Fox News host Tucker Carlson questioned what the federal government would get in return for “backstopping” deposits at failed banks like Silicon Valley Bank Monday.
“What we know is the Biden administration is backstopping these deposits, okay. But that’s not the end of the story, in some ways it’s the beginning,” Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller News Foundation, said. “So here is where you pause and ask yourself a question that too few seem to be considering right now: They’re doing this, what are they going to get in return? Well, something for sure.” (RELATED: ‘Time To Buy Gold’: Tucker Carlson Reacts To ‘Second Biggest’ Bank Failure In American History)
Federal regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank Friday after its stock price collapsed and customers began a bank run following the financial institution’s disclosure of a $1.8 billion loss on asset sales due to high interest rates, CNBC reported. Depositors who had accounts at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which was shut down by regulators Sunday, will be able to fully recover their funds, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced in conjunction with the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Sunday.
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“Remember that after 2008, the Obama administration, Eric Holder swooped in and imposed DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion standards on the entire financial sector, and that’s one of the main reasons our big banks are now increasingly incompetent and one of reasons Americans are so divided by race,” Carlson said. “Ideologues who used the 2008 bank bailout to kill American meritocracy, that’s a big step, mostly unacknowledged, but we are living with its consequences. So, you have to ask yourself, what are they going to do this time?”
“What we know we’re about to see bank consolidation, big banks eating little banks, and that means less competition, more consolidation means more government control,” Carlson said. “What are they going to do with that control?”
Carlson criticized White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for noting that the officials addressing the crisis were all black women, and said her comments were more likely to include runs on regional banks. Several regional banks, notably First Republic, saw their stock prices drop during Monday’s trading, according to Fox Business.
“If you want to make people less confident in regional banks, the banking system more broadly, if you wanted to induce a run on the banks, this is how you talk,” Carlson said, saying it was more important to know that banks were solvent. Carlson also noted reports that Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona asked financial regulators if they had tools to censor social media in order to prevent bank runs.
A spokesperson for Kelly denied the reports in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The unsupported claim made by this blog post you referenced is false,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF. “On the briefing, Senator Kelly asked about *foreign adversaries* potentially trying to take advantage of this situation by spreading misinformation.”
“We have to ask the obvious question, how closer are we to some sort of disaster and to what extent are the people in charge abetting it?” Carlson asked.
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