It's bad, but likely still a contained collapse (hopefully!)
I'll take that as a sign that the economy remains robust.
They quite literally changed the definition of a recession. Just because it's not a historically accurate recession does not mean we are not in, nor that are not heading into, one.
ZIRP is dead, there's no indication interest rates will go down any time soon, CPI indicates food costs are not moving, energy is still expensive, layoffs are picking up steam, housing is at it's most unaffordable time in history, etc.
You look at the gestalt sitting in front of you and you say "the economy remains robust". Lord, I wish I had your naivity^W^W^W^W^W^W^W optimism. I lived through the GFC and suffered the consequences of hedonistic money policy. History may not repeat but it certainly rhymes and all of this is starting to smell very familiar to me. I'm not in possession of a crystal ball but as it stands there is still too much money in the economy. The VAST majority of stock value since the GFC has been from stock buyback programs and not bottom line increases. That alone should tell you the possible origin of the next disaster.
There are a fuck-ton of factors that all have not-so-rosey outlooks.
Its amazing we dont have an actual game "sim America" and you get to fiddle with all the various economic levers in our tax code and see the output based on real data coming from various sources in the economic space (like farm, military, foreign subsidies, etc)
One that takes in the budget proposal from .gov and lets you fiddle with the model and such and crowdsource the best model outcomes through millions of game players - rewarded kind of like the lottery - everyone pays $1 a month to come up with the best model - its run through many simulations and the best model wins a bunch of cash. and then, wait for it, chatGPT writes an actual budget bill to be voted on.
I wonder how many others did similar?
The government printed a ton of money and demand for loans crashed after the pandemic started. People even paid loans down. Many companies weren't borrowing much because of supply chain issues - why borrow if you can't use it? I'm not blaming the government - unemployment went through the roof for awhile and they had to protect people. But this is a side effect that no one really saw. That the treasuries would lose a lot of value because of super rapid interest rate increases while companies start eating away at their runway because no new investment is coming.
It all makes sense today but literally no one saw this coming a couple weeks ago.
> But this is a side effect that no one really saw.
Literally everyone except SVB saw that long term bonds would decrease in value post pandemic when interest rates increase. Interest rate increases lowering the value of bonds is quite literally the most basic rule of bonds.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/business/banks-government...
It's why the fed is currently bailing out the industry by being willing to take them all at par value, not market value, in exchange for cash.
OK, now comes 2022, inflation is high and you think the Fed will increase rates. Now your bonds have already dropped in price due to the anticipated rate hikes. The billion dollar question now is whether you believe the Fed's "it's fine, don't worry we can get inflation under control", and keep your bonds, or whether you believe aggressive rate hikes are coming? It's easy to ridicule in hindsight, but as the saying goes hindsight is 20-20.
No one said SVB is going to be insolvent on 3/10, but lots of people thought SV and investors were making bad decisions in general over the past several years.
SVB is a victim of its own culture. You would never be hired as an exec at SVB is you said "Lets keep all these deposits in 1-month Tbills and cash since most of these startups are garbage and are going to need to take withdrawals within a couple years."
The risk has been discussed for almost a year at least:
https://www.fitchratings.com/research/banks/us-banks-face-hi...
The short interest in SVB would indicate that alot of people saw this failure moths ago.
That and SI have been two of the most crowded trades by hedge funds since December. Borrow has been 50%+ for the banks. That would indicate that alot of people saw this coming 4 months go.
We’ve had 15 years of people getting billions for phone apps made in 12 months and forgotten in 6. Random individual software startups are valued more than basically the entire hardware industry under them. Bitcoin peaked out at 1.28 trillion and it still has no use beyond being a converter from dollars, to crypto, to dollars again with the occasional hand wavey “dude it’s totally completely secure and stable and everyone will use it in the future as a currency! Look how much I made by investing at the peak!” story.
Sure, you might claim those people are unhinged and don't count, but they'd say the same to you. Unless you actually start going to your broker and buy a bunch of PSQ your comments here carry as much weight as mine.
I was out of work for 18 months during that period. Luckily I had a background in Animation and Architecture to fall back on and got a job designing tech companies when the crisis lifted.
2008 was worse though.
Will missing payrolls result in layoffs/resignations? Thus, increasing unemployment rate that the FED desires. If contagion doesn’t spread outside of tech/startup, does the government have any incentive to intervene? Maybe this is not too big to fail.
A sale seems like the most likely scenario out of this liquidity problem (insolvency). It’ll be dirt cheap and has to make sense to its buyer.
edit: Even with recent downturn in tech, there is still sizable value in having tech as banking clients.
So, in that light, losing these jobs would be like throwing away the kid with the bathwater.
I personally don’t agree with all the premises and conclusions I’ve enumerated above, but imo that’s how a mainstream economist (like one working for the FED right now) is most likely to view things.
If all the cash evaporated from my company's account, we were forced to declare bankruptcy, that's pretty much game over. The employees would be among other creditors figuring out their turn to pick over the remains. The employees may end up near the top of the list, but they wouldn't get to hold the C-Suite or shareholders accountable on a personal level.
They're contractually obligated to pay their employees, but that contractual obligation rolls up to the company level, not the people who run or own it.
I've also worked at both startups and large companies where problems with the bank or payroll software delayed payroll a day. In those situations there's typically overcommunication about the steps being done to get it resolved ASAP so employees don't walk out.
Q1 of 2023 has stabilized a bit and began with a market rally, but it could just be a dead cat bounce on the path to lower lows as the year goes on. Seeing SVB implode suddenly is ominous not so much because of them, but what it means for the industry right now. I was hoping that we maybe hit the trough in Q4 of 2022 but it would appear this year will be bleak and I sadly suspect we'll be seeing more layoffs in the second half of this year if the first half continues to miss.
I hope I'm wrong. We are about at the point where a bear market ends (around 9 months) but that's just an average. We could very well have quite a few more months or even the entire year and into next year ahead. High flying tech has been in a bear market now for over a year, although it probably needed a correction.
(I understand that Big tech is also doing layoffs because they massively overhirred during the pandemic)
I look to Sequoia because, of any VC fund, they are the most likely to be able to pull off a takeover of SVB. I am still gobsmacked that they invested hundreds of millions in a company with no board or CFO (FTX)
1) FDIC insurance only applies in situations where the bank doesn't have the assets to make depositors whole. SVB has a ton of assets; most sources I've found asserting 100% deposit coverage, just not liquid. Even if the FDIC takes over (which isn't even likely) (edit: this aged well), the insurance element is irrelevant; its about operations and finding funding to drive liquidity.
2) When startups close a round of funding, they don't just get a check for $20M and throw it in their SVB account. Funding rounds are an agreement between the VC firm and the startup for that money, which transitively represents an agreement between the VC firm and its partners, and the money is generally delivered "just in time", not all at once. When the startup needs an infusion, they go to the VC, who then goes to their own bank accounts or their partners, who then go to their own bank accounts, and wire transfers happen. SVB is only one player here; yeah, its absolutely true that many startups (maybe most) directly use SVB, but its less common the further up the chain you move as the money gets more and more boring (when you hear "partner" think "old boring local business magnate who has banked with JP Morgan for 50 years"). And more-over short of systemic bankruptcy the VCs are still on the hook for that $20M.
The risk that SVB, the financial industry, and regulators are worried about right now is short-term liquidity. Startups may have $xxx,000 in their SVB account which they use to make payroll every two weeks and pay vendors and such, which is separate from the $xxM on contract with the VC. If SVB can't meet outflow demands, the people staying and trying to make payroll are going to get caught up with the panic'ed people trying to pull all their money out, and short-term liabilities like payroll are at risk. That's part of of the reason why some VCs are pushing their startups to pull money out; its not about "oh my god we're going to lose all our money", its because they don't want to get caught in the herd and be forced to pull money from other sources which are also less liquid, like long-term investments or going to their partners. Put another way, SVB's liquidity issues could spiral to cause liquidity issues further down the chain; and no one in the industry wants that to happen.
But, its a macroeconomic prisoners dilemma. And, to be frank, and I mean this absolutely genuinely and sincerely; most VCs are just rich idiots. Lets be real, the industry is proud of the fact that if one bet in fifty pays out 100x it'll make up for 49 bad bets, yet we treat them as paragons of investing genius? Their biggest motivation is to avoid embarrassment among their drinking buddies (read: investing partners) during the next trip to Jackson.
Some startups definitely deposit $X-$XX MM directly into an account at SVB. Depending on a bunch of factors, these funds can be risk for availability in the short term.
SVB's assets are not liquid enough to cover all of those funds, obviously. If depositors panic in a meaningful way (they have, and will continue to do so), then SVB will be under new management by Monday.
Startups' $XX MM will not be lost. Today's payroll might fail. Next week's will be fine.
I've never heard of the "just in time" funding - and if that's more common than I think I'm also very surprised that we don't hear more of the "fund committed $100M, but the business went south and they declined to fund it fully" sort of stories.
> the "fund committed $100M, but the business went south and they declined to fund it fully" sort of stories.
My understanding is that its contractually obligated, and there would be legal ramifications for doing such a thing (or, there are clauses in the contract which allow it, or, you know, its pretty common for VC partners to sit on the board of the businesses they fund, so there are definitely options for the VC to assert sway over the company's finances and spend short of turning off the hose and breaking a contract).