The collapse of SVB exposes the largest crack in the economy
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Basel III was introduced to force banks to be more conservative, and thus more safe. Downside: this also means bank is going to be less profitable.
European banks were forced to implement Basel III, while the US bankers managed to lobby a loophole for certain types of banks. And sure enough, SVB leveraged this loophole.
For those interested, FT Alphaville describes this in ample detail:
Silicon Valley Bank is a very American mess https://on.ft.com/3ywMURD
The exemptees just need to be fucking careful with this advanced mode of operation.
How many times will we get burned until we learned that banks will not be careful if they are given an opportunity to not be.
And the pace of innovation in US banking was very slow, essentially stalled, for a generation from the consumer's POV
Here in Aotearoa we have ATMs on every street corner since the 1980s. All but the tiniest traders have had pos electronic transactions for nearly thirty years
Other countries are even more advanced (our banks are all like yous now, consumers now viewed as pests)
I want innovation in customer services, but what we get is innovations in financial engineering.
May they all rot...
You mean “need to have sheer luck in their gambling”.
Tails, taxpayers bail us out
> Tails, taxpayers bail us out
You're doing to have to define "bail us out".
SVB's shareholders got wiped out.
https://ir.svb.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx
The depositors will get their money back, with perhaps a small delay. Which is more than you can say for scams like cryptocurrency.
Play stupid games, win 70 cents on your dollar.
Meanwhile, how close is the US to making Chip-and-PIN a thing?
And who still uses cheques these days?!
> And who still uses cheques these days?!
US uses them for business-to-customer payments, especially unsolicited ones, because we don't want to give random businesses we don't know our bank account numbers.
You can pay people instantly by refunding their debit cards - that's how Uber drivers can get paid - but it's not free, which is why most transfers don't go that way.
There's no inherent information risk to giving out an account number that justifies an outdated paper-based system. Especially when one considers the accompanying fraud risk thereof.
The instant I moved to Europe, I realized just how far behind consumer banking is in the US. It's pitiful.
Yes, as well as the routing number.
> There's no inherent information risk to giving out an account number …
Of _course_ there is. In the US, the account + routing number is sufficient to perform a ACH transfer, write checks against that account, etc.
The risk is enormous.
> Especially when one considers the accompanying fraud risk thereof.
I’m assuming you misunderstood the risk when you wrote the above. It is, in fact, extremely high.
So… how does writing a check remove this risk then? That was the original point, that writing a check is safer than giving out your account number.
Not in Europe it's not, which is monodeldiablo's point: there's no inherent risk to giving out your account number. It's only the primitive US system which makes it a risk.
https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/what-country-has-the-mos...
We asked the banker what would happen if we were robbed. He said he'd just write a new one. The thief couldn't do anything with it, as it was all on name only, and the extremely low daily volume of cheques in use would mean cashing it would stand out like a sore thumb.
... now the transoceanic cable, on the other hand, that was... anemic, we'll say.
The exemptees just need to be f**ing careful with this advanced mode of operation.”
This sounds tongue in cheek I know, but SVB’s situation has created real world consequences even for me, someone who has no money tied up with them. My go-to for bonded cellular networks (so i can run a livestream for my employer, a small tech start up) had to tell all of us who use them to pause payments immediately today as this unfolded and are not taking new rentals in the meantime. They’re literally not getting paid right now. This is not a holding pattern that can last long and is highly disruptive for them and, consequentially, me. A video content guy at a small start up on nearly the other side of the country.
What are the downsides to society if banks are less profitable? They invested in T-Bills, I don't see how that investment served society in any way.
Yet everyone keeps talking about how the money supply is causing inflation, even though there is no plausible direct connection [1] between the amount of money in some bank account somewhere and consumer prices. The bakery down the street does not look at federal reserve rates when figuring out their bread prices.
[1] I'm guessing that someone will be able to explain this to me. But keep in mind that your explanation should cover how we could have over a decade of near-zero interest rates and the respective money supply inflation without seeing any significant consumer price inflation.
Thus, you have inflation: The price of goods inflate(!) because the value of monies drops inversely to the monies in circulation.
Creating money does not automatically cause it to circulate, as the ECB and others have demonstrated between 2008 and 2022.
If we want to get deep into the thickets of finances we absolutely can, but that's not what I'm here for.
Europe, much like the US, was printing money, at a fairly steady rate from 2008 to 2020, at which point they doubled the money supply in a little over a year. That is, they printed more money in ~18 months then they had since the EU was formed.
This is a nice fiction a lot of people spout. The consequences of that are inflation or default. Inflation is very unpopular but defaulting ends the game because investors won't buy the bonds after that. There are consequences to ignoring debt.
I can think of other (political) consequences, but not economical per se, if you assume that a loan has a risk of default priced into its interest rate.
Probably more politically disastrous is that if the debt is denominated in the domestic currency, it’s likely that a substantial portion of the bond holders are domestic and they will not be happy about having their wealth confiscated.
People are forced to acquire the currency to pay their taxes or risk being assaulted by the violence of state and dispossessed of a lot of their stuff and/or freedom.
Fiscal Theory of Price Level seems to be inspired by Fiscal Theory of Money.
"The literature on the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) integrates discussion of monetary and fiscal policy, recognizing that fiscal policy can be a determinant, or even the sole determinant, of the price level"
Christopher A Sims: Paper Money
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
Ignoring the fact that elected governments do not, of course, do that.
>Why not just make the government do that directly?
If I understand, do you mean why not cut out the middle-man and have people buy the T-Bills/Bonds themselves? If so I completely agree, to some degree, that banks nowadays are nearly complete scams as far as warehousing your money, while providing near 0% interest, with the backdrop of 4 to 5+% risk free short term rates from the government as alternative.
I myself have taken out a bunch of cash and deposited into various tenors of treasuries at TreasuryDirect.gov
And many others have as well, which is why depending on which data you look at there has been a massive withdrawal of cash from commercial banks in recent months, with people either buying treasuries or putting the cash with their brokers (who are buying treasuries etc).
I don't know the answer to how this is resolved, or banks place in the economy... they are supposed to provide credit and money creation for business investment. Since the 2008 crisis, lending has been subdued... there are probably many causes for this. Banks have terrible apps, user interfaces, user experience moving money quickly (in the US) and terrible returns provided to you for lending them money (most people don't realize this is what you're doing when you deposit). So yea, they are a legacy, protected industry that scams their customers out of the spread between the treasury yields they are getting.
The alternative to banks is a credit union where you are a shareholder and their rates aren't necessary exciting either. There's a cost to maintaining infrastructure both digital and physical. Not to mention providing various financial services to shareholders.
The moving money problem is a bigger issue with the American financial system as a whole and basically the business mentally of underinvestment and "don't break what works". FedNow will hopefully reduce alot of the time delay related friction in the coming year or two that comes with ACH.
If you know you have a 10-year horizon, by all means buy treasuries instead of depositing at a bank.
And you can sell T-Bonds, they are as liquid as any other assets, the bank just lost money on it. If the T-bonds hadn't lost value they wouldn't have collapsed, they would have just sold the bonds.
National Savings & Investment Bank (NS&I) does not offer loans, but money you save with this bank is in practice just part of the country's general fund, they're paying you interest on your savings because if they borrowed that money commercially they'd have to pay interest too.
This has one obvious big advantage for the saver - it's inherently safe, you aren't saving with a bank, who might gamble your money away and then go bankrupt, if the whole country fails then it doesn't mean anything to lose the Pounds in the savings account, Pounds are now worthless anyway. Also if you live there you have more immediate problems.
Since the government owns it, it's also allowed to do things which would otherwise be illegal, at least potentially e.g. NS&I Premium Bonds are basically savings except with gambling, or scratch-offs except you get your money back if you don't win. Your deposit is safe, but instead of say 1% interest on £10 000 you might have 0.1% chance to win another £90 000 for a total of £100 000.
This is technically worse than the 1% interest but it's exciting and people buy lottery tickets so who am I to argue?
Edited to add: Somehow the word not was missed in my second paragraph during editing. Fixed now.
3.30% on an instant access account is actually pretty great (best i see elsewhere is 2.51%; i see a six month fixed term deposit at 3.28%), and getting it tax-free without having to have it in an ISA makes it even better.
What you're describing is pretty close to a "narrow bank", minus the "owned by government" part. The Fed doesn't like it for several reasons:
>The Fed raises three main objections. 3 The first is macroeconomic: The Fed worries that narrow banks could mess with the implementation of monetary policy, because if they succeed they will keep a lot of money at the Fed, increasing the size of its balance sheet. 4 They might also make other short-term interest rates (like fed funds) more volatile, because people who would otherwise participate in those markets might park their money at narrow banks instead, making it harder for the Fed to target interest rates. 5
>Second, it worries that narrow banks will take funding away from regular banks, making it harder for those banks to trade stocks and bonds (a business largely funded by repo), and maybe even making it harder to make loans:
>Third, the Fed worries that having too safe a bank would be bad for financial stability: In times of stress, everyone will flee from the regular banks to the super-safe narrow banks, which will have the effect of bringing down the regular banks.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/the-fe...
Interests are not perfectly aligned.
Those statements might technically be true, but the implied conclusion (ie. that the fed is beholden to banks because of its ownership structure) is not. The federal government essentially controls the fed because the president appoints all the board members, and nearly all of its profits are paid to the treasury.
>The federal government sets the salaries of the board's seven governors, and it receives all the system's annual profits, after dividends on member banks' capital investments are paid, and an account surplus is maintained. In 2015, the Federal Reserve earned a net income of $100.2 billion and transferred $97.7 billion to the U.S. Treasury,[22] and 2020 earnings were approximately $88.6 billion with remittances to the U.S. Treasury of $86.9 billion.[23]
They invested in T-Bonds (10Y or longer) and MBS (mortgages) it seems like, not T-Bills (1Y or shorter)
The distinction is extremely important in this case. If they were trading T-Bills, they would have survived. Instead, they took on much riskier T-Bonds (probably hoping to make more money).
(Which is why bank regulation is incredibly important, because without strong regulation banks often do start to chase profit by lending to more and more risky customers, and when that unwinds you get what happened in 2008)
Because they touch money they have all sorts of woo-woo respect. Really they are just service providers like lawyers, gardeners, and doctors.
The whole public perception of the finance sector (and its own sel-regard) is backwards.
The minimum viable size of a bank increases. Small, community banks can't implement Basel III. That's why they were exempted. How SVB was in a bucket with the Bank of Jackson Hole, however, is another question.
Really?
That is interesting. Why? How? Who else?
My money market fund (VMFXX) is composed of Fed Repo notes with 13 _DAYS_ of maturity average (https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...)
A bank holding customer deposits in lol 30 _Year_ or 10 _YEAR_ treasuries is anything but safe. That's called duration risk, and congrats, they just got burned by duration risk.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/liquidity-coverage-rati...
At a typical community/regional bank, payday is just a bunch of bill entries: debit the corp account and credit the employees accounts. Meanwhile a business-focussed bank will just have huge debits every Friday without corresponding credits: those are happening at other banks.
And with a small number of account holders, it doesn’t take many actors to cause an a bank run.
Payday sealed the fate here.
I’m unsure what special services a startup needs from their bank that any other bank serving businesses couldn’t offer.
SVB was not small, but an order of magnitude smaller than the large money center banks (Citi, BofA, JPMChase).
That being said, nearly every other bank of that size submitted Dodd Frank Stress Test results to the Fed in 2022.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2022-dfast...
Somehow SVB avoided this. I don’t see this as systemic at all. The FDIC will make depositors whole and the owners and managers did a bad job and they lose. The worst possible response would be a bailout of any sort beyond ordinary FDIC receivership.
Fun fact, if you're married, you can actually turn that into 3 * FDIC insurance limit.
- Account 1: You
- Account 2: Your spouse
- Account 3: Jointly you and your spouse
This can be done manually, with some logistical challenges.
This can also be done automatically, e.g. via CDARS.
Besides common strategy in my country: have more money than 250k spread it around at multiple banks.
I don't know much about US bonds, but Brazil issues 3 types of bonds: fixed rate, inflation-indexed floating rates and interest-indexed floating rates. It's common sense between investors you need to hold a mix of the 3 to hedge against macroeconomic changes, that way the term does not really matter that much: if inflation skyrockets, it's likely the government will increase interest rates to compensate, and so on.
Is it that much different in the US or has SVB simply failed to choose the bonds they bought carefully?
You can, however, buy bonds with varying maturity times. That's generally OK, since there's a liquid market in those bonds. They appear to have been caught flat footed by a sudden run.
You're thinking of I-bonds, but that's not the only inflation indexed bonds out there. There's also TIPS https://treasurydirect.gov/marketable-securities/tips/
1. https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/treasury-inflation-protec...
But people do love buying them, exactly because they never lose nominal value.
This kind of thing is bank risk management 101. For example, in Europe, banks tend not to lend out long term at all at a fixed rate, precisely for reasons like this.
Broadly this is called "duration marching" IIRC, duration being the name of sensitivity to interest rates. Ideally a bank would have no duration risk - they don't care if rates are going up or down. You can achieve it with a variety of tools: IR swaps, issuing long-term deposits/bonds, floating rate loans etc.
You're right, if SVB in 2021 just bet the farm that interest rates will stay so low for a decade, this is basically moronic.
No, it’s smart! If it works out, you cashout and go on the speaking circuit patting yourself on the back for your ygenius. If it doesn’t, you’ve limited your own liability and someone else comes in and cleans up your mess.
This is not "the economy". This is a giant sucking leech attached to it. A parasitic fungus that has attacked the minds of an alarming number of susceptible people. But not everyone is a mindless zombie.
Among other things, the parasite needs "zero" interest rate borrowing to survive.
"The economy" is not synonymous with Silicon Valley nor the SV mind virus.
I don’t know about you, but I come to HN for discourse that I could not get on race-to-the-bottom social media sites.
Even if the hyperbolic claim you made was true (it's not - see below if you want), why should we all be polite, pious disciples of Silicon Valley? It's ok to critique things, even when they provide some good.
N.B. I think it's more accurate to say the actual majority of tech we use is born from government funded research à la the entrepreneurial state. One should not confuse R&D with commercialization.
It would be very prudent to not have more than the FDIC insured amount in especially smaller regional banks that may have made same errors as SIVB while avoiding Basel III regulations [1]
[0] https://twitter.com/TOzgokmen/status/1634329176554520576
There's nothing wrong with going long on duration, it's a hedge against decreasing rates. The problem is when you go all-in on long duration investments and rates suddenly shoot up like they did, you now can't sell those assets without eating a massive loss.
An appropriate hedge would have been doing what every retail bond trader does, build a ladder. If they had simply bought a wider variety of say 1/2/5/10 year securities then they could have let the longer-dated ones sit and sell the shorter duration ones (and they wouldn't have suffered such a huge loss of market value that spooked depositors and started the run in the first place).
Even at the time it should have been seen as a short-sighted move, however. It was obvious ZIRP wouldn't go on forever and rate risk would bite you in the backside, so I can't call it anything but careless yield chasing without proper risk management.
If you want to standardly hedge against interest rate risk, that's what swaps are for. If you want to take on a comparatively less rate-sensitive portfolio, then you buy shorter-dated bonds. They yield less, but surely that's better than "the FDIC seizes your bank and your equity goes to zero."
For the individual banker, perhaps it's not? If rates stay low they get a fat bonus, if they go up they just get a new job somewhere else.
Here is a primer: https://www.pimco.com/gbl/en/resources/education/understandi...
This is another (PDF): https://www.treasurer.ca.gov/cdiac/publications/math.pdf
No. That is a fact. But it does not collapse properly run banks.
They did not raise "suddenly". The move away from ZIRP was well telegraphed. Once they did the first hike the only question was how fast and how far. Most in the market initially expected an end rate around 3% (ie, 100bp over their target inflation rate of 2%). As it became increasingly clear that the inflation was not just about supply chain disruptions that end rate target went to 4% and higher.
Further - every bank has a team with one responsibility - asset and liability management. They are responsible for not just the product choices (ie, MBS vs Treasuries, etc) but also matching durations. The Treasurer of the bank is also responsible for oversight, including whether or not any of these positions should be hedged and to what extent.
This is entirely on the bank staff and management.
If you have a healthy mix of business and retail clients, payday is a wash. If it’s a lot of business customers; every payday is like a predictable mini bank run.
If you have a small number of large, correlated and communicating players, you have a huge bank run risk.
The Fed funds rate was 9% in July of 1980 and 19% in December of 1980.
You would say the Fed raised rates as quickly in the first scenario as the second?
The only reason the boom/bust cycle is implemented thus in the west is so the banks can periodically redistribute assets of their least successful borrowers to other people. In China, the reorganizations are more market priced since the ownership and control of distressed assets is written down by the central bank and they are resold for pennies, while in the west it tends to go through bankruptcy court, which is a slow complex bureaucratic process and tends to destroy what was left of the company.
A casual look at the regional bank index ETF will show that starting about two weeks ago, the price started to steadily decline and then a sudden drop with SVB. I’m not sure if this decline is well correlated with the total market index over the same period, but if not, it suggests that some people “saw this coming” a couple of weeks ago and the other shoe may still need to drop. Was it just good analysis? Was there some whispering going on? If so, I hope the SEC is watching.
This might be just the beginning of a large hunting campaign, let's wait and see.
The problem is that SVB, knowingly, took on "interest rate risk" by buying long-term bonds (average 6.2 years, I read) that lock in an interest rate. The money to purchase those bonds came from deposits, which can be withdrawn at any time. When everyone started withdrawing their money SVB had to sell the bonds, and they took a loss because interest rates have increased and the bonds they were selling were not longer worth as much.
The dump trigger wasn't even an action/attack it was the lack of additional influx of VC/private equity/sovereign money, probably mostly from foreign markets that slowed or stopped, that tripped them up.
Then larger investment groups filled with startups like Founders Fund and Union Square Ventures doing a margin call across all their funds/investments caused a big enough dump that it was over. The run was started at this point and days later the bank is over.
Ultimately this is SVBs fault, but also regulators because concentration like this where they are responsible for so many companies and one type of money VC/private equity, is an attack vector just sitting there. It wasn't wise for investment groups to run the bank either because now this harms companies across the board, but may also be a consolidation move, shaking out companies they don't back.
HBS is even realizing too much optimization/efficiency is a bad thing. The slack/margin is squeezing out an ability to change vectors quickly. This is happening from supply chain to credit to food and more.
The High Price of Efficiency, Our Obsession with Efficiency Is Destroying Our Resilience [1]
> Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder.
> A superefficient dominant model elevates the risk of catastrophic failure.
> *If a system is highly efficient, odds are that efficient players will game it.*
It is CLEARLY time for some anti-trust busting at the funding level.
You can do the same thing to yourself. Take your life savings and emergency fund and put it locked up into 10 year treasuries bought direct from the treasury. Now go have an emergency. Good luck, have fun.
Only to find out that because of the raised rates nobody wants to pay for them enough to cover your emergency.
Also worth noting that SVB was not the only one to belief this. The market, in general, was supporting insanely high valuations whose only justification was near-0 rates well in to the future.
I disagree that the Fed set an expectation for indeterminate 0% interest. I'm sure that's what sugar addicts in the market told themselves, but I think the Fed was clearly, if gingerly, trying to dig themselves out of a 0% hole, having started to raise rates again in 2015. As they should have been!
And yeah as a bank it's an extremely stupid move to put 40% of your money into an entirely unhedged bet that interest rates will not go up for 10 straight years. Maybe the Fed didn't handle things as well as they could, and similarly maybe VCs exacerbated the problem unnecessarily, but I don't see how the lion's share of the blame doesn't go to SVB here.
>And they bought safe assets with that money.
The point is that you can't buy 100B of bonds and say "oh bonds are safe". When you buy low yield bonds with a 10 year maturation you're inherently betting that rates aren't going to rise since their valuation will go down if rates rise.
When you're a bank risk management does not involve hoping the fed doesn't raise interest rates. Sometimes you make the wrong bet but you recognize your mistake, take the loss and sell those T-Bonds earlier. Then you plan your communication to clearly explain why so that a bank run doesn't happen.
It seems the one of the pieces in the chain is that there was a big disconnect between the internal perception of the magnitude of the problem and what was communicated. Silicon Valley VCs and startups are twitchy right now and they tried to exit this position too late with too little explanation and got hit with a very old and very traditional bank run.
1. Covid stimulus vastly increased the amount of cash at the bank.
2. Artificially low interest rates plus the cash infusion caused inflation.
3. While inflation was beginning, the Fed somehow got it in its head that inflation was “transitory” and rate hikes weren’t needed.
4. The Fed waited too long to raise rates, so they needed to spike rates as quickly as possible once they changed their opinion on inflation.
Basically the government gave banks hundreds of billions of dollars to lend via stimulus spending, and then made those loans worthless by spiking interest rates less than a year later. Whose fault is that really?
Becoming insolvent because the rates reached ~5% when history has had far greater rates is in fact an issue for SVB. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
The federal reserve has dual mandates for both full employment and to have stable inflation. These mandates are in many ways opposed to each other. Putting the blame on the fed in hindsight is always easy, but unlike an institution with such a mandate SVB failed at one of the most fundamental parts of being a bank.
Just because the tech community is just now discovering interest rate risk and maturity matching problems doesn't mean any of this is new to the rest of us.
That was the first domino to fall, but that was survivable. The real problem was that the banking system had a suicide pact in the form of credit default swaps on each other that they couldn't cover. The MBS stuff was bad, but that wasn't what caused 2008.
Now I'm just waiting to find out if some other bank is going to need to pay out credit default swaps for SVB in excess of their market cap...
But mostly this was because they bet the farm on long duration bonds just before a period of rising interest rates. It's not like nobody saw that rising rates were on the horizon.
Is this going to end with similar results as 2018 by affecting the whole financial system? If yes I hope there will be no bailouts using public money and the financial system will start to be properly regulated and supervised.
In 2022-23: “Bond convexity”.
This word is still not on headlines yet, so maybe more loses has to come.
Did we? So what the hell is it?
Just one note for those that aren't fully aware, the treasuries were only down approx 20% because they were forced to sell before the 10yr maturity. If they could have held the entire term they would get back 100%.
So in effect, as the fed raises interest rates, they are destroying the principle of every existing bond on the market. That’s a big problem for anyone owning bonds, especially if they are using them as collateral for leverage.
What principle are they destroying? Bonds are not, and never were, immune to economic changes. They're just less volatile and react differently than stocks and, if you hold them to maturity, will pay what what they promised.
It seems to me that the problem is that a whole bunch of people made investments assuming that there was effectively no risk in doing so. Like the good times would last forever or something.
If your collateral gets worse ...
What they actually did was put 40% of their deposits into a long term bond that would start paying a shit rate if interest rates went up. The invested money is borrowed from depositors so the only thing they really "own" is the interest. In order to keep depositors in a high interest environment it will require paying out some amount of interest too. But they have locked themselves in to gains at a now small interest rate.
This was a risky bet for the bank from the start and there's absolutely no way they would make the trade they did if they knew interest rates would go up, even if they also had a guarantee that there would not be a bank run. This isn't a simple liquidity crisis or even somebody trying to stay solvent until their GameStop puts pay off.
So, yeah, these MBS will probably pay out when held to maturity, but their customers didn't buy MBS, they deposited their money in a bank.
I hope the bank thought it was betting, because if they didn't realize they were betting on interest rates staying low then that is a shocking level of incompetence. They probably thought it was a safe bet, but it was a bet nonetheless with obvious risk if they were wrong.
You’ll get that money back come 2041, it just won’t be able to buy you much.
100% back in, say, 9 years at 1.5%. Or take the 20% hit today, buy back bonds giving 4% yearly and end up with the same amount. I mean: it's literally how the price drop is calculated right?
What counts is the real, not nominal, value
*T-bills are up to 52 weeks maturity.
With regards to safety, I noted that I think there are two types of safety to note here:
1. Default risk. 2. Asset price volatility.
Ultimately if someone is willing and able to hold to expiry, they aren't subject to #2, but this clearly wasn't the case with SVB and may also be the case with other institutions. I think it lacks nuance to not consider the middle states between the purchase of a bond and the full return of the bond upon expiry.
First off - it is not a 10Y T-bill. T-bills extend to 52 weeks. From that point through 10Y are "notes" and everything longer are bonds.
Second anyone involved professionally in the markets understands the duration (not maturity) of bonds and how coupon rate and market interest rate will effect the price of said bond. [those interested can google terms like 'modified duration']. So there is absolutely no shock that the price of 10yr paper with a 50bp coupon would be near 80 in the current rate environment.
Yes. But those "100%" wouldn't be worth as much, due to inflation. There's also an opportunity cost to consider: if you sell now with 20% loss you get a chance to invest that money wiser.
Looking at the comments here, it's possible that this may trigger a run on banks.
My money at VMFXX is almost entirely composed of safe Fed Repos with average maturity of 2-weeks. VUSXX is mostly Treasury Bills, again of maturity averaging like 2-weeks. My money at SWVXX is composed of AAA-rated bank notes, of similar 2-weeks-ish maturity average.
The idea of a bank, like SIVB, being composed of largely 30-year mortgages and 10Y or 30Y Treasury Bonds is insane. The bank deserves to die after taking such high duration risks. There should be _NO_ bailout. I can barely believe a bank was so stupid to keep customer deposits backed by something so risky.
----------
We've been preparing our financial system for the last 15 years (since 2008) for the next financial storm. We've got "stress tests" to see that various banks have severed contamination between each other, at least in theory. Lets see how good our preparations have held up.
No point giving up and bailing things out before we've even tested our new financial system regulations. We can afford to let some banks go under. Only if the contagion has a chance of spreading everywhere should we consider the last-ditch effort of a bailout.
I know that this sort of problem isn't new, and I know that there are a variety of ways to mitigate the risk to acceptable levels. I don't think you can ever completely eliminate risk.
Dealing with large amounts of money is very complex and really requires experts to do right. I'm an engineer, not a money expert. Your question is better aimed at a subject matter expert.
But my underlying point isn't even that these companies did the wrong thing. Only that they took a risk -- and starting a business is itself taking a risk. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
But when you take a risk, you're (obviously) taking a risk that the money will be lost. That's truly an unfortunate thing, but everyone knows the rules of the game.
Also, if any particular bank fails, you only risk 1/20th of your cash.
EDIT: I never managed $100M before however. Maybe that stops being a potential plan at these sizes.
These spread your deposits over (up to) thousands of banks, keeping each account below FDIC insurance limits. You can choose demand deposit accounts, or CDs or money market accounts if you want interest.
All accounts roll up into a single bank statement from your primary bank.
There is a good chance that depositors will be made whole regardless, but even if it does require some intervention it is probably worth it to prevent this from spreading to other banks. There are very valid reasons why certain organizations would need to keep more than $250k in an account, and if everyone of them started transferring their money to a handful of the safest institutions, then things could quickly get out of control.
I get that the FDIC insurance is supposed to make you whole as long as you have less than $250K in a bank. But then you have to ask if the FDIC can actually cover that for several banks at a time - particularly at a time when the debt ceiling has not been raised and so Treasury can probably ill afford additional unplanned spending.
If SVB really failed because it misstepped and believed it would make more money off of government bonds and didn’t, I don’t really see there being a risk of the major banks collapsing. If lots of smaller banks banked on (no pun intended) doing the same thing though…
It's nice that he took time from his busy schedule decimating Twitter to share his views. But in my opinion VCs can't simultaneously claim to be such financial geniuses that they deserve lower taxes (via the carried interest loophole) but such babes in the woods that they need Uncle Sam to bail them out for a bad financial decision. Pick a lane, buddy.
Chamath?
What am I missing?
An alternative is to bankrupt the partners, cancel the shares, then take action for depositors
That is what did not happen in 2008
Have the shares been canceled? Are the partners bankrupted?
Too soon to tell. Remember AIG
Part of the issue here is that SVB was able to get into trouble because important regulations and safeguards were removed years ago.
The ones that exist to minimize the wider impact of a bank failure are working, and I don't see anyone upset about that fact.
Which important regulations and safeguards were removed?
It was effectively repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Its repeal is one of the things that allowed the 2008 crash to happen.
They aren’t just a vault for your money - they would charge you handsomely if so.
Silicon Valley is “building the future”, but at the same time can be very disconnected from the lives of many people around the country. That leads to mistrust and lack of empathy when these kinds of things happen.
1. Increase the amount of funds covered by FDIC insurance
2. Reduce the potential for loss of funds by a bank failure
I get that it's a pain in the ass to manage a bunch of accounts, but any business with >$1mm in cash reserves really should have everything but their operational float in a CMA or manually move it around themselves into multiple banks. When I see comments about a startup that had $x million in cash with SVB I have to wonder what the hell the founder and their investors were thinking keeping all of that in a single place.
its not just government bailout versus nothing. private equity could have come together and tried to shore of the bank in its capital raise, but nobody (not enough) wanted to be first. their own collective risk aversion is their demise. And on the greed front, people totally plan to buy the carcass and firesold assets.
Let them crash and burn, they shouldn't have all their assets in one bank.
This guy who has spent years (decades?) constantly whining about how government regulations are excessive and federal agency should be curtailed and government should stop protecting various groups from harm etc. is now suddenly crying out for urgent government help once something is hurting him and his friend circle personally.
Dilution and share classes also are worse nowadays I believe.
I saw it as a promotion for gambling. Listening to them talk about it made me sick
Americans love for gamlbing and alcoholism is beyond my comprehension. Like all bad things it's very bad in the long run
We should also consider the moral hazard at play here. How are future tech CEO's going to go into work every day and completely crush it 200% if they know that the government will bail them out if their monkey jpeg startup fails? A bailout will only breed lazy entrepreneurs, taking hard-earned tax dollars away from America's job-doers.
So, yes to all 3.
just stick with selling directly to collectors and you already have enough money
Uh, oh! Unregistered security...
https://twitter.com/TheyCallMeTarz/status/163431641123228877...