Run, Bank, Run
ILINSHEN (UNITED VIRIDIAN STATES) – Six days after the extraordinary near-collapse of the Ubthar Advancement Bank in the most prominent of the recent series of bank runs and its equally extraordinary rescue by Gilea & Company Capital Ventures, ICC, which extended a line of credit equivalent to 168 billion Viridian daal to the struggling bank simultaneous with its purchase of 17% of its equity, the repercussions are still rocking the economic and political status quo of the Viridian States.
While economic instability has become a fact of life in the States in recent months, the failure of a bank so prominent in the technical sector would have raised eyebrows even without transstellar intervention, but the situation was further inflamed four days ago with a press release issued under the seal of Móes Cheraelar-ith-Cheraelar, Chief Capital Officer for G&C Capital Ventures – rather than, as might be expected, that of the Cinti Xi VPO. In this release, Móes Cheraelar specifically attributed the bank runs in general and the collapse of UAB in particular to “misinformation concerning industry practices and bank liquidity being deliberately propagated by public, media, and governmental figures to the severe detriment of financial stability”, accompanied by detailed semantic analyses of various examples, and warned that the Hidden Cog would undoubtedly take such measures as it deemed necessary to preserve fiscal integrity. The press release specifically named Senator Eryl Torrad (Equilibrium/Erayshen-ro-Dine) as a source of “innuendo, allegation, and distortion without regard for truth, honor, or decency” which led directly to the run on the UAB.
While praised by a number of analysts, that a transstellar based outside the States, even one of the Big 26, should so directly criticize local politics has proven controversial. The situation, however, has escalated further with the news having reached Ilinshen yesterday that G&C Capital Ventures have filed a petition with the Court of Trade and Commerce requesting that they apply the extraordinary sanction of judicial incredibility to Senator Torrad.
The granting of such a petition by the Court is extremely unlikely, inasmuch as judicial incredibility – the legal declaration that a given person is “not to be believed upon any topic” – is a legal archaism that has not been applied for over seven millennia, and it would, in any case, only be of legal effect within the Imperial territorial volume. Nonetheless, the petition appears to be having its intended effect in the Court of Public Opinion, with the Equilibrium Party moving quickly to deprive Senator Torrad of her committee posts, even those unrelated to financial matters. Equilibriate spokesmen ascribed this to the trouble, even without an official finding of incredibility, the Senator would have in interacting with the many Imperial or Empire-proximal interests relevant to such positions, but it is generally accepted among pundits that the party and President Nallen’s administration are engaging in damage control.
Ambassador Rithan-ishi-Dellia declined to comment on the matter, citing the impropriety of commenting on legal matters which remained sub judice and the Imperial Diplomatic Corps policy of refraining from involvement in purely commercial affairs. Cheraelar & Orthodox, the primary market rating agency for large institutions (including polities) in the Cinti Xi constellation has made no comment at this time.
– from the Imperial Infoclast