Originally published at: Wall Street Journal ponders: did diversity cause the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank? | Boing Boing
…
18 Likes
Yeah, he really swept the board with all those bogus claims. Even managed to make veterans look suss, which is somewhat outside the box, I’ll give him that.
What’s the term for when you get an entirely full Bingo card? That’s what he was going for, surely.
41 Likes
Bank with dangerous overexposure to the startup sector and its deeply incestuous network of VCs collapses
“Could diversity have played a role?”
It’s like watching someone lose eleventy-zillion acres of genetically uniform wheat to some sort of rust fungus and pondering whether it was the time they were spending on obtaining…ethnic…farm workers that was to blame.
(edit: aside from that particularly glaring elephant in the room; this…‘thesis’… seems to zigzag wildly in terms of its commitment to the importance of talent: when it comes time for a motley lineup of diversity hires to be all the evidence needed that meritocracy was slain on the altar of political correctness it is all in on the idea; surely the situation could have been salvaged with just a few more frat bros in charge; yet, somehow, the capabilities of the talented are apparently so limited that they can’t even manage to just foist the diversity initiative off on some midlevel HR lackey and get back to banking?
How is it that your glorious meritocratic leadership are simultaneously so vital that they could have salvaged this situation and such fuckups that they can’t even delegate properly?)
29 Likes
JAQing off like this is all they have to explain away the bank failure in a way that will be palatable to their fellow white cis-het males from privileged backgrounds.
The always bonkers WSJ op-ed pages (which pre-date Murdoch and which also provided the inspiration for Ruben Bolling’s “Lucky Ducky”) are meant to sooth members of a certain group…
30 Likes
43 Likes
So if a bank has 11 white people and 1 Black person on the board it logically must be the Black person’s fault if the bank goes under. Christ, that’s a pretty racist conclusion even for Wall Street.
46 Likes
This is the first time I’ve heard “JAQing off” but god damn, I love that
25 Likes
Counterpoint: Trump hated having black people touch his money, only Jewish people in green visors, and still managed to bankrupt multiple casinos.
20 Likes
“There is no information about when those individuals joined the board, what their experience may have been, et cetera. There is no evidence presented to suggest that any of these individuals “benefitted” from any such diversity initiatives.”
So, there’s no evidence that the presence of these board members changed the actual activities of the board at all, really. It’s just implied that once you include a Black or LGBTQI+ member on the board, all those members are going to want to do is talk about diversity initiatives all day long. I’ll need proof of that, because I say it’s bullshit.
If a Black or LGBTQI+ member of your board is able to spend a significant amount of time talking about DEI, it’s because your company is fucked up and needs to change.
15 Likes
You’re one of today’s lucky 10-thousand!
Not my coinage but it does accurately describe the concept in both intent and result. Definitely a favourite activity on the WSJ op-ed pages.
23 Likes
Sounds like white thinking there…
It’s a constantly sea-lioning type problem around here… But happens out in the rest of the world too…
19 Likes
This smells much like the claims of rigged election against Dominion.
Using the same standard, assuming the (minority) of members were of mal intent, could they crater the company if they wanted to?
For the Dominion case, were there enough of their machines in use that if they were 100% compromised, would it have materially affected the outcome of the election?
(I don’t believe there were enough machines in use to affect such an outcome, if that was true.)
5 Likes
Yep. And if they could crater it, how well did the vaunted White Men do at setting up and running the company?
15 Likes
This is so fucking stupid on every god damn level.
They will blame everything but capitalism when capitalism fails.
24 Likes
“Were they distracted by DEI concerns?” Exactly how much of their board meetings were actually taken up discussing DEI? And SVB didn’t seem to be very good at it anyway, judging by the board’s composition.
It’s also a convenient way of squashing DEI initiatives moving forward “We can’t consider DEI right now, it might be a distraction from running the business!” And that is the real motivation here - not to pin the blame for SVB’s collapse on DEI, but to discourage other businesses from considering DEI moving forward by providing them with convenient cover or making them worry about the perception their DEI initiatives create among rich white people.
12 Likes
Apparently the “one drop” rule never actually went away.
11 Likes
Logically though, before boards had even token diversity on them banks and other businesses failed all the time. That must mean white people are shit at running them.
13 Likes
For all its fancy name, the Wall Street Journal is just another Murdoch nozzle, like Fox.
12 Likes
15 Likes
Yes, we all know this is the stupidest fucking reason and they’re just trying to shift blame. But look at all the stories reporting this, even if they’re just mocking it. Like always, the bullshit lie is already racing around the planet faster than reality can keep up, thanks to journalists who sit in the pocket of the billionaires and happily generate this horse shit.
Fuck the banks and their urination of journalists.
14 Likes
