Are Bank Runs Coming Soon to your Area?

The Largest FDIC Insured Bank Since Lehman Collapsed as the 2nd One in 3 Days. Is Contagion Spreading?

This is going to be a Coffee and Covid style roundup, in honor of fellow Pisces Jeff Childers, whose birthday, if memory serves me, just passed. Happy Birthday Jeff whether it is belated or not. Hope you’re enjoying it.

As a fair number of readers know I flew back into Thailand one week ago. Some of you might be curious about how my trip went or the state of international travel now. Everything was okay there, though I had the longest flight I’ve ever taken, a 15 hour jaunt from LAX to Doha, Qatar. I’m used to layovers in say Tokyo or Hong Kong or Seoul. I knew this had to be clear on the opposite side of the world.

Let’s look at the flight map.

So a question remains, would we fly east or west?

The answer of course is neither. We flew north. Weeee!

We flew into Greenland then cut south over Oslo, Norway, then further South were in Iraqi airspace. This is all a technological, modern day wonder that I don’t think enough people appreciate. I’m sure that the airplane on the flight map was not scaled to size, but other than that, I have no problem wrapping my head around how this looked presuming that the Earth is round. If someone wants to try to explain it on a flat Earth model, go for it. It boggles my mind.

Google still claims that I need to be twice jabbed to come to Thailand, but a smaller print TripAdvisor article from February mentions that those requirements were dropped. I was not asked about it.

People seemed to be over facemasks where ever I went. In the terminal for LAX I’d put the number wearing them at 2% or 3%. That’s like 1 in 50. The numbers increased slightly on the 15 hour flight to maybe 5% of passengers. It would have to be uncomfortable to wear one of those things for 15 hours without taking it off for eating or drinking, which presumably would ruin the point. More flight attendants were masked but they took them off in the back cabin area, so I presume it’s for some type of optics.

The percentage wearing facemasks rose to about 10% in DOH. It sits at around 20% in Phuket in my area. These numbers are all way down.

I went on a twitter thread called BringBackMasks a few days ago. It was apparently started in response to a lot of medical settings in the USA dropping facemask requirements. While I can celebrate knowing that I can finally enter these places and get a medical or dental procedure done I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the remaining virtue signalers. I guess it’s like the Japanese soldiers found on some remote island years after World War 2 who didn’t know that it was finished. It’s a religious zealotry that will never go away and the sincere ones I suspect have brains that are permanently broken.

There is no update on my lack of electric situation. It’s like the more I know the less I know. Some big guy cut the power it’s above our landlord’s head but he is willing to rewire his line to us for the low price of 10,200 baht or conversely he has lots of small bungalows I can rent out that have power. Nobody has packed up their houses on the back block but only one other, an older married couple, seems to stay in their unelectrified house at night. We have a few solar powered power banks and one solar powered light out front. A generator is a little expensive if it’s just on my dole. I still don’t know if I’m dealing with Muslims, the Military or the Mafia. That land development office is looking like a good plan this week.

I have not been able to sign up for AseanNow. I have tried a few dozen times and it always gives me the same error which is that I answered the challenge question wrong which is usually either What is the third letter of the alphabet or what is eight minus one. I’ll try it from my husband’s Thai phone but in the meantime I posted the puppies on Facebook marketplace. I’ve had a few questions and somebody who was supposed to come out yesterday but nothing yet.

Speaking of Facebook am I the only one who is seeing a lot of asses on my news feed? I mean since my account got hacked in December I’ve been more willing to take friend requests from just about everyone, but a fair number of them are people I supposedly know, usually from Ohio. The story section is filled with pictures of women’s asses in tight thongs or whatever, followed by some sort of “I will give you $10,000 on CashApp message me” or something of that sort. So of course I did message with a few of these people about this obvious seeming scam.

“I knew you when you were a baby how did you get messed up in this stuff?” I tsked tsked, probably sounding grandmotherly, to a young woman who I thought was my brother’s ex girlfriends sister’s daughter. There’s a lot of variations sometimes they want me to screenshot my cashapp (I do have one at $AmySukwan—donations appreciated there also) for them to show that the $10,000 they are going to deposit no questions asked has actually come through. I’m presuming they would use this pending payment to sucker others in. Some want me to invest in bitcoin. All promise me $5000 or more just because they want to spread the wealth or something.

It all seems a bit desperate to me. First why can’t at least one of them take a picture of a man’s butt in a thong? I mean let’s mix it up a little bit. I have no interest in seeing either but at least that might make me laugh. It also might be more intriguing for the right person. And can you use fake dollar numbers for our clown world? “I will give you one kajillion quadrillion Brazilian dollars ask me how.” Make it funny at least. Ohio people are apparently the new Nigerian Prince.

I anyone else still on facebook noticing this? And if you really have been randomly handed $10K on your cashapp or whatever I might want more information!

Speaking of which I guess I should round back to the financial contagion thing. As reported by Brian Shillavy, Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest in the USA became the second bank to collapse in 3 days. This marks the second largest collapse in US history after Lehman in 2008 and sets off concerns about a financial contagion setting in. As reported:

This news has led to a dramatic drop in value in trading for ALL banks, and several of them reportedly suspended trading on the NYSE for a while today. Bank runs have also been reported.

Venture Capital firms who held accounts at SVB are panicking. The Information reports:

Startups and VCs Scramble to Pay Employees After SVB’s Collapse

The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sowed panic at hundreds of startups and venture capital firms that banked there and now must seek new ways to pay employees and access funds from their investors and customers.

Founders and VC firms, which also kept billions of dollars worth of assets with SVB, on Friday rushed to figure out whether they could get loans to cover payroll if their funds were still tied up in the bank, which a federal banking regulator took under receivership on Friday.

“The reality is sinking in among founders who are realizing, ‘I have payroll this week and I’m not able to log into my SVB account right now.’ And maybe the money will be there in the future, but they need it right now,” said Billy Libby, CEO of startup debt and equity investor Upper90.

The scramble highlighted Silicon Valley Bank’s deep connections with the tech industry. Besides clients that deposited cash or took out loans from the bank, hundreds of startups and dozens of venture capital firms had received investments from the bank’s venture capital arm.

Its startup portfolio includes crypto compliance firm Chainalysis and credit card startup Jeeves, PitchBook said. Many VC firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, have also held their money at the bank, according to PitchBook.

One startup founder said they had about $10 million in an SVB checking account when the bank failed. The company’s finance team is now trying to open a new bank account and use the company’s Treasury bills and other securities to pay vendors and employees.

“I am talking to people whose only bank account was at SVB and they are trying to figure out how to make payroll. That’s a true statement. That’

s scary for a lot of people,” said Andy Boyd, who used to lead tech investing at Fidelity Investments and now runs Bramalea Partners, a VC firm. (Full article – Subscription required.)

Could this be the beginning of a broader contagion? Stocks are at their lowest point in 2023. According to Zerohedge, this is “The Worst Since Lehman,”

The worst week for stocks in 2023... On the week, all the US majors were down hard with Small Caps crashing 9%, S&P, Dow, and Nasdaq over 4% lower...

The Dow has been underwater on the year for over a week and is now down 4% in 2023. Today's ugliness smashed the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 down to unchanged on the year...

Do you think this might be the start of a broader contagion? Or will it just be a few people with $250K plus in deposits getting haircuts? It’s a space I’ll be watching especially with the CBDC planned rollouts…

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