Silicon Valley Bank… And Donetsk

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I received a reader comment, as follows, below.

This has been rather typical, over the last few days.

Don’t know about “duration risk”. The term is duration mismatch. They locked in on long dated paper. Let’s say they locked in at 2% for 10 years using a treasury bond, assume at a cost of $1000 ea.. They pay 0.1% interest to depositors. Those accounts are essentially zero duration. Interest rates (Fed Funds) rise to 4%. Depositors want a higher rate as they can get 4% on T-bills. So they start withdrawing. The Ten year bonds SVB bought 2 years ago are now around $700 ea.. They HAVE to sell these bonds to get the money for depositors. 30% loss. They can use the Fed discount window, but that’s going to be 4.5% interest. But they are only making 2% on their assets.

They should have hedged, but they didn’t.

My response:

Some serious misunderstanding here. The yield is never locked in, only the coupon is locked in. And you can sell your Treasuries any time, perhaps at a loss, but it’s not like a $100 paper bond certificate that you buy for your nephew as a novelty, and he holds it until it matures. In the adult world of AAA bonds, no one is “locked in.”

The REAL “duration mismatch” is in a bank’s non-callable loan portfolio, but in that case, ALL banks, EVERYWHERE, have duration mismatch, ALL the time, since the DAWN OF BANKING.

Pretending (as “they” have done) that this was an SVB problem only, to deflect from the systemic crisis, is REALLY dishonest. As if all these smart people, don’t know what banking is about? Yeah, OK.

They were just seeding talking points among the peasants. I saw it play out in real time with Bill Ackman being carried by “Citizen Free Press”, which is a sort of reboot of the Drudge Report, very popular.

A LOT of proles have fallen for it, more than a few commenters on this site have fallen for it. So many of them repeating the “should have hedged” BS, like they are experts all of a sudden. Do they even know what “hedging” is?

The only hedge is for the government to maintain an atmosphere of confidence, all the time. Any bank will fall if enough depositors start asking for their money, and don’t stop. You can’t “hedge” against that.

This reminds me of July 2014, when the Malaysian Boeing was shot down over Donetsk, and everyone became an overnight expert on the alleged trail of “the Buk”, and the rebel personalities allegedly involved, some guy code-named “Beast” among others, LOL. That guy was probably too busy raiding police stations for bullets. He was in charge of the Buk, like I’m a pimp in a fur coat. It was all BS.

But people are all the same, always. If one doesn’t understand something, it’s a new or unfamiliar topic, one will latch on to whatever talking points are going around. Critical thinking is always in very short supply.

We are all, always, at risk of being a sock puppet for some spin-master. Some much more, some less, but there’s always some risk.

Well, that covers “duration mismatch.”

In my next post…..

I aim to cover the alleged “duration risk” BS…..

It’s a bit more complicated.

I’ll give you more detail, than I did in my recent long headline.

BTW, I just got a reader email, asking:

What is yield?

I guess my “rent on money” explanation…..

…..from “Dreizin Explains Banking“…..

…..was too nebulous.

“Yield” is the expected gain, for the buyer, on a bond.

Probably the concept is obscured…..

…..by the multiple meanings of the word.

In Russian, the word for “yield” (in the financial sense)…..

…..доходность…..

…..is really more like “profitability.”

Anyway…..

Yield is a function of a bond’s price…..

…..(think, relative to “par (face) value”)…..

…..it’s coupon payments…..

…..and its remaining time until maturity.

There is an arithmetical formula for it, you can look it up online.

Speaking of BS…..

So, they went online…..

…..and got some photos of a Russian women’s jail.

Wonderful.

That’s all the evidence you need, LOL.

Can someone please explain…..

Why are Brits so stupid?

Not the ones reading me…..

…..but all the others?

I mean, Brits have to be stupid…..

…..to believe this shit, day in, day out.

(I assume, if they didn’t believe it, day in, day out… the papers wouldn’t publish it.)

Brit papers are the Worst of the Worst.

Why is that?

My Twitter Engagement Fell Off A Cliff

Folks, still got some really good, original stuff for you…..

…..further down.

But, first…..

It looks as though…..

If I don’t keep asking, in every post…..

Then, people can’t be bothered to remember…..

…..to “like” my tweets.

Well, here I am, asking.

Please like my tweets.

Go back and like everything you’ve read.

Thank you!

Of course, if that’s asking too much…..

You’re always free to give me money.

I’m raising money to be with these ladies:

But, I want to be clear…..

If you’re a pensioner…..

…..eating spaghetti with ketchup for dinner…..

…..or a single dad with two kids, on a blue collar salary…..

I DO NOT need any money from you.

If you need that $5 or $15 much more than I do….

…..then, please…..

…..just follow me on Twitter, it’s enough.

As it is…..

I’ve got at least a couple of thousand readers…..

…..who do nothing for me at all.

So, don’t feel bad.

Thanks.

Ukrainian Ethnogenesis…..

…..And, Why ANY Ukrainian State Will Always Descend Into Fascism

Here’s another one from my “comment response bin.”

In large part, here’s what I wrote:

As for the Nazism, they can’t avoid it.

The Ukraine is a historically new construction. Until the late 19th century, the Ukraine was merely a region, and 100% of its inhabitants, the Ukrainians, or Rusyns (Ruthenians) as they were called in areas under Austria at that time, considered that their language, or whatever regional dialect they spoke, was Russian (“Russka mova”), and they had zero political awareness or identity separate from Russia (with the exception of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who were Cossacks, not as presently described, “Ukrainian Cossacks”, LOL.)

The concept of a “Ukrainian language” and the associated identity was constructed in areas under Austrian rule (parts of Galicia and Volhynia), with Austrian support and state financing, immediately after the local iteration of the 1848 revolutions, as a way to quell pro-Russian irredentism among landowners and the Russian Orthodox church in the region. From here on, the Galician literary dialect was also set as the “one and only” Ukrainian language, similar to how the dialect of Florence became “standard Italian.”

Due to Russia’s backwardness, the Russian Empire was unable to standardize its linguistic landscape in the same manner as the Germans and French had largely done by prior to World War 1, or World War 2 at the latest. That process requires compulsory schooling and mass literacy, which Russia did not have until Soviet days. Hence, by the time of the Russian Revolution, the Galician Ukrainist movement had been able to gain some marginal but elite following throughout all territories that spoke Ukrainian dialects rather than “Great Russian.”

This was subsequently channeled, with the Russian collapse of 1917-1918, into the formation of the Ukrainian breakaway state. After this was put down by the Bolsheviks (first and foremost, Ukrainian urban Bolsheviks from Kharkov and what’s today called Donetsk), it again came to life under German rule with the Galician-based Banderist movement.

Most Ukrainians did not vote for independence from the USSR in 1991, but the republic was abandoned by Yeltsin, and thus, had independence thrust upon it. There was a general lack of enthusiasm for the state, a lack of understanding as to its purpose, especially as by this time, almost all Ukrainian citizens spoke Russian as their language of work, at least, and among well over half of the population, of the home as well. In short, there was a near-total ideological vacuum.

The only people who had an ideology… were, well, guess who.

Today, excepting the far northwest, with its dominant Greek Catholic church, the Ukraine is still so similar to Russia (culturally there is ZERO difference)…..

…..that the ONLY way any Ukrainian leadership can aim to make its state distinct, to justify its own rule, is to invent a completely fictitious, phony history of some coherent, historical “Ukraine” that never existed (their school history textbooks are a RIOT)…..

…..and to adopt a “supremacist”, Russian-exclusionist approach and ideology. Like, “We’re not Russian goddamn it, we were never Russian, we will cut the Russian out of us, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly if we can, but we’ll get rid of it, because the Ukraine isn’t big enough for minorities or two nationalities, so, someone needs to get steamrolled.”

In short, fascism.

The Ukrainian state (under German protection) of 1918, and then again with the Banderist movement (again under German protection, or benign neglect at least) during WW2 and then in exile… were explicitly fascistic. The former, even before the term existed.

I wrote last summer or so, that any independent Ukrainian entity will ALWAYS arrive at fascism as its governing ideology. It just took much longer this time (since 1991), in part because of the dominance of Russian cultural and professional media (and the difficulty in re-Ukrainizing in the absence of a sufficient written base and professional need) and the enormous cross-border family bonds left over from Soviet days.

But, it happened.

Obviously, Uncle Sam has taken advantage of this to establish his 51st state on the territory of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Obviously, the majority of Ukrainian officials, educators, etc., are just there to get paid. Like people everywhere, they go along and are not driving the ideology.

Nonetheless, no fascists… no 51st state.

Uncle Dreizin Wants YOU!

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Comments and any associated weblinks or other references must be directly relevant, tangential, and responsive to specific facts or views within my own published material (not just to other comments), specifically the material above the given comments section that you are adding to.  What this means, for example, is if I wrote about dogs and cats in the Ukraine, and only dogs and cats in the Ukraine, please don’t start babbling about life in Lugansk, or the horrible loss of life in general. THIS IS NOT A “DISCUSSION BOARD.” IT IS NOT A DEBATE PLATFORM TO DISCUSS IRRELEVANT HISTORICAL QUESTIONS, OR TO INJECT YOUR OWN PET SUBJECTS / INTERESTS, PHILOSOPHICAL MUSINGS, OR RANDOM RAMBLINGS THAT DON’T DIRECTLY, SUBSTANTIALLY BEAR ON WHAT I WROTE.  Please, no disjointed / overcaffeinated rambling, which implies, among other things, no mentioning eight different topics in one comment, like a schizoid aiming to connect all the dots (if your mind is racing, take your Ritalin and calm the fuck down before you comment on this site); no “pet issues” or inquiries that have no direct bearing on what I wrote; no unclear/unexplained, irrelevant, or barely-relevant weblinks; no trying to write your own mini-blog news update digest in my comments; no batteries of questions like what about Donetsk and what about Kiev and what about the Big Offensive and how does this all end and where does blah blah blah (I will NOT respond to you, I will BLOCK you); no asking me what I think of some commentator whom I’ve never heard of; no Nazis; no Nazis pretending to be Jewish like “I’m a bar mitzvah boy, but I’m so ashamed of my people who are not the real Jews of Jesus’ time“; no “crypto” Jew-hating (when I have to read it three times before I’m sure it’s about Jews, then I permanently block your wise ass); no dogmatic Marxists; no using anti-Ukraine jargon or other “Nadsat” bullshit-speak that you picked up from The Saker, which no one outside of you and your freaky virtual friends can understand (e.g., Ukrops, 404, the vimiratis); no calling for the destruction or dissolution of the USA or its government; no calling for the destruction of Washington, DC; no calling for violence against current or former elected or appointed officials of the U.S. Government; no nonconstructive or hateful ranting about Jews (or Swej, Joos, Jooz, Jooze, Juice, Juize, Jewz, Jewze, J-Dogs, J-Dogz, J-Dawgz, J’s, Chews, Choos, Chooz, Chooze, Zionists, Zio-Nazis, Anglo-American Zionists, Amerizionists, Zionist Occupation Government, ZOG, IsraHell, Bibi SatanYahoo, “those of whom we cannot speak”, “your friends whom we can’t talk about”, “a certain small ethnic group”, the chosen, the tribe, the chosen tribe, the thirteenth tribe, tribe of Judah, the Khazarians, Khazarian mafia, Rothschilds, Khazarian Rothschilds, JewTube, JooTube, JewMerica, JooMerica, etc., etc.); no being nasty to other commenters; no trolling the “sysop”; no passive-aggressive needling of the “sysop” (I don’t acknowledge, I just BLOCK and you’re gone, “one strike” and your ass is out, GO GET SOME THERAPY); no dissing or ragging on the Insane Clown Posse, no Chupacabras, no “country music”, no karens or avocado toast, no complaining that your other comment wasn’t published (because you’d didn’t read this Comments Policy), and no claiming “the korona doesn’t exist because vyruses don’t exist.”  Please share your ***CONCISE*** (2 smartphone screens of small font text is NOT concise, I don’t have time to read your dumb fucking manifesto, gawd dayyuuum!!!), relevant, coherent, organized thoughts, and come back for my next post. Also, by commenting, you expressly accept and agree to my “one bullet, one Nazi” policy, and please be advised, this includes Nazis everywhere, even in the Ukraine. Furthermore, if you are a LibJew/DemJew, you are BANNED from commenting on this site UNLESS you acknowledge the extensive presence and influence of Nazis and other fascists in the Ukraine, who don’t give a fuck that they have an allegedly “Jewish president”, because they’re still (in many cases) getting paid by the state, and they’ll “take their country back from the Jews” once they take care of the Russians (can’t slit all throats at once.) If you can’t acknowledge it, then get the fuck out with your “Never Again” bullshit. Also, no scrubs. If you don’t know what a “scrub” is, please consult the TLC video on YouTube. Although scrubs exist in ALL ethnic groups and populations, a very good example of scrubs, is all the poor young black men who get shot dead, and then the moms are like, “He had such aspirations, he was going to be a rapper.” Yeah, they were all going to be famous rappers, all the thousands of them! Sure!

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