The figurative tremblors of the last few weeks have confirmed why we call ourselves Flyover Country. It’s because the major shapers of the American economy keep — well, flying over us as they shake the financial foundations of the entire nation.
All of the work of endangering the banking system, laying off hundreds of thousands of digital workers, and plunging America closer to economic crisis has occurred among tech titans, money-center-bank whizzes and kowtowing politicians acting on the coasts, or plotting in the skies as they fly over us in their Gulfstreams. They’ve made us dizzy tracking their movements, encircling us as they try to engineer some kind of pullback from the disaster they’ve created.
It's a disaster that we’re already paying for in the heartland in terms of added federal obligations to cover bank deposits, higher taxes that will result, still-rising interest rates that are choking businesses and households, and more sand in the slowing gears of a national and global economy that is, after all, ultimately reliant on what happens in the middle of the United States, in our factories and on our farms and in our research labs.
But there’s a promising inverse to being on the sidelines for the debacle that was birthed on the coasts: As Silicon Valley folds in on itself, the resulting debilitation of the digital-tech empire, along with the crumbling of the epochal fraud known as cryptocurrency, is unleashing more financial and human capital that is now available for the growth of the heartland for the first time.
New Opportunity
What we must do is take advantage of the regional reordering of the U.S. economy that began during the pandemic and has accelerated since then.
Have no doubt that it’s the excesses of coastal financial elites that generated the crisis which has unfolded over the last few weeks. It has forced them to rely on a Biden administration that won’t allow poorly run banks to fail. And, ultimately, the rest of the country is the backstop of the banks’ inexcusable practices.
Silicon Valley Bank was vastly over-reliant on financing tech companies and serving as a primary capital provider to the go-go digital economy, profiting from borrowing short and investing long with a balance sheet that looked more like that of a money-market firm than a bank. The bank purposefully allowed as much as 94% of its deposits to exceed the FDIC limits on account insurance.
Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition.
Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Photo: courtesy Flyover Coalition.
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