Why Kyrsten Sinema's critics are 'blaming' her for SVB's collapse: journalist

17 March 2023

After Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) stressed, in an op-ed for the New York Times, that the crisis underscores the need for more "stringent" federal government regulation of the banking sector — the type of regulation that SVB has been fighting. SVB lobbied aggressively against Barack Obama-era regulations, saying that they placed an unfair burden on the bank. And many Republicans in Congress agreed with them.

But according to journalist Ja'han Jones, not everyone in Congress who saw things SVB's way was a Republican. One SVB sympathizer, Jones emphasizes in an op-ed published by MSNBC's website for Joy Reid's The Reid Out Blog on March 16, was centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona).

"Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who recently switched her party affiliation from Democrat to independent after facing intra-party criticism for her conservative stances, is yet again the subject of criticism for her political work in service of uber-wealthy finance executives," Jones explains. "Sinema's relationship with Silicon Valley Bank, in particular, has come into focus after its collapse… Some Democrats are blaming SVB's collapse on Sinema and company's Trump-era rollback of many of the Dodd-Frank regulations."

The Dodd-Frank Protection Act of 2010 went into effect under President Barack Obama in response to the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession, which was the United States' worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some progressives, in 2010, argued that Dodd-Frank didn’t go far enough; many bankers, in contrast, felt it way too far.

When Donald Trump was president, the protections that Dodd-Frank did offer were rolled back. During the Trump era, Sinema served in the U.S. House of Representatives before being sworn into the U.S. Senate via Arizona in January 2019.

"Politico reported that Sinema is among the members of Congress who received a combined $50,000 from SVB's political action committee," Jones notes. "To that point, check out this Forbes piece on the thousands of dollars she has raked in from finance industry billionaires in recent years. Not a great look for Kyrsten 'Let them eat cake' Sinema, who has been derided for her public displays of disregard for the non-wealthy and disempowered."

Ja'han Jones' full op-ed is available at this link.

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