CORPORATE GREED NOT CLIMATE ACTION TANKS A BANK.....Republicans are blaming the collapse of two major banks over the weekend on “woke” investment practices, once again dragging the effort to address the climate crisis into America’s increasingly polarizing culture wars. But their reasoning doesn’t align with assessments from leading economists who have mostly tied the bank failures to risky bets on cryptocurrency—not clean energy—and the plummeting value of government-backed securities amid rising interest rates. High-profile Republican pundits and far-right lawmakers, including Donald Trump Jr., Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, chimed in with similar accusations on social media. And Suzanne Downing, a former communications director of the Alaska Republican Party, explicitly blamed financial institutions “buying into climate change theology” in a Sunday op-ed.   According to analyses by Baker and other well known economists, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, which held some $220 billion in assets and was America’s 16th largest commercial bank before its collapse Friday, was tied largely to the bank’s decision to buy up government bonds amid the tech boom between 2019 and 2022, when many Silicon Valley companies were flush with cash. Between the end of 2019 and the first quarter of 2022, deposits to Silicon Valley Bank more than tripled to $198 billion, far outpacing the national average, Marc Rubinstein, a former hedge fund manager and popular financial analyst, noted in his assessment. With deposits skyrocketing and demand for loans relatively low, the bank chose to invest the bulk of that money in government bonds, he said, which tanked in value as the tech boom faded and the Fed raised interest rates to curb inflation. As clients began asking for their money back, Silicon Valley Bank was forced to prematurely sell $21 billion in bonds at a $1.8 billion loss, triggering an old-fashioned bank run, Rubinstein concluded.Signature Bank’s collapse can be explained even more simplistically. As the finance trade publication Barron’s noted in its apt analysis, “the bank’s connections with cryptocurrency seem to have spooked depositors after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, prompting a run on the bank’s deposits which, in turn, prompted action from regulators."....no URL- read the article and checkout all the links.