The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank rocked the financial market on Friday, with many marveling at how quickly it seemed to happen. But Seth Meyers wasn’t at all surprised it happened, nor was he confused about who was responsible for it. The “Late Night” host joked that the meltdown is basically just the latest mystery “in a super boring game of Clue.”
If you haven’t been following SVB’s collapse, here’s what you need to know. On Wednesday, the bank told investors it needed to raise just over $2 billion to offset $1.8 billion in losses. On Thursday, dozens of SVB’s venture capital clients — at the urging of, among others, billionaire Peter Thiel — started pulling their assets from the bank.
In the end, these customers withdrew a staggering $42 billion, and as a result SVB was left with a negative cash balance of $958 million. So, on Friday morning, regulators shut the bank down and seized its assets.
As those involved have tried to figure out what went wrong, Meyers offered a blunt response on Monday night.
“I mean, of f—ing course it was Trump,” he said. “Trying to figure out what went wrong in this country has turned into a super boring game of Clue, where the weapon is always a pen and the killer is always Colonel Ketchup.”
How would this come back to the twice-impeached former president? Well, in 2018, Trump rolled back regulations that were put on banks in the Obama-era Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Among other pieces of the act, Trump’s legislation repealed liquidity requirements for the bank, and obviously, liquidity is what SVB needed on Friday.
Meyers tried to cut Trump a little slack, saying that it was entirely possible that he didn’t fully know what regulations he’d be gutting, since there are often a lot of weeds to get through on legislation.
“We have a team of researchers who can dig through the weeds of legislation to find carefully hidden adjustments to existing safety measures,” Meyers noted. “It’s not like Trump loudly bragged about it over and over again.”
Except, of course, he did exactly that. The “Late Night” host then played yet another supercut of videos to back him up, this time of every time Trump indeed bragged about actively dismantling Dodd-Frank.
“He actually said the words, ‘For the bankers in the room, they’ll be very happy.’ A true champion of the forgotten man,” Meyers mocked. “Who else was in the room with him? Was it an audience of literal fat cats? How could you possibly think rolling back regulations on banks 10 years after a financial meltdown could ever be a good idea?”
You can watch Meyers’ full “A Closer Look” segment in the video above.
