It seemed to be a good week for Fox News Last Week Tonight with John Oliver today, when the collapse of the Silicon Valley bank and uncertainty in the financial world replaced the sharp revelations that arose from Dominion Voting’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s cable journalists for the HBO series.
Well, at least for a while.
Promising not to “be bored with every little detail,” Oliver continued to tear apart the intricacies of investments in long-term government bonds and the losses accumulated by the now-defunct bank in Santa Clara, Calif., as interest rates have risen over the past year. “It’s essentially a classic story about a bank that misjudges risk and hedges it,” said the multiple Emmy winner.
And then, while those thorny legal battles and embarrassing text strings from Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity were out of the spotlight, Oliver went right back to the Fox News pinata.
“It’s so stupid, I’m almost jealous,” the moderator exclaimed after a montage of FNC moderators criticizing the SVB’s demise as a “woke” couch.
“It must be nice of them to automatically watch anything they don’t like or understand,” Oliver continued. “It rained on my birthday because of critical race theory and my son called me ‘ab*tch’ because of socialism and I was late for work today because of a bunch of pronouns,” he added, citing some of the touchstones of the conservative culture war. “I believe all this because it makes my life so much easier,” Oliver concluded.
Oliver specifically chastised Fox for trying to “blame” SVB’s diversity initiatives for why the bank collapsed, noting that “hedging against risk is a fundamental lesson of the bank, along with buying.” at low prices, sell at high prices and wear a fancy suit and tie so you can’t see that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.
Thankfully, the host took a moment to adjust his own rather chic tie, before chuckling self-deprecatingly: “It’s coming in quite handy, to be honest.”
Of course, SVB wasn’t the only bank to get a facelift and takeover by state regulators in recent days. With $100 billion in assets, Signature Bank went under before its deposits and loans and all of its 40 branches were bought over the weekend by Michigan-based Flagstar Bank. A look at a series of horrifying and uncomfortable internal videos from Signature Brass, including ex-chairman Scott Shay singing about the bank’s plight that would make even Oliver Stone blush, was just too easy for John Oliver to miss.
“In terms of things that are very dated, I’d say it’s somewhere between Gwen Stefani, my actual body, and the October 1976 cover. Sesame street Magazine,” he joked with a groan. For those of you who didn’t subscribe to the release of Big Bird and pals, check out the unfortunate bicentennial cover below:
In short, Oliver’s SVB segment amounted to a Senator Elizabeth Warren-inspired claim that “banks cannot be trusted to regulate themselves”.
Okay, but banks weren’t the only institutions to receive Oliver’s written scalpel tonight
“In general, it seems that the people responsible for the safety of our economy will continue to tell us to trust ourselves, that we can control ourselves, that nothing will go wrong,” he noted, adding that the Federal Reserve and other government departments were highlighted. LWT then cut to Signature boss Shay over one of those gruesome internal videos, exclaiming, “I happen to know it’s not going to happen.”
With the potential global banking crisis behind us, Last week tonight has a painful collage of greetings from the local St. Patrick’s Day news aired before the primetime story began. “They’re incredibly easy to get in … and incredibly hard to get out of,” Oliver said of the frequent holiday scams and hours of listings used to sell the properties.
Needless to say, in the seemingly endless list of comparisons, the crux is of LWT and Oliver, who called out the “bullsh*t” of timeshare rights, was slammed for it Avatar: The Way of Water there was good.
in brackets – Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is free next week
Source: Deadline
Joseph Fearn is an entertainment and television aficionado who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a keen eye for what’s hot in the world of TV, Joseph keeps his readers informed about the latest trends and must-see shows.
