency measures declared by the Federal Reserve after 2008, but they never ended. And because they never ended for 13 years, the American economy was distorted beyond recognition in ways too numerous to count. Venture capital and private equity exploded, and so did cryptocurrency, so did asset prices, particularly real estate.

There was an ocean of money flooding the system, and the people who pay half the tax rate you do benefited most. They started buying third houses and flying private. But there was also a problem that you didn't hear a lot about with low interest rates. If interest rates were at zero, how do you get meaningful returns on your money? This was a problem that virtually every investor faced for more than a decade, very much including the banks. At some point, investors became tempted to make very risky bets. If they wanted to produce returns, they had to.

As they say on Wall Street, "Tina, there is no option." One of the risky bets that banks made was loading up on long-term Treasury bonds from the U.S. government as a surrogate for cash, though, of course, bonds are not cash. They're different from cash, as we're now learning, but that worked fine as long as interest rates remained low. But once interest rates rose as a response to inflation as obviously they were always going to do. (Nothing lasts forever, including zero interest rates). Once that happened, those bonds were worth less than the banks had paid for them and so the banks began to fail. You are seeing that right now.

You're also seeing, revealed for everyone to see, the other effect of 13 years of artificial Fed-driven prosperity, and that is a lot of silly, frivolous people in charge. They're like inherited money people: They think they earned it, but they didn't. Because when money is free from the Fed, you don't have to be a serious person to get rich. You can do whatever you want because there's no consequence. You can put BLM logos on your website. You can spend investor funds on female empowerment ski weekends in Tahoe. When interest rates are zero, you can do anything because making money is easy. Everybody is a genius. Anyone can do it, and unfortunately, a lot of very stupid people did do it.

Again, video at the link, and read the whole thing.

MAGA, Inc. is accusing DeSantis of a similar scam -- but there's no way DeSantis is charging Florida taxpayers for his book tour. That's obviously a personal thing, and there's just no evidence he's charging Florida taxpayers for his travel on a book tour. MAGA, Inc. just asserts that's what's happening.

posted by Ace at 06:20 PM

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