By all accounts, SVB's banking was boring. They borrowed short and lent long, and their long bets were very safe. The problem wasn't that they too exciting bets; its that they played the standard playbook incompetently.
Clearly not safe. IMHO anyone buying 10 year treasuries in the last several years is an idiot. Those rates were guaranteed to rise, as they could not fall below zero.
Next up: anyone who bought a house in the last few years is gonna get hurt. We knew rates would be rising, and hence prices falling. So far it's mostly sales volume dropping near zero, but soon...
And then when people are broke, many will raid their retirement investments. The stock market has benefitted for decades from people blindly (via 401k funds) dumping money into the market. More buyers than sellers equals rising prices. Guess what a jump in sellers causes...
And then after the market drops, people with money elsewhere will want to buy, resulting in one more shift of money from here to there.
People who bought a house as an investment might be in trouble, but people who bought a home to live in are making out like bandits with their 30 year fixed mortgages.
It would of course be deeply unintuive to a regular person and likely very unpopular if rates went negative enough to require it to be reflected in consumer banking (eg negative rates on a checking/savings account). But I don’t think it’s impossible and we may see it in our lifetimes.
That is just a nitpick though because I think the US public as-is would throw a fit if it happened, making it unlikely. Fully agreed that purchasing a 10y bond at 1% was boneheaded given plenty of people predicted interest rates to need to increase to fight inflation (come on, just because the fed said it was transitory for a while, doesn’t give professionals an excuse to blindly take that at face value). The effective yields could have been so much higher just keeping the cash uninvested or in short term treasuries, then purchasing 10y bonds after the rate hikes started or stabilized.
Yeah that is much more obvious in hindsight but it’s not like it was a fringe position even in 2021
The best spin I can think of is that they assumed HTM was sufficient to prevent a bank run, but it wasn't.
Edit: I went looking and PWC has a nice overview...
6.4.3.4 Hedging held-to-maturity debt securities ASC 815-20-25-12(d) provides guidance on the eligibility of held-to-maturity debt securities for designation as a hedged item in a fair value hedge.
... The notion of hedging the interest rate risk in a security classified as held to maturity is inconsistent with the held-to-maturity classification under ASC 320, which requires the reporting entity to hold the security until maturity regardless of changes in market interest rates. For this reason, ASC 815-20-25-43(c)(2) indicates that interest rate risk may not be the hedged risk in a fair value hedge of held-to-maturity debt securities.
https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/der...
In reality, they didn't hedge, and they used the HTM accounting treatment. So the accounting still said they were fine, since that permitted them to ignore the loss when interest rates increased; but accounting doesn't change reality, so they actually weren't fine and they blew up.
But I just can't wrap my head around the decision making process at SVB. I wouldn't expect to be paid high 6 figures to run risk at a $200B bank and I knew not to be in long bonds. hn_throwaway_99's comment about the legality of hedging their HTM book makes me wonder if they just reclassified it to reduce their costs in 2022. (Only credit and servicing risks can be hedged)
And that gets to the real issue. Current regulations actually encourage rate risk at banks <$250B, because you can either pay for insurance or just mark it HTM. The majors don't have this choice and have to eat the extra cost.
It is not that way in EU banking due to the Basel framework and IRRB. At least they have reporting standards and don't allow more than 15% to be at risk in the Supervisory Outlier Test (SOT).