Woke Banking, with Women in Charge

Serious people do not take human interest stories very seriously. After all, they are just a small step above gossip, and serious people look at facts and figures. They do not wallow in gossip.

And yet, we could not fail to notice the feminist commentator on television last week explaining that the problem with the Silicon Valley Bank was techie bro culture. You see, the wild and witty bros had nearly destroyed a bank. We could fix the problem, said feminist opined, by putting more women in charge.

Of course, no one bothered to check on who was in charge of the SVB. No one except for Melissa Koenig of the Daily Mail. When Koenig started researching the bank, she discovered, lo and behold, that the bank’s board of directors was nearly half female, and that it only contained one person who had any experience with banking. The rest of the board was comprised of diversity hires, especially Democratic Party mega donors. That is, it was comprised of Hillary Clinton supporters, good feminists all, who checked the equity and inclusion boxes. 

Will wonders never cease?

Koenig explains:

Just one member of Silicon Valley Bank's board of directors had a career in investment banking, while the others were major Democratic donors, it has been revealed.

Tom King, 63, was appointed to the board in September after previously serving as the CEO of investment banking at Barclay's. He has had 35 years of experience in investment banking.

But he is the only one on the board with a career in the financial industry, while others are a former Obama administration employee, a prolific contributor to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even a Hillary Clinton mega-donor who prayed at a Shinto shrine when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

So, the bank was in the best of hands. And it was largely in the best of female hands. How did that one work out?

Dare we mention that the Signature Bank, the other bank that has just been shut down, was fully woke. And that it gave some very serious money to anyone who was running against Donald Trump. Besides, the head of Signature led a seminar on woke pronouns.

At the least, this bank, along with SVB, and the unfortunate, soon to fail Credit Suisse, was being run by Democrats. So much for the vast right wing conspiracy.

The New York Post reports:

Struggling Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Credit Suisse bet big on Democratic candidates over the past three election cycles, according to a Post review of fundraising data.

The banks — through their employees and affiliated PACs — donated nearly $1.2 million to Democrats between 2017 and 2022, according to the government transparency group OpenSecrets. Republican candidates got fewer than $750,000 over the same period.

All three banks spent big to defeat former President Donald Trump in 2020, collectively giving $198,926 to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

SVB, Signature Bank and Credit Suisse jointly gave just $17,597 to Trump in 2020 and $5,516 to his upstart run in 2016.

Since 2016, the banks have also donated $89,322 to the Democratic National Committee, as well as tens of thousands more to the individual Senate campaigns of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), among others.

As for Signature’s wokery, consider this report about the pronoun seminar, led by the company CEO:

Scott Shay — chairman of the doomed Signature Bank — co-hosted a company seminar last October in which employees were instructed for more than an hour on using gender-neutral pronouns such as “Ze” and “Hir.”

Video circulating on social media shows Shay — whose New York-based bank was shut down by regulators over the weekend in a bid to stave off a US banking crisis — alongside Finn Brigham, a corporate consultant on gender issues.

The video of the Pride Council event presents Brigham, who works as director of project management for the Manhattan-based nonprofit Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an LGBTQ health clinic, as a “genderqueer trans masculine person.”

In the hour-plus video, Shay and Brigham deliver a lecture titled “Know Your Pronouns,” part of the bank’s “Social Impact” series.

So, Signature Bank failed. It could not have happened to a better group of people. Somehow or other banks and corporate executives do not understand that going woke leads to going broke. They are all-in for diversity, equity and inclusion-- until their companies implode. Let’s hope that the authorities can limit the damage.