Last year I wrote about the risks and results of running a company as “woke.” I pointed out how woke companies like Disney, Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter and crypto-creep Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX all tanked.
All those companies terribly underperformed while pushing their self-serving agenda onto gullible shareholders who accepted the companies’ self-aggrandizing virtue-signaling instead of financial performance.
Part of the reason universities and companies talk so much about their woke agendas is that they are relieved of real accountability for the quality of education they provide or their financial performance. If you can keep pointing to all the woke things you can say you did, you can divert attention from the things that are hard, like accountability metrics: “Yes, we lost market share and profits are down, but the accounting department just hired our first Albino-African American-Transgendered head of auditing. Aren’t we cool?”
Such is the startling recent case of Silicon Valley Bank. The nation’s 16th largest bank failed last week amid virtue-signaling instead of tending to its business. It’s the second biggest bank failure in American history.
With all the Democrats’ bank regulations, one would think they would have seen this coming. The reality is that if you act woke and donate to Democratic causes, the deep state regulators look the other way. It has been true from Madoff until now. This bank got the highest ESG ratings and did not even have a chief risk officer.