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Question is whether the people who run SVB saw it coming
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The CEO, a man called Greg Becker, apparently sold more than $2 million in bank stock
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over the last two weeks. Timing is pretty impeccable. The 10B5, the pre-planned sales plans were put on
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for the CMO and the CFO and the CEO. For a month or two later, these big sales kicked in
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Now, I wanna be clear, Greg Becker, the CEO, had been pretty active buying and selling. But if you're somebody that's gotten wiped out
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you're looking at this going, really? Out of those two US banks collapsing and tonight two federal investigations have now been launched
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the Justice Department and the SEC. And among the questions, did any high-ranking bank employees know that this was coming
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and did they take advantage of that information? Fewer than two weeks before Silicon Valley Bank became the biggest bank failure
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since the 2008 financial crisis, top executives at the company sold stock worth several million dollars
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The Department of Justice is looking into a preliminary investigation that will be led out of the FBI's field office in San Francisco
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into the ways that executives at the failed bank were trading stock in the days leading up to its dramatic collapse last Friday
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It concerns specifically some stock trades that actually netted a lot of these executives millions of dollars
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Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker just two weeks before the collapse sold about million in stock Now for what it worth that was a pre sale but this investigation might bear out to what degree there could be potentially insider trading Becker wasn the only high SVB employee to sell company shares In a separate
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filing with the FEC on March 1st, SVB Chief Financial Officer Daniel Beck said that he sold
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$575,180 worth of common shares of the company on February 27th. They took on all that risk
1:44
made themselves more profitable right up to the day that the bank exploded
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So I've got an ask, and it's a completely unfair ask. My unfair ask is this
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Can you guys just hang around, try to support each other, try to support our clients
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work together, which may be a, again, a slightly better outcome than where we are right now
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And Pierre, you've learned that that CEO was among those who lobbied lawmakers to roll back those new banking regulations back in 2018
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The CEO wrote a letter to Congress pushing to roll back those regulations
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Tonight, what the FBI wants to know is when did the bank leadership first understand
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they were on the brink of collapse? And David, what did they do about it
