When Bernie Marcus talks, conservatives listen.
The Home Depot co-founder’s opinions are as easy to find — and as useful — as the chain of tool-and-appliance stores he started in 1978 that brought lumber yards from the outskirts of town into shopping plazas, and changed the way Americans work on their homes.
And when it comes to Friday’s failure of the Silicon Valley Bank — and the ongoing failure of the Joe Biden presidency, Marcus hit the nail right on the head.
In an appearance Saturday on Fox Business News’ “Cavuto Live,” Marcus, a 93-year-old who retired in 2002 from the company that made him a billionaire, had sympathetic words for depositors who might have lost millions, caustic words for the SVB officials who sold some of their stock in the bank only weeks before the collapse, and words of warning for Americans as a whole about what the SVB failure could portend about the economy, and what it says about the Biden presidency.
“I feel bad for all of these people that lost all their money in this woke bank. You know, it was more distressing to hear that the bank officials sold off their stock before this happened. It’s depressing to me,” Marcus told host Neil Cavuto.
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“Who knows whether the Justice Department would go after them? They’re a woke company, so I guess not. And they’ll probably get away with it.”
Considering the politics of Big Tech — which were painfully obvious even before Twitter owner Elon Musk started revealing them regularly with each new release of the “Twitter Files” — it’s no surprise that an entity called the “Silicon Valley Bank” would have considerable leftist leanings.
On Friday, the New York Post reported that SVB’s head of financial risk management in its United Kingdom branch devoted an inordinate amount of time to promoting LGBT issues.
On Saturday, TheBlaze noted that the bank’s Twitter account showed an interest in race that bordered on the unhealthy.
Marcus’s words about the SVB officials who dumped their own stock were backed up by recent reports, too.
According to Newsweek, SVB President and CEO Gregory Becker sold more than $3.5 million in stock in the back on Feb. 17.
On the same day, according to Newsweek, SVB’s chief financial officer Daniel Beck sold more than a half-million dollars worth of stock in the bank.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe that kind of thing happens all the time. And maybe, as Marcus implied, bankers of a certain political breed enjoy a little more … freedom of movement than others.
But where Marcus really nailed it was his extrapolation for what the news meant for President Joe Biden and his administration — and what it could mean for the American people.
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“I can’t wait for Biden to get on the speech again and talk about how great the economy is and how it’s moving forward and getting stronger by the day. And this is an indication that whatever he says is not true,” Marcus told Cavuto. “And maybe the American people will finally wake up and understand that we’re living in very tough times, that, in fact, that a recession may have already started. Who knows? But it doesn’t look good.”
“Whatever he says is not true.” There may be no better summation of the Biden presidency possible than those six words.
Marcus also blamed the Biden administration for forcing companies to toe the leftist line, rather than concentrate on doing what they’re created for — making profits for their shareholders.
In the current parlance, that’s known as environmental, social and corporate governance — or ESG — which tries to turn hard-headed money-making operations into some kind of non-government organizations with a leftist bent.
“I think that the system, that the administration has pushed many of these banks into [being] more concerned about global warming than they do about shareholder return. And these banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is, shareholder returns,” Marcus told Cavuto.
“Instead of protecting the shareholders and their employees, they are more concerned about the social policies. And I think it’s probably a badly run bank. They’ve been there for a lot of years. It’s pathetic that so many people lost money that won’t get it back.”
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It’s pathetic that the economy is falling apart in the third year of the Biden presidency.
It’s pathetic that liberals can find only former President Donald Trump to blame whenever anything goes awry under the Biden administration.
Many on the left blamed Trump for the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Since word of the SVB failure started spreading, many leftists have been doing it again, as Fox News reported.
But blaming a previous president — and a law he signed in 2018 for the ills afflicting the United States today — isn’t going to fly, particularly when the Biden administration has been so relentlessly in-your-face about its obsession with the value of what it calls “diversity.”
“The Fed keeps raising rates and inflation keeps going in the wrong direction. It’s not staying where it should be. People are struggling. People can’t pay their bills. They can’t fill their tanks with gas. And if you think that’s a good sign, I don’t think it is,” Marcus said.
“And we have an administration that’s obtuse to this. They just keep talking about the great times and how good it is. It’s not good.”
No one who’s been shopping for groceries lately can miss Marcus’ point. And even if there’s no public acknowledgment yet that Democrats see the hurdles they’ve created for themselves in the 2024 election — starting with Biden himself and working down from Vice President Kamala Harris — it’s going to come.
When Bernie Marcus talks, sensible people listen.
But when reality screams, there’s no escaping it.
