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IF you want to know why the public is so confused about Bitcoin it is all down to Elizabeth Warren. She is/was such a liar. She lost the race for the Democrats.
Warren is behind all the Bitcoin disinformation, also controlling the banks so that you weren’t allowed to buy it.
She has done so much damage over the years in convincing the media to report incorrectly about Bitcoin because she punished any bank that obey her. She was/is a disaster for Democrats and has to go.
If you own 1 Bitcoin you are in the top 1% of the top 1% of Bitcoin holders on Earth.
Wholecoiners are in the 99.99 percentile. Like scoring a perfect SAT, solving a Rubik’s Cube in under 5 seconds, typing 180 WPM without errors, or deadlifting 900 pounds.
Alex Gladstein Human Rights Activist
The media, governments, and the establishment continue to say Bitcoin is useless.
Unfortunately for them, I packed my Nashville keynote with dozens of specific Bitcoin use cases from across the world in the areas of commerce, freedom, and energy. No price talk, all utility
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24waV3Fwvow
I don’t have an opinion about Caitlin Long or Custodia Bank but she has reported on the story below and it’s very personal.
© 4/16/25 @CaitlinLong_
@CaitlinLong_’s Avanti crypto bank has filed an application to become a Federal Reserve member bank 2021 Founder/CEO @CustodiaBank in Wyoming.
https://caitlin-long.com/
Liz Warren pulled all the financial strings in the Biden admin
THIS BOMBSHELL HAS BEEN AN OPEN SECRET in Washington for quite a while–so much so that it wasn’t really a secret anymore. *FINALLY* someone put it in writing:
Contrary to what I believed in early 2023, when I labeled NYDFS
Superintendent Adrienne Harris one of the architects of Operation
Choke Point 2.0, it was the FDIC’s call. Per sources, Superintendent
Harris was not eager to take Signature down, but she relented. Late
on Friday night, the NYDFS began the process of seizing Signature,
and on Sunday, the FDIC instructed New York to send the bank into
receivership. Now, the FDIC had their “systemic” crisis, so the
exception for Silicon Valley Bank was triggered. Pelosi got her way:
uninsured depositors at SVB, Signature, and later, First Republic,
would be made whole.
Signature died for the sins of SVB.
**Elizabeth Warren had de facto control over Biden’s economic & financial regulatory team.**
Historians, have fun…
To understand the full chain of events, we have to go back to early
2022, when Marty Gruenberg was reinstalled as FDIC chair. It’s
widely understood that presidential candidate Biden had struck a
deal with Senator Elizabeth Warren whereby she would support his
candidacy in exchange for total discretion over the composition of
his financial regulatory apparatus. Accordingly, she placed former
staffers in the National Economic Council (NEC), the White House
body that coordinates financial policy and helps vet candidates for
key financial regulatory agency posts. It’s also understood that she
had first refusal over financial regulators at the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC), FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of
the Currency (OCC), and the Fed.
AND LOOKY HERE…a name that insiders also surfaced when the White House & Fed went after @custodiabank, using the press to try to intimidate us into withdrawing our Fed applications by telling us the Fed Board would vote down our application–2 days before the vote happened:
What happened next is commonly known among D.C. and financial
regulator insiders: Warren’s protégés at the NEC and beyond,
including Bharat Ramamurti, spread the rumor in the press that
Harris had withdrawn her name from consideration, and leaked that
her campaign for the FDIC role was troubled by issues that had
surfaced during her background check. This was a lie: Harris’s
record was squeaky clean — she had been thoroughly vetted for her
role at NYDFS. But it was enough for Gruenberg to nudge ahead of
Harris and regain his seat at the FDIC for a second term (which, with
the benefit of hindsight, was a catastrophe). 12
HOW DC REALLY WORKS:
On Friday, the situation deteriorated when SVB depositors
attempted to withdraw $100 billion from the bank. Shortly before
noon Eastern Time, SVB was taken into FDIC receivership. Nancy
Pelosi then made calls to the White House and Treasury asking for
uninsured SVB deposits to be guaranteed. Her husband, Paul Pelosi,
ran a business based in San Francisco called Financial Leasing
Services, which engaged in mezzanine startup lending. Sources
familiar informed me that Paul Pelosi’s firm would likely have gone
out of business or suffered severely adverse consequences had
uninsured deposits at SVB not been guaranteed.
It’s unclear whether Paul’s business interests were Nancy’s primary
concern, whether she was simply trying to salvage a major
Californian financial institution, attempting to prevent even more
political fallout in an already strained relationship between
Democrats and tech, trying to prevent a broader crisis precipitated
by the total liquidation of VB’s uninsured depositors — or any/all of
the above. Interestingly, SVB was located in Ro Khanna’s district, not
Pelosi’s; in other words, this wasn’t a case of her going to bat for a
business in her own district.
AND LOOKY HERE–another name from the @custodiabank
situation surfaces again here: Michael Barr.
Gov Bowman dissented from Barr’s later self-assessment of the Fed’s performance during the Spring 2023 bank failures. I don’t recall seeing this detail in the Fed’s self-assessment:
Signature’s treasurer had not put in the request to borrow from the
FHLB — a network of 11 regional banks across the U.S. that provides
low-cost funding to member institutions, especially in times of
stress — by close of business on Friday, but bank leadership felt it
could easily unlock liquidity against those assets with a bit of
cooperation from the Fed. Barney Frank leapt into action, drawing
on his prodigious network. At around 5:30 p.m. ET, he called Jerome
Powell. Powell referred him to Michael Barr, then Vice Chair of
Supervision at the Fed. The ask was for the Fed to set up a triparty
agreement allowing Signature to borrow from the Fed using their
collateral parked at the FHLB, and to open the discount window
over the weekend. Barr said he would look into it. He never called
back.
For posterity, here’s a tweet from @StevenKelly49 on that very subject at the time Barr released his self-assessment of the Fed’s performance:
Steven Kelly
@StevenKelly49
Whoa. Gov Bowman coming out swinging on the bank failure postmortems:
“Much of this work was prepared internally, by Federal Reserve supervision staff, relying on a limited number of unattributed source interviews, and completed on an expedited timeframe with a limited scope.”
up to the bank failures. But much of this work
was prepared internally, by Federal Reserve
supervision staff, relying on a limited number
of unattributed source interviews, and
completed on an expedited timeframe with a
limited scope. There is a genuine question whether
these efforts provide a sufficient accounting of
what occurred. A supplemental, independent
review would help overcome the limitations of
Speech by Governor Bowman on bank regulation and supervision:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20230625a.htm
Yet while Interim Chair Hill is pursuing a more accommodating
course for the agency as it pertains to innovative activity at banks,
career FDIC staff appear to be fighting the last war — trying to
justify the questionable decision to destroy a solvent bank, and one
that was known for its progressive approach to crypto. Michelle
Bowman, Michael Barr’s presumptive replacement as Vice Chair of
Supervision at the Fed, has pledged24 to undertake an independent
third-party review ofthe regulatory failures that led to the banking
crisis in 2023. Instead of trying to rationalize prior bad decisions
with frivolous litigation against Signature, bank regulators should
revisit the circumstances of the bank’s collapse — and determine
whether it was improperly closed, and why it was denied access to
adequate liquidity facilities during the crisis.
YEP, and it wasn’t just Gruenberg’s FDIC,
@BarneyFrank
The same was true of the Fed under Barr’s reign at S&R. What’s the common thread? Answer: Elizabeth Warren’s control over Biden’s economic & financial regulatory appointees, as @nic__carter referenced early in the article.
For his part, Barney Frank remains adamant that Signature was targeted by the FDIC for its crypto-focused lines of business. He told me: “Some people at the FDIC were so opposed to crypto that the
fear was not that we were going to fail because ofcrypto, but that we were going to succeed. And they didn’t want there to exist a successful example of a bank serving crypto.”
— Nic Carter
The daisy chain continued. Signature was hung out to dry because
allowing SVB to collapse — and with it, a huge fraction ofthe Bay
Area startup sector — was either politically unacceptable with the
approaching election year, economically disastrous, intolerable to
Nancy Pelosi because of her husband’s business interests, or any/all
ofthe above. The FDIC had to justify its Systemic Risk Exception
with a non-California bank, and New York’s Signature was the
sacrificial Iamb.
thinks that’s the case.) The main reason Signature was left high and
dry — without regulatory assistance or the time to save itself — was
to justify invoking the Systemic Risk Exception necessary to protect
SVB depositors. Virtually everyone I spoke to with familiarity of
Signature’s financials told me that the bank wasn’t insolvent — only
marginally illiquid at worst. Opinions vary on whether Signature
needed additional liquidity to make it through Monday or whether it
would have been able to manage on its own. 20 Every source for this
story was adamant Signature would have survived with the slightest
accommodation from regulators — accommodations that were
freely granted to other banks during the crisis.
Barney Frank’s view that Signature Bank was targeted by federal regulators due to its crypto business has *strengthened* during the ensuring two years:
Two years after the collapse, the commonly accepted narrative is
that Signature failed due to mismanagement by leadership. The
GAO’s postmortem18 reads: “FDIC found that Signature Bank’s
planning and control weaknesses prevented it from adequately
identifying, measuring, and controlling liquidity risk. We also found
that poor governance and unsatisfactory risk management practices
were root causes ofSignature Bank’s failure.”
Some believe Signature was a political target due to its crypto
affiliation, and at the margin, this may have made it a more attractive
takeout candidate. Barney Frank was adamant this was the case,
telling The New York Times,19 “I think we were shot to encourage
the other [banks] to stay away from crypto.” And undeniably, by
forcibly shuttering Silvergate and Signature — alongside their
crypto settlement networks, Silvergate Exchange Network and
SigNet — regulators dealt the crypto industry a huge blow.
I asked Barney Frank whether his view had changed in the two years
since Signature’s collapse. Quite the contrary, he told me. His view
that it was targeted due to its crypto business had strengthened,
especially given the revelations in documents released in the
Coinbase lawsuit against the FDIC, which revealed a long-running
campaign against banks dealing with crypto.
HOW MUCH DID THE FED’S BOARD ACTUALLY KNOW when it voted to invoke the Systemic Risk Exception??? Congressional investigators must seek and disclose the answer:
External assessments also validate Signature’s view that the crisis
was survivable. As Senator Hagerty put it in the postmortem Senate
hearing:17 “If you combine [the cash position and lending capacity]
with the federal liquidity programs that were put in place over the
weekend of March 11th and 12th, it appears that Signature was
neither insolvent nor illiquid. At the very least, it seemed that it
would have had the tools at its disposal to navigate all of this.”
On Sunday evening at 6:17 p.m., 47 minutes after NY DFS delivered
Signature into the hands of the FDIC, the FDIC invoked the Systemic
Risk Exception. This is not a minor thing. It required two-thirds of
the Fed Board, two-thirds of the FDIC Board, the Treasury
Secretary, and the President to all collectively agree. Now,
Washington had the air cover it needed to invoke the exception and
make SVB depositors whole.
The NYDFS carried out its marching orders from the FDIC and sent
Signature into receivership on Sunday night. The New York financial
regulator later blamed15 the shutdown on leadership’s inability to
“provide reliable data and a credible liquidity strategy.” The words
“insolvent” or “illiquid” do not appear in Superintendent Harris’s
postmortem16 ofthe bank. Barney Frank told me that the bank “was
solvent but not liquid. We could have become liquid with temporary
funds from the Fed, which others later received.”
Bowman has good reason to re-open the Fed’s bank failure post-mortem. Barr famously siloed information within the Fed’s Supervision & Regulation Division, and Bowman’s dissent from its self-assessment confirmed other Fed Governors didn’t have access. Did they even know this??
Later on Friday night, one of Signature’s cofounders called the FDIC
and was taken aback at the agency’s dismissive and unhelpful tone.
He asked the FDIC to impress upon the Fed the gravity ofthe
situation and to help persuade them to facilitate the triparty
agreement with the FHLB to unlock Signature’s stranded collateral.
At 7:30 p.m., the FDIC reached out to the Fed but was only able to
reach midlevel staffers, not senior leadership. Fed staffers initially
agreed to transfer Signature’s collateral housed at the FHLB to the
Fed but subsequently rejected transfers several times that night.
For posterity, here’s a tweet from @StevenKelly49 on that very subject at the time Barr released his self-assessment of the Fed’s performance:
Whoa. Gov Bowman coming out swinging on the bank failure postmortems:
“Much of this work was prepared internally, by Federal Reserve supervision staff, relying on a limited number of unattributed source interviews, and completed on an expedited timeframe with a limited scope.”
up to the bank failures. But much of this work
was prepared internally, by Federal Reserve
supervision staff, relying on a limited number
of unattributed source interviews, and
completed on an expedited timeframe with a
limited scope. Although the report was
published as a report of the Board of
Governors, it was the product of one Board
Member, and was not reviewed by the other
members of the Board prior to its publication.
Troublingly, other Board members were
afforded no ability to contribute to the report’s
content. There is a genuine question whether
these efforts provide a sufficient accounting of
what occurred. A supplemental, independent
review would help overcome the limitations of
‘*•.¸♡ ♡¸.•*’
ECP NetHappenings Bitcoin 4-15-25
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