Waters: Too Early to Tell if Trump Rollbacks Caused SVB Collapse

Monday on CBS’ Red & Blue, House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) stated that she hasn’t come to any conclusions yet on whether regulatory rollbacks under the Trump administration caused the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Asked if she agreed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that the rollback of regulations in 2018 under the Trump administration was to blame, Waters replied, “Well, let me just say this: the rollback was troublesome for me and some of us who worked on Dodd-Frank reforms. However, we have to take a look at what is happening in our world today.

“For example, we have these startups,” Waters added. “They are different in terms of seeking out support and loans. We have banks that don’t deal with them directly because they don’t understand some of this creativity. And it’s not easy for the startups to get loans, and what we saw was Silicon Valley Bank that was the go-to bank for these startups and they were able to support them. Many have become successful. They have created jobs. The bank was handling payroll. And we wanted to make sure that the people and the staffs that are in these startups get paid, and we’ve done that.

“And so, I think we’re going to look at all of this,” she continued. “And we’re going to make some decisions. I’m not at any conclusions now about what we will do, what we won’t do. But I am very much focused on and relieved that we’ve done an extraordinary job in a short period of time and that we will work to see if we have re-define risk, if we need to have more stress tests, and whether or not we need to make sure there’s not the kind of deregulation that would cause a collapse by a bank.”