The giant collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) sparked headlines that went beyond the economic sections, both in the US and in Israel. The multitude of news on the subject that were published around the world was sometimes accompanied by false or erroneous information. We have compiled some of the most prominent errors.
Look for the woman. Are women to blame for the failure of SVB? A tweet that received 140,000 views and hundreds of shares made this claim when he shared a photo of what are allegedly four members of the bank’s “investment committee”. “In honor of ‘Women’s History Month’ let’s celebrate SVB’s all-female investment team,” it said sarcastically. “Diversity, fairness and inclusion (DEI) are more important than solvency”. In other words, the tweet accuses the bank that in order to comply with the principles of political correctness, and other liberal values, it appointed only women to critical positions and these in turn led to the bank’s collapse. And what are the facts? According to Newsweek’s fact-checkers, SVB does not have an investment committee at all. The relevant committee regarding the collapse is the risk management committee, which had seven members and had a male majority – four men and three women. And what about the picture that was included in the tweet? Three of the four women seen in it are not related to the bank at all, and have never worked there. Their photo, in which they are seen under the heading “Investment Committee”, was taken from a Twitter tweet intended to promote a women’s panel, which appeared on the program broadcast on the CNBC network.
You can make it up. Could there be a direct connection between the collapse of SVB and the famous collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, whose fall in 2008 started the global financial crisis? “You can’t make this up,” stated an Instagram post. “The administrative director of Silicon Valley Bank was the CFO of Lehman Brothers when it collapsed.” The post went viral, but is it true? The claim concerns a man named Joseph Gentile and the post shows his picture with his job title below it: administrative manager at SVB Securities. However, as USA Today’s fact-checkers have shown, this company is not directly related to Silicon Valley Bank, but is a sort of “sister company” to it – both have a common “mother company”. And what about the past of Gentile Lehman Brothers? First, he did work at Lehman for six months, but not as CFO but at a lower level. And second, he left the bank in January 2007, more than a year and a half before its collapse.
The prophecy fools. And we’ll end with the stupid fake but probably the most common of all, given that fact-checkers from the US, India, Spain and Germany were asked to disprove it. Could it be that the series “The Simpsons”, which is repeatedly attributed with prophecies that came true, also predicted the collapse of the bank? In the video that became Bart Simpson is seen virally performing a prank and making the branch’s customers believe that the bank has no money left. According to the video, the name of the bank where the prank is being performed is Silicon Valley, but as the fact checkers at Snopes have shown, for example, in the original version, which aired in 1995, the name of the bank is ” The First Bank of Springfield” (where the plot of the series takes place). In the fake version, the name of the branch was changed in a not particularly sophisticated way, so that the episode would correspond with the reality of 2023.
debriefing: Oriya Bar-Meir
for further reading:
● Newsweek’s investigation: Was SVB’s investment committee made up entirely of women?
● USA TODAY’s investigation: Posts wrongly link SVB to Lehman Brothers
● Snopes’ test: No, The Simpsons did not predict SVB’s collapse