How To Succeed In Business Without Really Succeeding

Be a banker and fail! Also: the trouble with bank regulators, plus the woke military spending that Freedom Caucus members want to eliminate.

There are days when I wish I were a failure. Being a highly esteemed magazine writer and published author just isn’t a very high-paying gig. I mean, sure, I do fine, my babies won’t starve. But it’s a cinch that any right wing tribune of the people who condemns me as a coastal elite will turn out, on inspection, to pull down at least twice my salary.

Rather than succeed in journalism, I ought to have failed in banking, because the pay is much, much better. James Herbert, First Republic’s founder and executive chairman, was paid $17.8 million in 2021, the last year for which data are available. Greg Becker, financial chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, got paid $13.7 million in 2021 and $13.5 million in 2022. Signature Bank president Joseph DePaolo was paid $8.7 million in 2022. Obviously their boards thought these guys were doing a splendid job, even as the guys themselves were frantically selling off their stock. Signature’s DePaolo dumped $13.9 million in Signature stock in 2021 and several million more in 2022. Top executives at First Republic got rid of more than $15 million in First Republic stock during the five months before regulators seized their bank. Silicon Valley’s Becker sold off $2.3 million in Silicon Valley Bank stock the week before regulators seized his bank. This is the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.

The day before, I read the three government reports released Friday about the bank crisis so you wouldn’t have to. The gist is that bank regulators knew full well that these banks were going down the tubes but didn’t do very much to stop it because that’s what bank regulators have been doing for at least 40 years. They remind me of an old joke about a guy who’s selling a horse. The buyer says, “Let me see him run,” and so the seller gives the horse’s flank a whack and it runs around the corral. The horse runs and runs, finally crashes into the fence, and is knocked out cold. “I can’t believe it,” the buyer says. “You tried to sell me a blind horse!” The seller replies: “Oh, he isn’t blind. He just doesn’t give a shit.” You can read my New Republic piece on regulators with sharp eyesight but little backbone here.

Also, I forgot to flag a piece I published on April 26 wherein I identify what part of military spending that the Freedom Caucus deems “woke.” It’s the Veterans Administration, the only Cabinet department that addresses needs and grievances on the basis of group identity. The wingnuts don’t actually say this, of course, but they show it through revealed preference in the debt-limit bill. You can read that here.