In late November 2021, Steve Bannon appeared in a live broadcast on GTV, a media outlet that he’d helped his friend Guo Wengui launch a year earlier. Bannon used the appearance to celebrate HCoin, a supposed cryptocurrency that Guo was selling. The currency, Bannon said, was a “monumental” and “extraordinary” success. Bannon also hailed the Himalaya Exchange, Guo’s purported platform for trading digital assets like HCoin. Bannon lauded GTV. He even touted Guo’s fashion company. These ventures, Bannon suggested, were an opportunity for Guo’s fans, mostly Chinese emigres, to hurt China’s rulers. “If you look at institutionalization of the counteroffensive to Chinese Communist Party, it’s pretty impressive,” Bannon gushed.

That was just one of numerous occasions in which Bannon has heaped praise on Guo and his companies, often in venues where his words mostly reach Guo’s anti-Communist followers.

On Wednesday, federal agents arrested Guo and accused him, along his former financier William Je, of stealing more than a $1 billion from thousands of Guo’s own supporters by soliciting investments in some of the same companies that Bannon has promoted. Prosecutors said those companies were mostly fraudulent. An early HCoin valuation at a preposterous $27 billion, they said, was completely fake, as was the blockchain technology Guo and Bannon claimed supported it. Guo—who fled China in 2014 ahead of separate criminal charges there—allegedly used investors’ money to fund a lavish lifestyle, including a Ferrari, two $36,000 mattresses, and a yacht on which Bannon himself has lived. Guo allegedly did this while claiming in federal bankruptcy court to have almost no assets. Guo, who did not receive bail Wednesday, has pleaded not guilty.

In multiple indictments and an SEC complaint Wednesday, federal law enforcement also offered a broader critique of the joint project Bannon and Guo have taken on over the past five years. Prosecutors suggested that an entire constellation of companies and nonprofits that Bannon and Guo have launched together, which they collectively dub the “whistleblower movement,” was largely a con. That “counteroffensive to Chinese Communist Party” that Bannon touted was just a means for Guo to line his pockets, the feds said.

Bannon has not been charged with any crimes related to Guo. Bannon, his lawyer, and a spokesman did not respond to repeated inquiries. Bannon is not mentioned in any of the federal charging documents. And no evidence has emerged showing that he knew about the alleged diversion of investor funds at the heart of the charges against Guo. 

The millennia-old legends that still shape how we think today

Last week, Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent banks used by the venture capital and startup sectors, collapsed.

SVB’s rapid crash—the largest such failure since the 2008 financial crisis—grabbed headlines and generated concern: How could a bank with nearly $210 billion in assets fall apart in just a matter of days? And, perhaps more to the point: How worried should I be?

Ross Levine, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley business school who specializes in banking and finance, believes SVB’s collapse is a manifestation of other problems within the banking system, and among federal banking regulators, that have been growing for years.

In the last week, many experts have focused on the 2018 legislation passed by the Trump administration to deregulate banks like Silicon Valley Bank. Its CEO, Greg Becker, engaged in an expensive, multi-year lobbying campaign to help pass this law, which raised the threshold for banks subject to additional risk checks—also known as “enhanced supervision”—by the Federal Reserve from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion, a line that SVB never crossed ahead of its collapse. The theory goes that this deregulation contributed to SVB’s failure.

Levine, who’s co-written two books on banking regulation in the United States and abroad, thinks that argument is both far too simple and absolves federal banking regulators of responsibility for the mistakes they continue to make in overseeing the banking system, going back as far as their response to the 2008 financial crisis. Here’s more of our conversation from earlier this week, edited for clarity and length:

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Timmy Straw’s “Brezhnev” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase?

There’s a scene I used to picture a lot as a little kid in the eighties—two people dancing slowly, closely, their bodies seeming to know and anticipate each other, only they are also separated by a screen, so that neither has ever seen the other’s face. This was, I think, one way I understood the world at that time. This dance (so I imagined) is what formed reality itself—Reagan’s America, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union—and the dancers’ mutually blind position was like an engine, driving the world on. This made-up scene, and my adult memory of it, was certainly a major goad to the poem. So was a weird little detail—one of my older brothers could never understand that my one-year-old self was not, in fact, a teenager like himself, and so would read to me from The Annals of Imperial Rome and the most turgid high school astronomy textbooks. Because of his mania for geopolitics, he also taught me how to say “Brezhnev”—so that, awkwardly, the Soviet general secretary’s surname was one of my first words.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?

It’s an Italian job in the Champions League! Dotun and Andy are joined by Jonathan Johnson to ask whether three Serie A clubs in the last eight indicates a proper revival.

But there’s a crisis facing France and Portugal - why? The European Conference League, baby! We explain how it’s swinging coefficients like nobody’s business. Plus, everyone apart from Dotun has it in for the Slovenian league and Jonathan talks us through PSG’s latest Groundhog Day.

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During the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, people in tech started to realize something: a lot of people really don’t like them.

Since the bank started to buckle late last week, tech luminaries have taken time out of their busy schedules of doing innovation to tweet about how everyone rooting against a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank simply doesn’t get it. Silicon Valley had birthed “the greatest wealth generation engine this country has had for the last 2 decades,” said Austin Federa, a spokesperson for the crypto blockchain Solana, and a bailout was essential to save a cornerstone of the American economy. 

The response to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse shows people no longer buy the tech industry’s delusions.

While getting ratioed in their own tweet threads, the wizards of tech seethed that so many didn’t see what they could. “The events of this weekend change things. The bank run isn’t actually the biggest thing—the reaction to it is,” tweeted Flo Crivello, a former Uber product manager who is now CEO of a remote work tool company. “It’s making me and a lot of people realize that the media’s coordinated anti-tech campaign over the last 6yrs has been a lot more effective than we thought.”

Helen Min, a co-founder of a tech venture capital firm tweeted a less conspiratorial version of the same diagnosis: “VCs [are] now realizing Silicon Valley has a public image problem.” Indeed, prominent venture capitalist David Sacks, astutely noted that many were resistant to bailing out Silicon Valley Bank because it “has the name Silicon Valley in it.” If the situation were a little bit different, Sacks posited during an interview with UnHerd, people would get it; say, Sacks argued, “this was a farmers’ bank and it was 40,000 farms, small business farms that were on the hook, everybody would understand.” 

Without realizing it, Sacks crystalized people’s real beef with Silicon Valley: if people felt like Silicon Valley actually improved or sustained their lives, they would defend it. More people would be up in arms about a bank for farmers collapsing because farmers make food that they like and literally need to survive. The region that once produced microprocessors, personal computers, internet search, and web browsers, kind of doesn’t really do that stuff as much as it used to, and people are noticing. 

Hungary, the landlocked Central European country of about ten million people, has become an unusual role model for US conservatives, with Tucker Carlson describing it as a place “with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”  Since 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has transformed the democratic country into a right-wing autocracy, or in his words “illiberal democracy,” by delegitimizing the independent press, building a militarized wall along the country’s southern border, expelling asylum seekers in potential violation of international treaties, separating migrants from their children, essentially outlawing gay adoption, and banning schools from teaching LGBTQ content to students under 18. After meeting with him at the White House, former president Donald Trump was inspired to say Orbán was “probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK.”

If Orbán’s policies sound similar to the Build-the-Wall, Don’t-Say-Gay brand of American conservatism, his penchant for bolstering the birth rate and rewarding large families appear to be yet another Hungarian-inspired social policy blueprint some Republicans are pining to adopt. The Hungarian government covers the cost of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatments, provides up to three years of paid maternity benefits, doles out discount coupons for minivans, and grants forgivable interest-free loans to young couples who plan to procreate.

In the US, where birth rates have also fallen about 16 percent in the last decade, the imitators are lining up. Earlier in March, former President Donald Trump floated “baby bonuses for a new baby boom” at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “You men are so lucky out there!” Trump added, offering an unsubtle reference to how this government policy would enhance men’s sex lives.

Also this month, Senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who reduces his views on reproductive and family policy to the concise “babies are good” declarative sentence, suggested to reporters on Capitol Hill that the cost of childbirth should be paid for by the government. Previously, Vance has lauded Orbán for his forgivable loan program for married couples, in which they can get interest-free loans dependent on their promise to have kids.  “Why can’t we do that here?” he asked, speaking to a conservative think-tank in July 2021. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

“We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”

Orbán often says that his pro-natalist policies stem from a desire to bolster the size of the country’s declining population and labor force through a baby boom rather than through immigration. Some countries “want as many migrants to enter as there are missing kids so that the numbers will add up,” Orban said in 2019. “We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”

How film and TV are hung up on the 'dead wife' trope

Guo Wengui, a far-right mogul on the run from criminal charges in China, has worked for years with Steve Bannon to promote charitable organizations and for-profit ventures that the men say are collectively aimed at destroying the Chinese Communist Party.

By claiming to be an outspoken Chinese dissident, Guo, who also uses the names Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, won a large and ardent following in the international Chinese diaspora. And his fans have showered his enterprises with investments and donations.

But his project was largely a scam, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged on Wednesday. FBI agents arrested Guo early Wednesday morning, and prosecutors charged him with 12 criminal counts, including wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering.

 “As alleged, Ho Wan Kwok, known to many as ‘Miles Guo,’ led a complex conspiracy to defraud thousands of his online followers out of over $1 billion dollars,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Wednesday. “Kwok is charged with lining his pockets with the money he stole, including buying himself, and his close relatives, a 50,000 square foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and even two $36,000 mattresses, and financing a $37 million luxury yacht.”

Federal prosecutors also charged a longtime Guo associate, William Je, with taking part of many of the same crimes. Je, who reputedly lives in London, was not in custody as of Wednesday evening. Guo’s personal assistant, Yanping Wang, was also charged in a separate case with wire and securities fraud for her role in some of the same transactions.

For the cover of our seventieth-anniversary issue, we commissioned a painting by the artist Peter Doig, of a boy eating his breakfast beside a London canal. Our contributing editor Matthew Higgs spoke with Doig about his influences and fried eggs. 

INTERVIEWER

How did the cover image come about?

PETER DOIG