Good morning.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is gripping the financial markets, as global bank shares slide despite reassurances from Joe Biden yesterday.
There have been fresh losses in Asia Pacific stock markets today, as bank stocks continue to fall, while shares in a number of America’s regional banks closed sharply lower on Monday.
The bank’s parent company, SVB Financial Group, and two top executives have been sued by shareholders over the collapse of SVB. The bank’s shareholders accuse the group chief executive, Greg Becker, and the chief financial officer, Daniel Beck, of concealing how rising interest rates would leave its SVB unit “particularly susceptible” to a bank run.
Shockwaves from the collapse of SVB pounded global bank stocks further today, with calls for calm from Biden and other policymakers doing little to reassure markets and prompting some analysts to rethink their outlook on interest rates.
What has Biden said about the situation? “Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe. Your deposits are safe. Let me also assure you, we will not stop at this. We’ll do whatever is needed,” he said yesterday.
Is the US response to SVB’s collapse a bailout? Given the antipathy towards Wall Street bailouts in the 2008 crisis, Biden and elected and appointed officials have been at pains to insist the emergency interventions to protect deposits in SVB and Signature Bank, a second bank that failed at the weekend – or, indeed, any further bank failures – won’t come at taxpayers’ expense.
What else is happening? Follow our live blog here.
Joe Biden to unveil executive order to crack down on law-breaking gun sellers
Joe Biden will announce today that he is ordering the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to crack down on gun sellers who break the law, “moving the US as close to universal background checks as possible”, the White House said.
The president will speak in Monterey Park, California, meeting victims’ families and community members devastated by a mass shooting that killed 11 people and injured nine others in January.
Opinion polls show a majority of Democrats and Republicans support universal background checks that would reveal whether a person is a convicted criminal or domestic abuser before allowing them to buy a gun. But with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, there is little hope of Congress heeding Biden’s pleas to pass legislation.
On a swing through California, the president will acknowledge this political reality and unveil an executive order to enforce existing laws against gun sellers who, knowingly or otherwise, fail to run the background checks they should.
What will Garland be asked to do? Biden will ask Garland to clarify the statutory definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms, the White House said. “Number one, to make it clear that those who are wilfully violating the law need to come into compliance with the law and, number two, to make it clear to people who may not realise that, under that statutory definition they are indeed in the business of selling firearms, they must become federally licensed firearm dealers and they must run background checks before gun sales.”
China says Aukus submarines deal embarks on ‘path of error and danger’
China has accused the US, UK and Australia of embarking on a “path of error and danger” in response to the Aukus partners’ announcement of a deal on nuclear-powered submarines.
“The latest joint statement from the US, UK and Australia demonstrates that the three countries, for the sake of their own geopolitical interests, completely disregard the concerns of the international communities and are walking further and further down the path of error and danger,” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said during a regular press briefing on Tuesday.
The multibillion-dollar deal, announced during a meeting of Aukus leaders in San Diego on Monday, will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines in an effort to counter the rise of China in the Indo-Pacific.
The spokesperson’s comments came after the Chinese mission to the UN tweeted a statement accusing the three countries of fuelling an arms race. It said the deal was a “textbook case of double standard”.
How did Biden respond to what China has said about the deal? The US president, Joe Biden, rejected the accusation, saying the submarines would be “nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed”. Penny Wong, Australia’s foreign minister, said the Chinese criticism was “not grounded in fact”.
In other news …
The three-time Grammy winner Brad Paisley appeared at the White House to perform his new, pro-Ukraine song – which has a cameo from Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He played before Joe and Jill Biden and a gathering of governors from blue and red states, in an effort to bridge political divides.
Zelenskiy confirmed that one person had been killed and three people injured in the shelling of Kramatorsk in Donetsk region this morning. He wrote that “six high-rise buildings were damaged” and that “the evil state continues to fight against the civilian population”.
Two men have died and nine other pedestrians were injured in Canada after they were hit by a truck yesterday, police said. Quebec police spokesperson Helene St Pierre said a 38-year-old man had been arrested and investigators were looking into whether the incident in the town of Amqui was deliberate.
More than $3.9m has poured into the Wisconsin supreme court election from individuals and groups involved with promoting election disinformation and attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to an analysis of campaign spending by the Guardian.
The White House rebuked the Republican former vice-president Mike Pence on Monday for making jokes about the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, maternity leave and postpartum depression that it said were homophobic and offensive to women.
Don’t miss this: ‘She’d been sending herself payments from me’ – Venmo users on discovering secrets on the app
Officially, Venmo is an app for transferring money from one person to another. In the US, where most banks do not offer instant free money transfers, it was revolutionary for simple things such as splitting the bill on dinner, or sending roommates half of the rent. But because the Venmo app has a “home feed”, an endless scroll that shows payments between users, it’s also a sneaky form of social media, writes Alaina Demopoulos. You can see how your friends spend their money – and who they spend it with. Though users have the option to make their payments private, many forget to. Two in five Venmo users reveal “sensitive information” on the app. When Daily Beast journalists snooped Matt Gaetz’s transactions, they discovered the Florida representative had paid an accused sex trafficker through the app. We hear from those who discovered something big.
Climate check: why Biden’s approval of Willow drilling project is ‘a colossal stain’ on his legacy
Joe Biden continues to confound on the climate crisis. Hailed as the US’s first “climate president”, Biden signed sweeping legislation to tackle global heating last year and has warned rising temperatures are an “existential threat to humanity”. And yet on Monday his administration decided to approve one of the largest oil drilling projects staged in the US in decades. The green light given to the Willow development on the remote tundra of Alaska’s northern Arctic coast, swatting aside the protests of millions of online petitioners, progressives in Congress and even Al Gore, will have global reverberations. Biden’s approval of this is “a colossal and reprehensible stain on his environmental legacy”, according to Raena Garcia, a fossil fuels campaigner at Friends of the Earth.
Last Thing: Colombia floats new strategy for Escobar’s hippos – ship them abroad
In the 1980s, the drug lord Pablo Escobar imported four hippos from Africa to join his giraffes, camels, ostriches and other exotic animals in the menagerie at his lavish Hacienda Nápoles estate, but after his death in 1993 they escaped and now it is thought the feral herd numbers 80. The government has repeatedly failed to tame the booming population that have made the Magdalena River basin their new home. It tried culling the animals in 2009 but had to stop after a graphic photo caused national outrage. It continues to sterilise the hippos but they are breeding faster than local experts can find, catch and castrate them. Now the regional government wants to try a new strategy. Like Escobar’s cocaine, they hope Pablo’s pets can be shipped abroad.
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