When Is a Bank a Non-Bank Lender?
Plus, China and Lenovo laptops; what Biden is promising Iran; Soros, Omidyar, Ford fund New York Times reporter
Goldman Sachs “has started allowing certain asset-management clients—namely insurance companies—to invest alongside it when it loans money to borrowers including private-credit funds and nonbank lenders such as mortgage providers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
That made me chuckle. I’ve been writing about the growth of nonbank lenders since at least 2012 and 2015, but until now I’d never focused on the possibility that the “nonbank lenders” would get their capital by way of loans from places such as Goldman Sachs, which is a bank.
One has to admire the creativity here. The “nonbank lender” avoids the pesky regulatory hassles of being a bank, while still accessing a bank’s comparatively lower cost of capital. And the bank gets to access the higher returns from lending businesses—the same lending businesses that regulatory hassles make it difficult for the bank to be in directly at competitive prices. It’s a win-win—at least so long as there are no 2008-style problems of plunging real estate values or newly unemployed borrowers going into delinquency or default on underwater mortgages. Even then it might be a win-win, in a certain way, because if things do deteriorate, Goldman gets to blame the non-bank lender for the problems, and the non-bank lender isn’t losing its own money, but Goldman’s money. And it’s even a triple win, because it allows would-be homeowners to access mortgages that are nearly impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive, to obtain directly from a bank under the current regulatory regime.
Lenovo: “The Business World’s Favorite Laptop Has Barely Changed in 30 Years,” the Wall Street Journal reports in a front-page article about the Lenovo ThinkPad laptop. The Journal article is so glowingly positive it reads like an advertisement for the product. “Reliable and resilient” is display type that appears in the news article.
Absent entirely from the Journal article is any mention of concerns over Lenovo’s connections to Communist China. In an October 4, 2023 letter to a Navy official, the then-chairman of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Mike Gallagher, wrote, “not only is Lenovo’s largest shareholder closely connected to the PRC government, but the company also has been linked to PRC state-directed espionage campaigns.”
“Lenovo is closely affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the PRC government. Its links to state-run cyberespionage campaigns are well documented,” the Gallagher letter said. It called on the Navy to stop selling Lenovo products to U.S. servicemembers.
The Gallagher letter and the concerns about Chinese involvement would seem like the sort of thing the Journal would at least want to mention in a front-page news article about the product?
SmarterTimes: “Soros, Omidyar, Ford Fund New York Times Reporter Tweeting About Israel’s Gaza ‘Massacre’” is the headline over my latest column for the Algemeiner. It begins, “For coverage of the war in Gaza, the New York Times has turned to a reporter whose opinionated social media posts accuse Israel of a ‘massacre’ and who is being funded with money from charities with anti-Israel track records.” Worth the click over to the no-paywall Algemeiner if you are interested in this topic.
What Biden is Promising Iran: “What Is the Biden-Harris Administration Really Telling Iran’s Khamenei in Secret Communications as U.S. Election Nears?” is the headline over my latest column for the New York Sun.
That column begins:
The Biden-Harris administration is in secret communications with Iran, just weeks before a presidential election in which the Republican candidate is attacking President Biden and Vice President Harris for high gas prices and the risk of war.
Ostensibly the communications are to warn Iran against additional attacks on Israel. Yet usually when there is a stick, there is also a carrot. Voters deserve to know — and congressional Republicans could ask — whether the Biden administration is also offering Iran a post-election reward for keeping the Middle East quiet, and gas prices low, between now and the election.
The full column is available over at the Sun.
Speaking of Iran: The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, “is extremely concerned about reports that, in the space of two days this week, Iranian authorities reportedly executed at least 29 people across the country,” a statement from his office says.
“Minorities, including Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs and Baluch continue to be disproportionately affected by these executions,” the UN says.
The UN says “It is time for Iran to join the growing consensus worldwide towards universal abolition, by imposing a moratorium on executions, with a view to ultimately abolishing the death penalty.”
One might wonder why taxpayers in America, which has a federal death penalty, are paying dues to the UN to advocate that Iran eliminate its death penalty. The volume of the executions is a reminder, though, that the Iranian theocracy poses a threat to the people of Iran as well as to America and to other countries in the region. And the absence of coverage of the deaths and absence of coverage of the U.N. statement in most of the U.S. press is a reminder of how selective the attention is. Where are The Editors?
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