An explainer post [1] connected to that Tweet is something I found extremely informative (assuming it's accurate):
"- In 2021 SVB saw a mass influx in deposits, which jumped from $61.76bn at the end of 2019 to $189.20bn at the end of 2021.
- As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital. As a result, they purchased a large amount (over $80bn!) in mortgage backed securities (MBS) with these deposits for their hold-to-maturity (HTM) portfolio.
- 97% of these MBS were 10+ year duration, with a weighted average yield of 1.56%.
- The issue is that as the Fed raised interest rates in 2022 and continued to do so through 2023, the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted. This is because investors can now purchase long-duration "risk-free" bonds from the Fed at a 2.5x higher yield.
- This is not a liquidity issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits, since these securities will pay out more than they cost eventually.
- However, yesterday afternoon, SVB announced that they had sold $21bn of their Available For Sale (AFS) securities at a $1.8bn loss, and were raising another $2.25bn in equity and debt. This came as a surprise to investors, who were under the impression that SVB had enough liquidity to avoid selling their AFS portfolio."
I have some family who (with some other partners) founded a small community bank that has grown over the years.
They expanded in some areas by buying other small community banks, specifically in areas where there was a big increase in income in the local area (from mineral rights, etc).
The smaller banks that they bought were in a situation where suddenly they had large amounts of cash incoming, and customers who were paying off / not taking out loans like they used to.
They didn’t have the reach (mostly confined to a small rural region) to use that cash to give out loans elsewhere so they looked to merge or be bought by someone who did.
Until I heard about those banks I hadn’t considered “too much money” was a problem.
At first glance, bank balance sheets are unintuitive and feel 'the wrong way round'. When someone deposits $1m at a bank, the bank doesn't have $1m more assets, it has $1m more liabilities.
Actually if you think about the balance sheet for banks "too much money" is a problem for them because deposits are liabilities not assets. The money belongs to customers not the bank. The bank must pay back the customers on demand.
That said, I think historically many banks can easily avoid the "too much money" problem by setting the interest they pay on deposits to be low, and maybe even negative.
Why is "too much money" a thing? If a bank only wants $100 million in deposits, but customers deposit $150 million, why can't the bank set the extra $50 million to the side and pretend like it doesn't exist until customers want to withdraw it?
with interest being zero as it was the past couple of years, can the bank not just sit on that money and literally do nothing? What operational expenses do they have?
Can you ELI5 this for me? Why is it terrible for the banks to simply sit on deposits if there aren't sound lending opportunities? I understand that the owners might prefer to sell rather than wait, but a small bank doesn't seem any inherently different than any other small business who's owner simply enjoys the work of running something. What is the inherent downside to idle deposits?
> - The issue is that as the Fed raised interest rates in 2022 and continued to do so through 2023, the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted. This is because investors can now purchase long-duration "risk-free" bonds from the Fed at a 2.5x higher yield.
Let's be clear, the issue wasn't that the Fed raised rates to a historically average level, it was that they were manipulating the bond market in 2021 with trillions of dollars of QE.
Over the last few years the Fed has basically done a pump and dump on the bond market, and SVB being a bank was basically forced by regulation to buy long-dated bonds for yield.
I've seen a lot of people speak critically of SVB and I get it, but I think people should take a minute to ask why the hell bonds were yielding such a low amount in 2021. I just wonder how much longer we're going to blame, banks, crypto investors, bond investors, equity investors, home buyers, etc for what's happening to the value of their assets. When central bankers make government bonds trade like meme stocks this is what happens. Perhaps if we didn't do that, SVB and many others wouldn't be in this position.
>Let's be clear, the issue wasn't that the Fed raised rates to a historically average level, it was that they were manipulating the bond market in 2021 with trillions of dollars of QE.
One of the principle, statutory purposes of the Federal Reserve is to conduct monetary policy to achieve maximum employment and stable prices. That means it's the job of the Fed to manipulate interest rates.
They bought $80b of fixed-rate bonds at historically and artificially low interest rates in a time of massive QE. Even based on the information available at the time, this is not a surprising outcome at all.
... housing prices have continued to rise at wildly unsustainable rates, leading to record homelessness. Which is the exact opposite of what happened with the crypto market, where the Ponzi scheme collapsed.
When the assets haven't even moved in the same direction, I don't know how you are going to blame federal policy to counteracted the recessionary impact of covid for moving them. Whereas the fed has caused significant damage & also been ineffective at fighting the current supply-side inflation caused by Russia's war of aggression.
"This is not a liquidity issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits, since these securities will pay out more than they cost eventually."
But that's exactly the problem. With higher interest rates, those deposits will be looking for a higher deposit rate. With their assets tied up in low-paying long-term bonds, SVB will not be able to pay that higher rate.
It would only work out "eventually", if the depositors would accept a below-market rate until the bonds matured.
EDIT: This is indeed a solvency issue, not a liquidity issue, as also pointed out below.
He meant solvency issue. Someone else called this out downthread and he confirmed. Definitely felt like it should've been corrected more prominently, though.
One of the differences between a central bank and regular bank is that the regular banks should do the riskier stuff and offer the higher interest rates.
This in theory creates a diverse non-correlated system of capital deployment with the best projects winning over the bad ones.
However when the central bank offers interest rates that a private bank cannot match even when it's deploying into safe and endorsed assets like MBS then some weird stuff happens...
The Fed can promise risk-free returns at whatever rate they want but once it exceeds the private banks', then the banks no longer serve any purpose. If there were a way for individuals to hold accounts directly w/ the Fed, they'd all do that. Money will be sucked away from banks that deploy capital in the private sector and squeeze into ones that just passthrough to the Fed's like money market funds.
With high enough interest rates, the Fed can end up sucking up liquidity even from good and safe projects and cause widespread asset collapse b/c the entities that are supposed to be doing price discovery can't compete anymore.
I will first try to explain with simplified numbers and then do the equivalent calculation somewhere else.
Let's assume you buy a $100 bond with 0% rate for 10 years. For simplicity, let's assume it's a riskless bond. Now, let's suppose those same bonds now pay 5% a month later. Well, the smart thing to do would be to sell your 1-month old bond and buy the new one. Of course, everyone is doing the same thing so the price has to drop until the bonds are equivalent. You would get $100/1.05^10 = $61.39. Of course, the old bond still pays 0% but now, on paper, the price of the bond should grow 5% every year as we get closer to maturation.
Going to the real world, it would be something like 4.5% (current Fed rate - expected to be higher) minus 1.5% (the MBS rate they have) is 3% difference and so $100/1.03^10 = $74.41. Now, you said 10+ and so doing the same thing with 15 years is $64.19. This is also not including the fact that MBS is strictly worse than treasuries in terms of riskiness and so it's easy to imagine 50% off.
It's pretty straightforward -- if you have asset yielding 1.5% forever, you can make it an asset yielding 3% by cutting its price in half.
In this case it's a little more complicated since you also get the principal back in pieces, but you can calculate the price today to create the equivalent of a 3% yield instead of 1.5%, and you'll get a significant price reduction.
There’s a misconception that bonds are safe investments. They are not. You’re just trading one kind of risk for another. You can do the math, compare 4% and 1.5% compounding for 10 years and that’s why no one wants the bonds yielding 1.5%. Dumping 90%+ of your liquid funds into a single thing other than cash is completely insane especially when it’s not yours.
MBS have a double whammy when rates rise. Not only are the mortgages yielding less relative to current rates but prepays decline so the duration extends. A lower relative rate for a longer time means a lower market price.
Interest rate rise will cause the same loss for bonds of the same duration. However MBS don’t have fixed durations. As interest rates go up, borrowers are expected to hold onto their mortgage longer. So the expected duration goes up for an MBS as well and loss is expected to be higher than bonds with similar duration to begin with.
However there is a mitigating factor for MBS in a rising rate environment, that is they are amortizing instruments. So the duration doesn’t go up as dramatically as callable bonds/CDs.
"to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital."
Sticking to unrealistic goals seems to to be the downfall of a lot of financial institutions (and probably a lot of other companies). Same happened with Deutsche Bank in the 2000s. The CEO declared that they wanted to achieve higher ROI and to achieve this they had to start doing ever riskier stuff until it blew up in their faces (and the taxpayer generously bailed them out so they could keep their big bonuses).
Exactly that. I am wondering why the “pressure” to generate more yield or any yield at all. It is counterintuitive to me to view the startups deposits as investments and not as saved money to be used later, hence no need for a risky or any yield (even if part of the savings will be washed by inflation year over year)
Noob Questions: How do banks typically diversify their investments so that this kind of thing does not happen? Also don't they have to have some kind of liquidity cushion? Can't they just cover their short term costs by borrowing(I thought there is an overnight facility for lending between banks to borrow at low rates)
With only a look at the summary numbers above, it looks like they tied up 40% or so to 10+ years. I don't know what the right percentage should be, if that much is going to be tied up in hold-to-maturity, you would expect it on a rolling basis which reflects the long term liquidity of your deposits.
On its face, such a purchase would only be done assuming rates and markets will remain the same. I wish I could say that accusing a bank of making such a naive purchase means that interpretation is wrong, but these banks keep doing things like this since it's always worked out before. I'm sure it's much more complicated, but sometimes that's because it should have been a lot less complicated.
As a bank, parking the money into long maturity bonds, especially when it's not your money, and your customer can take the money back anytime, and the current rates are 0% (so can go upward only...).
Or just some, as it turned out, valid business advice. That being said, I would never let my investors choose my banks (as in more than one bank) holding my company's cash. And I definetly wouldn't use some not-to-big-to-fail, not international bank to hold my multi-millions in VC money, which is the only yhing keeping my company a float.
As someone who was considering using one of those "banks" in the coming months, this whole ordeal makes me want to stick with Chase, Wells Fargo, etc. Stripe integrations be damned.
It’s probably not material to the overall picture, but just for accuracy, the wording of this is inaccurate - “As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital”
Capital has a special meaning to banks, and deposits are absolutely not capital from their point of view of the bank (they are from the point of view of the depositor). To the bank, deposits are on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.
A bank’s capital is only equity put in by shareholders and retained profits from previous years. This is important, because how much a bank can lend is only determined by the amount of capital they have, not the amount of deposits (since deposits are on the wrong side of the balance sheet for lending from).
There are some big parts to this story we don't know.
Yes, they sold the treasuries and took a bath. But if that was their best option, it speaks very poorly to the other "assets" they held on their balance sheet.
We may find out in the coming days that they had a big position in Silvergate, which went bankrupt yesterday, and they had to mark their position to zero, creating the need for liquidity.
Something like 60% of their assets were these bonds in December. They very well may have seen the other 40% withdrawn already by startups that can't raise anymore leaving them with this pile of 10 year 1.5% bonds.
[EDIT:] See the thread, it seems that the story may have stolen from the tweet! Pretty shocking for one of India's biggest business publications (and with 2 million Twitter followers).
He is correct, but he is blaming the FED raising interest rates.
The responsible is not the FED, but the negligent management of SVB that purchased such products because of greediness.
When interest rates raise, previously issued bonds lose in value because there are more attractive ones available.
It's like if they missed the Chapter 1 lesson about investing into bonds.
Some people are downvoting my reply to jamiequint https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35100305 but if that comment becomes dead then you won't be able to see his reply to me or the surprising conclusion of the story.
I do not think this is a problem of mortgage-backed securities.
The problem is that SVB tied up their liquidity for 10 years at a yield far lower than they would get with more secure investments after the FED's rate hikes.
The specific assets they invested into are immaterial.
Come on, where else would they put your money ? When are retail going to understand handling and parking and securing and regulating money has a cost and interest rate have to be chased somewhere.
Narrow banking never works because at the first regulatory lapse (my employer got fined 200M because we used whatsapp, not even for committing crimes), BAM no money left for deposit liabilities.
And dont forget here that as long as people eventually pay their mortgage in the expected default risk, the money will eventually come back, at an opportunity cost.
This is a symptom of the problem of middle class single family home residential real estate being treated as an unreasonably-price-increasing bubble inflated investment and not a place for people to live in.
The irrational exuberance in price increases in this segment of the market over the past 4-5 years is not sustainable.
It is not logical, sane or normal for houses that were valued at $150k five years ago to now be valued at $400k in some suburbs and metro areas.
It's crazy to realize how brazen Wall Street bankers and Hedge Fund managers are when it comes to asking for taxpayer dollars during distress, while decrying any attempt to add to that taxpayer dollar pool from their billions in earnings when the times are good.
> "- In 2021 SVB saw a mass influx in deposits, which jumped from $61.76bn at the end of 2019 to $189.20bn at the end of 2021.
Would be interesting to see where that money came from. That has all the markings of a pump before a dump, the dump being 2023. They didn't even have to dump, they just had to stop the pump to auto dump once the interest rates went up.
SVB opened themselves up to an attack vector and one thing the banking industry likes to do now and again is consolidate and shakeout. That amount of inflow in good times can make you do funny things. The better way to go about it is be scrappy always, and expect the attacks.
There were way too many companies in this bank, it had too much concentration of startup/VC/PE money. Regulations will probably have to be made around this now more robust.
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.*
Good grief. Simplifying this to “they took on tons of deposits and felt the need to make risky unchartered investments to retain their existing level of returns” is just so stupidly greedy. JFC, I think here of a ship with a heavy keel; only for the captain to order cargo many multiples the weight of the keel to sit above deck.
Why can’t so many folks who are doing well enough just act with basic common sense and integrity these days?
I don't get it. I'm no expert in finance but even I knew the fed wasn't going to stop raising interest rates because I had the common sense to know the fed would fail to trigger a recession by doing so.
When I set my ‘Hindsight Goggles’ to 100, I too saw that the Fed would keep raising interest after the initial rounds, because unemployment would stay low despite massive layoffs, somehow, and that prices would keep rising. And I am an expert in finance.
I hope it's accurate. What I should have said though is "This is not a *solvency* issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits", it's obviously a liquidity issue.
Because people can’t see the future and you’re talking do we forgo $1b a year or not in that spread. It wasn’t the MBS that got them into trouble, they were supposed to hold those to maturity. It was something else they did that led to that forced liquidation
Please correct me if i'm wrong since i'm not a finance guy,
apart from the loss of $1.8bn and the delta of the interest - growth from their assets.
Isn't everyone still going to get their money back - the percentage of the loss that SVB has which should be less than 5-9%? Sure FDIC has to liquidate all the money from the assets and it takes time. But at least the impact is not going to be as hard as losing all the money like FTX or Maedoff in 2008 right.
I mean. If you’re a startup that just had $10 million locked out and can’t make payroll. It doesn’t matter that you’ll “get your money back”. You’re toast.
In general people pay their mortgages. Just because a financial crisis has happened around it once doesn’t mean the asset class is inherently bad. It’s more regulated than ever, the problem was rising interest rates and not being able to keep their head above water with the position.
What’s interesting is that this bank failure as well as the failure of a neo bank Xinja in Australia despite taking in deposits both illustrate that it is not the case that banks make money by “lending out deposits” but rather by issuing loans and then attracting enough deposits to make their lending operations profitable.
> 10+ year duration, with a weighted average yield of 1.56%.
> the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted.
How much 'plummeting' did they do in numerical terms? Something with those kinds of yields doesn't sound like it ought to be a super risky asset. The mortgage lending market tightened up a lot after the great recession...right?
They're very safe assets, they just have a long duration which makes them really risky if you could need them to cover deposits.
To make things more straightforward, let's just compress it to a 1-year time frame vs a 30-day bond. So a $100 MBS at 1.5% would pay you $101.50 if you held it for 1 year. If you have $100 in deposits and a $100 MBS bond, you're "solvent". But what happens if after 30 days, your depositor asks for his $100 back? You either need to sell your MBS or find other money to pay them.
If you try to sell the MBS to pay that $100 deposit liability and interest rates are about the same as they were when you bought it, you'd likely get around $100 and things are okay. If however, rates have spiked since then (like they have here), investors can either buy your bond that pays 1.5% or they can buy a new issuance 1-year bond paying 4% or 5%, or perhaps a 30-day bond paying 1.5%. So you need to give them a discount in order to sell your bond -- in this case it might be upwards of 30% or 40%.
So if you sell your MBS, you'll only get $60 or $70 for it -- leaving you a huge shortfall that you need to makeup from your other reserves. If you could convince your depositor to leave his money in the bank until that bond matures, you'd be completely fine -- but the timing mismatch and interest rate spike just kills the bank.
A bond with a 10-year yield of 1.56% has a price of $0.85 on the dollar. A bond with a 10-year yield of 4% has a price of $0.676 on the dollar. So if yields increase from 1.56% to 4%, the bond price falls by 21%.
That has to be an inflation adjusted yield, right? Why would anyone do anything remotely risky for such terrible returns? You can almost find government bonds with similar average yields.
The risky part is (or more precisely has happened to be) the 10+ year duration, more than the ~1% yield over treasuries (which may be too low to compensate for the additional risk but is not what has brought the bank down).
I had the vague impression that after the 2007 crisis, banks holding retail deposit accounts were not allowed to invest in stuff like MBS, only investment banks (without retail accounts) were.
> I had the vague impression that after the 2007 crisis, banks holding retail deposit accounts were not allowed to invest in stuff like MBS, only investment banks (without retail accounts) were.
You are confusing the Great Recession with the Great Depression.
The 2007 crisis and subsequent Great Recession was contributed to by the 1999 repeal of that rule, adopted in response to the Great Depression; there were several efforts to restore it after the Great Recession, but none succeeded.
fifteen years ago we had simpler explanations of why things are going to pieces. Nowadays everything is more complicated - but the results are the same...
(i think HN needs a black bar, we are all screwed)
This logic is counterintuitive to me “As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital.”. Startups are not depositing the money in SVB to invest it, they are storing it for future use. Why the pressure to generate yield and grow the loan book “fast enough”?
There was no explicit need or requirement for SVB to buy MBS at 1% yield, yes. Poor management handling too much money.
They also could have hedged the interest rate risk. Likely there will be policy change as a result of this. Banks over some AUM requiring stricter regulations
The Fed is complicit in encouraging moral hazard through distortion of the bond market. Pretty much every crisis in the modern era is precipitated by fed policy from years earlier
"The yield they wanted to see on this capital" I imagine is some combination of money needed to run operations of the bank, interest paid on the deposits and profit.
They could have just stored the money in the proverbial vault. But if they do that, then they have to charge the depositors a fee to be a customer. And competition has pushed in the other direction.
And probably more importantly that whole "profit" goal.
> As a result, they purchased a large amount (over $80bn!) in mortgage backed securities (MBS)
Do we now have people making decisions on stuff like this who are too young or clueless to remember what happened with the 2004-2007 mortgage backed security bubble that popped in the 2008-2009 financial crisis? Seriously? Did nobody learn the lessons on this? Countrywide and other originators of MBS and CDOs?
Any investments whose value was sensitive to the Fed's rates would have had the exact same problem.
In 2008 MBSes were bad because the underlying value of the investment turned out to be bad. That's not happening this time. All that's happening is the same thing that happens to any bonds -- when rates increase, older lower-rate bonds lose value because why would anyone pay full price for them when they can get a new one with a higher rate?
The underlying problem in the 08 collapse was poor/non-existent underwriting of the mortgages and those loans being rated AAA when packaged in an MBS. When the economy slowed just a bit people started defaulting because originators were writing NINJ (No Income, No Job) loans, something that is illegal today.
This situation today has nothing to do with the failure of the MBS'S to payout like 08.
The error wasn’t that the mortgages defaulted too much (like in the ‘08 crisis) but that interest rates went up, which is a distinct problem, and, from the comments in these discussions, not something that the capital requirements adequately capture.
Hedging maturity and interest rate risk is literally the only thing a bank needs to do. (Okay not literally but come on you have more or less one job: assure assets are secure and generate some yield safely).
They got too much in deposits very quickly and could not originate loans at the same speed. If they kept the money uninvested their operating costs would have eaten up their principal (even if they had to pay 0% in interest to their customers)
Investing in the exact same kind of unsafe assets that brought the 2007 crisis, as well as assets that cause house prices to stay unaffordably high.
Yep, all of SV is truly made of bumbling idiots. That whole solution is truly hilarious and watching all these clowns lose their money is going to be fun.
Actually not. The kind of asset they invested in does not really matter. If they invested in super safe government bonds at <1% at the same time, they would have had the exact same issue. It is the rapidly rising interest rates that did them in. If they were smarter they could have done a rolling ladder of short maturities but probably someone there was lazy.
The execs have been pulling $3-10M/yr compensation and will walk away wealthy, legally in the clear, and probably into similar roles and comp elsewhere (or simply retired). They aren't bumbling idiots, though if they were, they'd be hella crafty ones.
I don't think the depositors, investors, or VC's that pushed for SVB were idiots. SVB was a good bank, with a good reputation, and good services that got mismanaged into oblivion.
I suspect all depositors will be made whole. The bank had a liquidity crisis; it had reserves in excess of its liabilities.
Every bank borrows short term (you can walk up and withdraw your money at any time) but lends long (e.g. mortgages, though SVB writes few of those). The recent management grabbed some very long federal bonds; as rates have risen the resale value of those long term assets (paying a lower interest rate) fell. They can't unwind that position and cover all possible demands.
FDIC will transfer the accounts to another bank, guaranteeing the 250K at least (I believe SVBs own liquid assets could cover that) and may use its own asset base to cover the balance, siezing SVB's other assets and stuffing them into FDIC's piggy bank. It's not like those government bonds won't pay out...eventually.
SVB held $21bn of 'available for sale' bonds and $91bn of 'held to maturity' bonds on its balance sheet, that were actually only worth $19bn an $76bn respectively on a mark-to-market basis, which means a total unrecognised hole its in balance sheet of $17bn. SVB's total equity was only $16bn[1][2]
That means it didn't have a liquidity crisis, and it didn't have reserves in excess of it's liabilities, it had a solvency crisis, and it has more liabilities than it has assets (before even considering the haircut it's assets will suffer at liquidation prices).
The crux of the issue here is that, for many types of assets, banks are able to test whether they meet capital requirements based on the price they paid for the assets, rather than the price the assets are currently worth. So SVB was sailing along nicely whilst it's bond portfolio slipped further and further under water, and wasn't required to recapitalise when it should have done.
People keep talking about how 'this is a solvency crisis because if SVB had to sell everything today, they wouldn't cover liabilities' when that is the definition of a liquidity crisis.
EDIT: To be clear, think of it this way. I have a piece of paper saying you'll give me $100 in 1 year plus 1% interest that I bought for $98.
No-one buys that piece of paper for $98 today, because they can get the same deal with better interest. But that doesn't change the fact that I will get $100 for it.
If deposits hadn't shrunk, $100 would go to SVB in 1 year and everything would be fine, it's the fact that they have to sell it so far ahead of maturity that's the problem, we just didn't notice this phenomenon in the past few decades b/c rates fell and prices went up.
This is not because SVB has a particularly risky book (we're talking treasuries here), it's because they didn't account for declining deposits (itself a very stupid, but unique bad decision unrelated to their risk tolerance).
> The crux of the issue here is that, for many types of assets, banks are able to test whether they meet capital requirements based on the price they paid for the assets, rather than the price the assets are currently worth.
I think this will limit the types of assets banks can purchase. They'll need to purchase only assets that regularly trade (and thus are quoted) on the market.
Agreed. Lots of people here in the comments are making assumptions about a system they don't understand. Depositors with > $250k aren't necessarily going to "take a haircut," for the reason you mentioned, plus a few others. Additionally:
1. Any financial advisor who recommended to these startups that they should keep >250k in a regular bank account should be fired. It's totally possible (and regularly done) to spread out cash among several financial institutions to protect against this very issue.
2. Any regular account with two or more signers (very typical for a business account) is insured up to 500k.
3. If spreading out your 6- or 7-figure assets to multiple institutions is too much of a burden, literally every business bank has special accounts or add-on features that either raise the FDIC default limit of 250k, or supplement it with external insurance. Again, if any startup's financial handlers didn't recommend this: fire them because they entirely failed to do their job.
SVB is not a typical regional bank taking deposits from middle-class workers, where most accounts are under the 250k insurance limit.
Banks that primarily serve ordinary workers typically have over 50% of total deposits in accounts that are under the limit, and are fully insured.
But for SVB, less than 3% of deposits are in accounts with less than $250k.
The cold, hard fact is that if the bank doesn't have sufficient assets to pay back depositors, no regulatory sleight of hand changes that fact.
There's a reason why large deposits aren't insured, and that's because the rich have the knowledge and resources to take care of themselves, and shouldn't co-opt the power of the state to force ordinary people to subsidize them when their bets go bad.
It would be hideously immoral to bail out fabulously wealthy VCs with funds from taxpayers and small depositors.
> 3. If spreading out your 6- or 7-figure assets to multiple institutions is too much of a burden, literally every business bank has special accounts or add-on features that either raise the FDIC default limit of 250k, or supplement it with external insurance. Again, if any startup's financial handlers didn't recommend this: fire them because they entirely failed to do their job.
Contractual obligations often prevent this, btw. Many SVB customers had loans with SVB, which prevented them from using other banks.
To be clear, if you have 10 million cash, and you need >250k to make payroll a couple of times while your banks assets are sold off and you get the rest of your cash back (or 95%, or whatever), there is no need to spread that 10 mil over 40 different banks. That would be very inconvenient. Just to set it up so you have enough insurance to help you survive a short while. You can put 9.75M in one account and 250k in another bank.
The thing that's strange is FDIC took control and setup a receiving bank for liquidation.
That's not normal; FDIC works quite hard to find a bank willing to take over - usually they can work out what the "cost" is to take over, and FDIC pays the receiving bank that amount to "eat" the dying one.
If they don't announce they have a bank to assume SVP by Monday, it's quite abnormal.
Exactly. The fact they didn't have a bank lined up points very heavily to the fact that they are not going to be made completely whole. In the past, the FDIC has found a buyer and as part of that process guarantees some amount of the losses. IE: Savior Bank buys Failed Bank for pennies on the dollar, or even for a negative amount. They get all deposits, insured or not, and all assets--meaning loans. Then, the FDIC guarantees they'll make Savior Bank whole some percentage of losses on assets that go bad. Sometimes 80% or more
This arrangement usually results in all depositors being made whole, and the FDIC fund not taking any, or many, actually losses, because most of the loans will still pay back, at least partially
They also do this before seizing the bank, so that it's all very orderly and calms any panics
SVB was looking for a buyer on the open market and that failed--no surprise
That the FDIC also could not find a buyer that they could subsidize and announce the same day as the seizure is very damning. I would be shocked if someone comes in later and tries to buy it
Also, the fact the seizure happened in the middle of the business day, and not at the close of business yesterday points to a somewhat disorderly and rapidly deteriorating condition. I think maybe the run picked up a lot faster than they expected
Most FDIC bank takeovers are slow moving crashes, allowing for a longer negotiation where buyers can evaluate the loan portfolio they are buying. This is a reaction to a classic run, so no time for that.
So what I think is happening here is that if you take over a bank the traditional way, you need to mark-to-market all of the bank's assets -- so all of the losses from the long-dated MBS that would be perfectly fine if held to maturity would have to be recognized immediately, just crushing the balance sheet of anyone who bought it. Probably trying to line someone up who can either absorb that loss, figure out a way to recapitalize without recognizing the loss, or get access to some other lending facility.
The size of this failed bank is quite abnormal. The business of this failed bank is quite abnormal. The surprising thing may be that the find anyone willing to take it out of their hands - let alone by Monday.
The conundrum with underwater bonds/mbs is that you can make depositors whole, or give depositors money back now, but not necessarily both.
If I had $1m in my account and it was invested 100% in MBS around in 2021, it could take 10 years to actually get the whole $1m back, and only be worth like $800k now. I have effectively lost that 20% because you could just give me $800k now and I could put it in a MBS myself to get the same results.
> DFPI specifically called them insolvent in their release today, does that change your opinion on depositors being made whole?
If the asset/deposits balance hasn't changed much since December (which I'm not sure is the case), depositors are likely to eventually be made whole for the deposit amounts, but liquidity issues and facilitating sale of assets to make that happen may result in substantial delays. For depository accounts businesses relied on for regular operations, that...may still create substantial additional costs that will not be compensated.
So, in a more holistic sense, it seems likely that depositors will not be made truly whole for the impacts, even if they eventually recover deposits.
- "it had reserves in excess of its liabilities"
- "They can't unwind that position and cover all possible demands"
I'm guessing that you're thinking of some sort of valuation of their assets that says something like "well they're really worth more than they're currently valued at", which is a common claim on this story but it's a pretty bold one?
That's a good question. The key is where I wrote that it was a liquidity crisis.
An analogy: you (hypothetically) keep your money in some 6-month CDs, with about a month's worth of expenses in your savings account in case something unexpected comes up. Then you lose your job and by the end of the month you haven't found a new job. You could liquidate your CDs, but the early-liquidation penalty might mean you still won't have enough to pay your bills. If only you could wait for maturity.
So yes, at mark-to-market firesale prices that means SVB can't pay out in full today to every account holder and so FDIC has to step in. But FDIC (who has a very large balance sheet) also seizes those assets. They give the accounts to another bank. Then FDIC can unwind those seized assets in whatever timely fashion it wants.
There's a second factor: in a secular banking crisis they may pay out only the guarantee (currently $250K; for a while (during the GFC IIRC) it was temporarily $500K. But we are not in a secular banking crisis; not only has the Fed completely restructured bank reserve requirements in response to the GFC but SVB is a single, small bank, not even a regional one, with a run-of-the-mill crisis. This is the kind of failure that you put all the new hires on because they can learn without any up-to-the-minute crisis stress. This is what they learned during onboarding :-). In such a situation it's better to pay out move than the $250K, probably several million, to prevent any "contagion" (since SVB has "Silicon Valley" in its name).
I have no special knowledge of FDIC's internal thinking: they could make them whole now, or make up to $250K whole now and pay out some later, or yes, they could force a few people to take a haircut. Those (small number of) panicing VCs would be better off calling their senators than their portfolio companies.
PS: BTW hypothetical you has more options than those above: you could take out credit card debt, perhaps tap a HELOC you might already have in place, etc. SVB had similar options: they did have a $15B fire sale and got an investment from General Atlantic. It wasn't enough.
Agreed. The FDIC report shows $209b in assets and $175b in deposits.
Even if they took the full $15b estimated loss to liquidate their HTM bond portfolio, they'd have $20b to spare before not being able to cover deposits.
The assets may not be valued anywhere near market prices given the recent run up in interest rates. They don’t have to reprice the asset if they intend to hold it to maturity in the face of fluctuating rates.
Joseph Gentile is the Chief Administrative Officer at SVB Securities.
Prior to joining the firm in 2007, Mr. Gentile served as the CFO for Lehman Brothers’ Global Investment Bank where he directed the accounting and financial needs within the Fixed Income division.
But by the time the depositors get their money all of their employees will have left, and some other company will have an N year lead on cornering the AI dog washing market.
Yeah, it seems companies should be mostly fine. Like you had 10 million in cash yesterday, but now you get 10m in 10y TBills, which you have to sell for $9m to get your cash back. It sucks but it shouldn't change the trajectory of your startup.
As fairity pointed out in a comment to this thread, "The FDIC report shows $209b in assets and $175b in deposits."
Unfortunately much of their balance sheet is illiquid (consider loans they've made to venture-backed businesses, and of course a poor choice they made in government debt maturity).
Thus a liquidity crisis; technically also insolvency, but not gross mismanagement and excessive leverage by any means. Unwinding it will be quite routine (see my reply to kmod).
The reason why depositors are going to lose money I think is because the fire-sale valuation of the assets << valuation on the books. I think depositors will lose a fairly big chunk of their money, maybe 10-30% if not more.
Their money was not sitting around in cash. It was in bonds which lost a lot of value in the last several months. They also have more exotic investments in the startups they work with, which depending on how it works, could get a really bad valuation as well.
See my reply to kmod in regards to this. It's the FDIC's current balance sheet we're talking about, not SVB's. In a liquidity crisis you don't have access to your capital. So FDIC spends theirs, and takes control of SVB's balance sheet. Also SVB is a small bank.
So it seems like they mismanaged their assets and their liabilities, taking on a lot of expensive deposits while investing at low yield.
What I don't get is all this pro-SVB, anti-VC sentiment, how "some VC's yelled fire in a crowded theater" and caused the poor bank to collapse. Isn't it just common sense though, to protect your money? The bank fucked up by doing risky reckless things, it got exacerbated because the customer base is not as diverse as a big bank - it's all startups that are subject to the same patterns, and SVB is not as big for the govt to bail out, so the bank customers did the only logical thing which is to withdraw your money before it disappears, yet they get lectured for doing that.
Of course the VCs who told their portfolio companies to pull the money were doing the right thing, by the people they are obliged to do the right thing by. They want to protect their companies and their investors. They'd be mad not to, and they are legally obliged in many cases.
I think you'll find a lot of the people complaining are people who got hit and are bitter about it.
e.g. some CFO's seem to be complaining about VCs - the CFOs likely didn't do their job, one part of it is "treasury/cash management". Some VCs are complaining about other VCs - probably they weren't paying attention and their portfolio companies got hammered.
Remember - SVB dusted ~$15 bill on their long term bond bet, it was almost their entire equity base. Pulling your money out was the only sensible action.
No, it actually was incredibly stupid and short-sighted by VCs. Here's Matt Levine on that point [1]:
> Also, I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors. If some depositors get spooked and take their money out, and other depositors evaluate your balance sheet and decide things are fine and keep their money in, and lots more depositors keep their money in because they simply don’t pay attention to banking news, then you have a shot at muddling through your problems.
But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time. In fact, Bloomberg reported yesterday:
Unease is spreading across the financial world as concerns about the stability of Silicon Valley Bank prompt prominent venture capitalists including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund to advise startups to withdraw their money. …
Founders Fund asked its portfolio companies to move their money out of SVB, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Coatue Management, Union Square Ventures and Founder Collective also advised startups to pull cash, people with knowledge of the matter said. Canaan, another major VC firm, told firms it invested in to remove funds on an as-needed basis, according to another person.
SVB Financial Group Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker held a conference call on Thursday advising clients of SVB-owned Silicon Valley Bank to “stay calm” amid concern about the bank’s financial position, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Becker held the roughly 10-minute call with investors at about 11:30 a.m. San Francisco time. He asked the bank’s clients, including venture capital investors, to support the bank the way it has supported its customers over the past 40 years, the person said.
Nah, man, you don’t get to be a successful venture capitalist by taking a long view or investing in relationships or being contrarian. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this is unfair. Of course they were right — Silicon Valley Bank did collapse, and if you got your money out early that was good for you — but that is largely self-fulfilling; if all the VCs hadn’t decided all at once to pull their money, SVB probably would not have collapsed.[6]
If you don't understand the sentiment, I recommend that you read about what happens in a "run on the bank". Too many large withdrawals at the same time results in a liquidity crisis. No bank in the country has enough reserves to pay all of its customer accounts at the same time; it's part of our system of fractional reserve banking. A massive spike in withdrawals forces a bank to sell long term securities in a disadvantageous environment, often for a huge loss. That undermines customer confidence and exacerbates the issue, causing more people to withdraw. A single person could bring the most successful bank to its knees in that environment, as long as enough customers believe them; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think we all understand why VCs telling people to get their money out caused or accelerated the collapse. But what was any individual VC supposed to do, tell their startups to just go down with the ship?
It's the same dynamic as the toilet paper shortages at the beginning of covid: most people weren't panic buying because they thought that there wouldn't be enough toilet paper to go around if everyone kept cool, they were panic buying because they knew not enough other people were keeping cool.
If it looks like the only reward you'll get for keeping your cool is a few weeks with a dirty bottom, it's hard to avoid joining in the run.
So my personal takeaway: pick a bank that is too big to fail, because if it happened to a bigger, non-niche bank they probably would have used the taxpayers' money to bail it out.
PS. the sentiment still makes no sense, SVB customers did not sign up for the bank to gamble with their money and they have a full moral right to do whatever it takes to get their working capital back the second they start to sense any trouble. These withdrawals are not just stupid meme stock lulz, this money belongs to the customers.
The same thing happened to all these stupid crypto exchanges and banks and yield scams.
The point is that they are supposed to have capitalization requirements and regulations that show they actually have more assets than liabilities.
But in reality they don’t so fractional reserve doesn’t work here. In fractional reserve the bank still has assets worth more than liabilities. That’s the whole point of the regulation.
This bank doesn’t meet that basic requirement.
This is due to the rate hikes, yes, but just like all the recent events if the bank had properly adjusted its portfolio after the hikes, making losses and having a shitty stock price for a while, it would have been able to weather this storm. The storm came because the bank never adjusted until too late. It waited until it was negative from asset devaluation due to interest rate hikes
This, these bonds/mbs are liquid instruments, they just lost value at market prices. When I make a deposit in a bank I am not purchasing a CD - I expect full liquidity. If the bank invested my deposit in something that lost money but should be worth my deposit amount in X years that is purely the bank’s fault, not my fault.
Here's the more mindblowing thing... not only are those MBS and treasuries completely liquid... they're correlated to interest rates! The fed has been forecasting interest rate hikes every single quarter. Every. Single. Quarter. They had plenty of time to roll over these investments at a slight loss. Heck, even reducing their exposure 50% would have been enough to not end up in this mess.
Instead, they waited until it was way too late (by most accounts, the fed is going to do another 50bps hike next) and all it took was some fear for the house of cards to come crumbling down.
This does feel like a regulatory failure though. Reserve requirements don't quite prevent a bank taking on massive undiversified risk like this.
"Common sense" that just fucked over the industry & a whole lot of workers in it.
In more mature industries, people would have been confident that the government wouldn't let their bank go under, because the government usually doesn't, and as a result the government usually doesn't have to. Instead, startup culture is so low-trust that we shot ourselves in the foot.
Silicon Valley Bank UK confirms it’s a standalone independent UK regulated bank.
London, 10 March, 2023: Silicon Valley Bank UK, the financial partner of the innovation economy, today moved to confirm to its UK clients, partners and external stakeholders its financial position as a standalone independent banking institution that is regulated and governed by the PRA in the UK.
Silicon Valley Bank UK has been an independent subsidiary since August 2022 with a separate balance sheet to the SVB Financial Group and an independent UK Board of directors. Silicon Valley Bank UK fully abides by the UK regulatory requirements as covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and by the Financial Ombudsman Service. SVB UK, Ltd. is ring-fenced from the parent and its other subsidiaries.
Notes to editors
Funds from client deposits placed with SVB UK, Ltd. are managed in the UK for the benefit of our UK clients.
None of our operations in the EU outside our UK Subsidiary are licensed to or take deposits.
If the assets are separate, it is still a very relevant point for depositors because the outcome of the UK receivership will be based on those separate assets. The amount that depositors in the UK bank recover may be completely different, higher or lower, than the depositors in the main bank.
The announcement is somewhat funny in a way that "independent Silicon Valley Bank"'s announcement actually happens on the website of the US website they are not supposed to have links with.
An interesting tidbit from the Bloomberg live thread[0]:
>The FDIC prefers to close a bank over the weekend, shutting it down on Friday and reopening Monday, Steven Kelly, senior research associate at the Yale Program on Financial Stability, told me.
>“The midday takeover suggests the bank couldn’t responsibly operate until the end of the day,” Kelly said.
The regulations that allow a bank to hold long-term fixed-rate bonds backing variable-rate liabilities (since deposit rates float) seems broken.
It's straightforward to reckon their exposure to interest rates: they had $90B in 10-year fixed rate bonds, so they lose $9 billion per % of interest increase. They must have known that a 4% increase in interest rates would put them underwater, but they did it (and were allowed to do it) anyway. It'll be interesting to learn about the process behind that decision.
What’s crazy to me is the fed hasn’t been raising rates out of the blue. What the fuck was this bank doing the last two years during every raise? They should have been rebalancing.
I think what probably happened is that, for whatever reason (hubris, incompetence, some bull thesis) they didn’t sell their HTM assets during interest rate increases until it got to a point that taking a loss on them would have forced them to recalculate their reserves such that they were lower than deposits (ie insolvent). Technically they were allowed to do this because they get to count the maturity price as reserves rather than the market price. Selling at a loss at any point would have fixed the problem but force them to lower their reserve calculations and realize a loss.
Once their HTM assets’ market price fell enough that rebalancing would force them to admit to insolvency by recomputing their reserves, they literally could not do anything with them except hold and pray that they make it, which may have just made things worse. Who knows how long they’d really been underwater
I'm wondering the same thing. The current rise in interest rates must have been a scenario that the bank considered. How can we still have a system that allows situations like this to happen? Other than negligence or malpractice, I cannot fathom a reasonable explanation as to how this happened / was allowed to happen (again).
There's nothing wrong with your first sentence really. Banks can (and should) hedge these risks using swaps and other products. Someone really messed up here.
All banks run on exchanging short term liabilities for long-term assets. No bank is big enough that it can survive a large enough run.
The whole point of capitalization stress-tests is to determine that banks can withstand a certain amount of withdrawals.
It of course is going to be much much more likely on a bank that only has 3% FDIC - I have no desire to "run" on my bank because I am below the $250k limit, and even if the accounts were frozen for a week it wouldn't be that worrisome.
But if I were a startup with $100m at SVP, I would have been freaking out earlier this week.
A swap has two sides. Someone still holds the bag, so what you're saying here doesn't make sense. What SVB was doing is typical; regular banks don't hedge anything. You can see everything in a Bloomberg terminal
they don't lose anything if they're not forced to liquidate those bonds but can hold them to maturity. It seems like the real problem here is a lack of diversity in liabilities (all tech/biotech startups).
That's not true. When interest rates go up, they have to pay the higher rates on customer deposits, but they're not getting any more from their bonds. Perhaps they can spread the losses over 10 years, but the losses are the same.
Please reboot Silly-con Valley...I mean the show. With everything that has happened with crypto and the current mayhem I think two solid additional seasons can be made.
Readit News
"- In 2021 SVB saw a mass influx in deposits, which jumped from $61.76bn at the end of 2019 to $189.20bn at the end of 2021.
- As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital. As a result, they purchased a large amount (over $80bn!) in mortgage backed securities (MBS) with these deposits for their hold-to-maturity (HTM) portfolio.
- 97% of these MBS were 10+ year duration, with a weighted average yield of 1.56%.
- The issue is that as the Fed raised interest rates in 2022 and continued to do so through 2023, the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted. This is because investors can now purchase long-duration "risk-free" bonds from the Fed at a 2.5x higher yield.
- This is not a liquidity issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits, since these securities will pay out more than they cost eventually.
- However, yesterday afternoon, SVB announced that they had sold $21bn of their Available For Sale (AFS) securities at a $1.8bn loss, and were raising another $2.25bn in equity and debt. This came as a surprise to investors, who were under the impression that SVB had enough liquidity to avoid selling their AFS portfolio."
[1] - https://twitter.com/jamiequint/status/1633956163565002752
They expanded in some areas by buying other small community banks, specifically in areas where there was a big increase in income in the local area (from mineral rights, etc).
The smaller banks that they bought were in a situation where suddenly they had large amounts of cash incoming, and customers who were paying off / not taking out loans like they used to.
They didn’t have the reach (mostly confined to a small rural region) to use that cash to give out loans elsewhere so they looked to merge or be bought by someone who did.
Until I heard about those banks I hadn’t considered “too much money” was a problem.
(Yes, this is a gross over-simplification)
That said, I think historically many banks can easily avoid the "too much money" problem by setting the interest they pay on deposits to be low, and maybe even negative.
You can always buy crypto if you think you have too much money. Or find a nice Ponzi scheme and invest in that.
Its not so much this as deposits are bank liabilities.
Let's be clear, the issue wasn't that the Fed raised rates to a historically average level, it was that they were manipulating the bond market in 2021 with trillions of dollars of QE.
Over the last few years the Fed has basically done a pump and dump on the bond market, and SVB being a bank was basically forced by regulation to buy long-dated bonds for yield.
I've seen a lot of people speak critically of SVB and I get it, but I think people should take a minute to ask why the hell bonds were yielding such a low amount in 2021. I just wonder how much longer we're going to blame, banks, crypto investors, bond investors, equity investors, home buyers, etc for what's happening to the value of their assets. When central bankers make government bonds trade like meme stocks this is what happens. Perhaps if we didn't do that, SVB and many others wouldn't be in this position.
One of the principle, statutory purposes of the Federal Reserve is to conduct monetary policy to achieve maximum employment and stable prices. That means it's the job of the Fed to manipulate interest rates.
They bought $80b of fixed-rate bonds at historically and artificially low interest rates in a time of massive QE. Even based on the information available at the time, this is not a surprising outcome at all.
When the assets haven't even moved in the same direction, I don't know how you are going to blame federal policy to counteracted the recessionary impact of covid for moving them. Whereas the fed has caused significant damage & also been ineffective at fighting the current supply-side inflation caused by Russia's war of aggression.
Is this true?
That’s what happens when people buy meme stock. I think the failure of the goverment and the bank are unrelated here.
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But that's exactly the problem. With higher interest rates, those deposits will be looking for a higher deposit rate. With their assets tied up in low-paying long-term bonds, SVB will not be able to pay that higher rate.
It would only work out "eventually", if the depositors would accept a below-market rate until the bonds matured.
EDIT: This is indeed a solvency issue, not a liquidity issue, as also pointed out below.
The markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
This in theory creates a diverse non-correlated system of capital deployment with the best projects winning over the bad ones.
However when the central bank offers interest rates that a private bank cannot match even when it's deploying into safe and endorsed assets like MBS then some weird stuff happens...
The Fed can promise risk-free returns at whatever rate they want but once it exceeds the private banks', then the banks no longer serve any purpose. If there were a way for individuals to hold accounts directly w/ the Fed, they'd all do that. Money will be sucked away from banks that deploy capital in the private sector and squeeze into ones that just passthrough to the Fed's like money market funds.
With high enough interest rates, the Fed can end up sucking up liquidity even from good and safe projects and cause widespread asset collapse b/c the entities that are supposed to be doing price discovery can't compete anymore.
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I'd like to learn more about the dramatic drop in MBS - elsewhere, downthread, it is asserted that they have dropped 30-50% ?
I understand the inverse relationship between bond price and yield ...
... but I am surprised that an asset yielding ~1.5% drops 30% in value when treasuries of similar duration rise to 3-4%.
Are there other factors at play with MBS in early 2023 - such as increased delinquencies - that are putting downward pressure on their price ?
Let's assume you buy a $100 bond with 0% rate for 10 years. For simplicity, let's assume it's a riskless bond. Now, let's suppose those same bonds now pay 5% a month later. Well, the smart thing to do would be to sell your 1-month old bond and buy the new one. Of course, everyone is doing the same thing so the price has to drop until the bonds are equivalent. You would get $100/1.05^10 = $61.39. Of course, the old bond still pays 0% but now, on paper, the price of the bond should grow 5% every year as we get closer to maturation.
Going to the real world, it would be something like 4.5% (current Fed rate - expected to be higher) minus 1.5% (the MBS rate they have) is 3% difference and so $100/1.03^10 = $74.41. Now, you said 10+ and so doing the same thing with 15 years is $64.19. This is also not including the fact that MBS is strictly worse than treasuries in terms of riskiness and so it's easy to imagine 50% off.
In this case it's a little more complicated since you also get the principal back in pieces, but you can calculate the price today to create the equivalent of a 3% yield instead of 1.5%, and you'll get a significant price reduction.
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Sticking to unrealistic goals seems to to be the downfall of a lot of financial institutions (and probably a lot of other companies). Same happened with Deutsche Bank in the 2000s. The CEO declared that they wanted to achieve higher ROI and to achieve this they had to start doing ever riskier stuff until it blew up in their faces (and the taxpayer generously bailed them out so they could keep their big bonuses).
On its face, such a purchase would only be done assuming rates and markets will remain the same. I wish I could say that accusing a bank of making such a naive purchase means that interpretation is wrong, but these banks keep doing things like this since it's always worked out before. I'm sure it's much more complicated, but sometimes that's because it should have been a lot less complicated.
This is a pretty insane bet. Why didn’t they ladder the maturities to have a lower average duration and less risk?
Sounds like an insane investment decision.
Very blatant weaponization of FUD to drum up deposits for their investments in Brex, Ramp, and Mercury.
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Capital has a special meaning to banks, and deposits are absolutely not capital from their point of view of the bank (they are from the point of view of the depositor). To the bank, deposits are on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.
A bank’s capital is only equity put in by shareholders and retained profits from previous years. This is important, because how much a bank can lend is only determined by the amount of capital they have, not the amount of deposits (since deposits are on the wrong side of the balance sheet for lending from).
Yes, they sold the treasuries and took a bath. But if that was their best option, it speaks very poorly to the other "assets" they held on their balance sheet.
We may find out in the coming days that they had a big position in Silvergate, which went bankrupt yesterday, and they had to mark their position to zero, creating the need for liquidity.
[1] - https://twitter.com/jamiequint/status/1633956163565002752
That tweet is unattributed verbatim from https://www.livemint.com/news/world/explainer-silicon-valley...
[EDIT:] See the thread, it seems that the story may have stolen from the tweet! Pretty shocking for one of India's biggest business publications (and with 2 million Twitter followers).
When interest rates raise, previously issued bonds lose in value because there are more attractive ones available.
It's like if they missed the Chapter 1 lesson about investing into bonds.
The problem is that SVB tied up their liquidity for 10 years at a yield far lower than they would get with more secure investments after the FED's rate hikes.
The specific assets they invested into are immaterial.
Narrow banking never works because at the first regulatory lapse (my employer got fined 200M because we used whatsapp, not even for committing crimes), BAM no money left for deposit liabilities.
And dont forget here that as long as people eventually pay their mortgage in the expected default risk, the money will eventually come back, at an opportunity cost.
The irrational exuberance in price increases in this segment of the market over the past 4-5 years is not sustainable.
It is not logical, sane or normal for houses that were valued at $150k five years ago to now be valued at $400k in some suburbs and metro areas.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/billionaire-investor-b...
It's crazy to realize how brazen Wall Street bankers and Hedge Fund managers are when it comes to asking for taxpayer dollars during distress, while decrying any attempt to add to that taxpayer dollar pool from their billions in earnings when the times are good.
Would be interesting to see where that money came from. That has all the markings of a pump before a dump, the dump being 2023. They didn't even have to dump, they just had to stop the pump to auto dump once the interest rates went up.
SVB opened themselves up to an attack vector and one thing the banking industry likes to do now and again is consolidate and shakeout. That amount of inflow in good times can make you do funny things. The better way to go about it is be scrappy always, and expect the attacks.
There were way too many companies in this bank, it had too much concentration of startup/VC/PE money. Regulations will probably have to be made around this now more robust.
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.*
[1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency
Why can’t so many folks who are doing well enough just act with basic common sense and integrity these days?
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This is exactly a definition of liquidity issue... Owning enough assets but not being able to cover short term liabilities.
In opposition to not owning enough assets to cover liabilities.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/deposit-insurance/
I should add: apart from 2008, bank failure has historically been quite rare
But why didn't they just hold money at the Fed given that they are a bank and they can?
It's literally splitting hairs between what the Fed Fund Rate is and what they got on their MBS.
Explainer post says end of 2021 they made that trade, in March the Fed raised the Fed Fund Rate to 0.20%, and by April it was 0.77%.
Had they waited just 5 months they'd have got a better Risk adjusted return by just keeping the money at the Fed
apart from the loss of $1.8bn and the delta of the interest - growth from their assets.
Isn't everyone still going to get their money back - the percentage of the loss that SVB has which should be less than 5-9%? Sure FDIC has to liquidate all the money from the assets and it takes time. But at least the impact is not going to be as hard as losing all the money like FTX or Maedoff in 2008 right.
The recovery rate for the Madoff Ponzi is 88.35%: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
> the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted.
How much 'plummeting' did they do in numerical terms? Something with those kinds of yields doesn't sound like it ought to be a super risky asset. The mortgage lending market tightened up a lot after the great recession...right?
To make things more straightforward, let's just compress it to a 1-year time frame vs a 30-day bond. So a $100 MBS at 1.5% would pay you $101.50 if you held it for 1 year. If you have $100 in deposits and a $100 MBS bond, you're "solvent". But what happens if after 30 days, your depositor asks for his $100 back? You either need to sell your MBS or find other money to pay them.
If you try to sell the MBS to pay that $100 deposit liability and interest rates are about the same as they were when you bought it, you'd likely get around $100 and things are okay. If however, rates have spiked since then (like they have here), investors can either buy your bond that pays 1.5% or they can buy a new issuance 1-year bond paying 4% or 5%, or perhaps a 30-day bond paying 1.5%. So you need to give them a discount in order to sell your bond -- in this case it might be upwards of 30% or 40%.
So if you sell your MBS, you'll only get $60 or $70 for it -- leaving you a huge shortfall that you need to makeup from your other reserves. If you could convince your depositor to leave his money in the bank until that bond matures, you'd be completely fine -- but the timing mismatch and interest rate spike just kills the bank.
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You are confusing the Great Recession with the Great Depression.
The 2007 crisis and subsequent Great Recession was contributed to by the 1999 repeal of that rule, adopted in response to the Great Depression; there were several efforts to restore it after the Great Recession, but none succeeded.
(i think HN needs a black bar, we are all screwed)
https://twitter.com/AhmadBaracat/status/1634293096639787008?...
They also could have hedged the interest rate risk. Likely there will be policy change as a result of this. Banks over some AUM requiring stricter regulations
The Fed is complicit in encouraging moral hazard through distortion of the bond market. Pretty much every crisis in the modern era is precipitated by fed policy from years earlier
They could have just stored the money in the proverbial vault. But if they do that, then they have to charge the depositors a fee to be a customer. And competition has pushed in the other direction.
And probably more importantly that whole "profit" goal.
For what crime?
If someone unintentionally but ineptly writes code that crashes Amazon on Black Friday, did they commit a crime?
Do we now have people making decisions on stuff like this who are too young or clueless to remember what happened with the 2004-2007 mortgage backed security bubble that popped in the 2008-2009 financial crisis? Seriously? Did nobody learn the lessons on this? Countrywide and other originators of MBS and CDOs?
In 2008 MBSes were bad because the underlying value of the investment turned out to be bad. That's not happening this time. All that's happening is the same thing that happens to any bonds -- when rates increase, older lower-rate bonds lose value because why would anyone pay full price for them when they can get a new one with a higher rate?
I'm not sure you learned the lessons. Other than MBS being coincidentally involved, this has literally nothing to do with 2008.
The MBS wasn't even the problem here. If they had 10Y corporate bonds or Treasury notes paying the same rate, they would have had the same problem.
This situation today has nothing to do with the failure of the MBS'S to payout like 08.
You mean it's not a solvency issue? It sounds like a textbook liquidity issue.
They bought bonds when interest was low, now interest is high and they’re worth less.
SVB wouldn’t have lost cash on those bonds if they didn’t experience a bank run.
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Yep, all of SV is truly made of bumbling idiots. That whole solution is truly hilarious and watching all these clowns lose their money is going to be fun.
I don't think the depositors, investors, or VC's that pushed for SVB were idiots. SVB was a good bank, with a good reputation, and good services that got mismanaged into oblivion.
Every bank borrows short term (you can walk up and withdraw your money at any time) but lends long (e.g. mortgages, though SVB writes few of those). The recent management grabbed some very long federal bonds; as rates have risen the resale value of those long term assets (paying a lower interest rate) fell. They can't unwind that position and cover all possible demands.
FDIC will transfer the accounts to another bank, guaranteeing the 250K at least (I believe SVBs own liquid assets could cover that) and may use its own asset base to cover the balance, siezing SVB's other assets and stuffing them into FDIC's piggy bank. It's not like those government bonds won't pay out...eventually.
That means it didn't have a liquidity crisis, and it didn't have reserves in excess of it's liabilities, it had a solvency crisis, and it has more liabilities than it has assets (before even considering the haircut it's assets will suffer at liquidation prices).
The crux of the issue here is that, for many types of assets, banks are able to test whether they meet capital requirements based on the price they paid for the assets, rather than the price the assets are currently worth. So SVB was sailing along nicely whilst it's bond portfolio slipped further and further under water, and wasn't required to recapitalise when it should have done.
[1] https://ir.svb.com/financials/annual-reports-and-proxies/def... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bond-losses-push-silicon-valley...
EDIT: To be clear, think of it this way. I have a piece of paper saying you'll give me $100 in 1 year plus 1% interest that I bought for $98.
No-one buys that piece of paper for $98 today, because they can get the same deal with better interest. But that doesn't change the fact that I will get $100 for it.
If deposits hadn't shrunk, $100 would go to SVB in 1 year and everything would be fine, it's the fact that they have to sell it so far ahead of maturity that's the problem, we just didn't notice this phenomenon in the past few decades b/c rates fell and prices went up.
This is not because SVB has a particularly risky book (we're talking treasuries here), it's because they didn't account for declining deposits (itself a very stupid, but unique bad decision unrelated to their risk tolerance).
I think this will limit the types of assets banks can purchase. They'll need to purchase only assets that regularly trade (and thus are quoted) on the market.
Which table in the 10-K would I look at to see this?
1. Any financial advisor who recommended to these startups that they should keep >250k in a regular bank account should be fired. It's totally possible (and regularly done) to spread out cash among several financial institutions to protect against this very issue.
2. Any regular account with two or more signers (very typical for a business account) is insured up to 500k.
3. If spreading out your 6- or 7-figure assets to multiple institutions is too much of a burden, literally every business bank has special accounts or add-on features that either raise the FDIC default limit of 250k, or supplement it with external insurance. Again, if any startup's financial handlers didn't recommend this: fire them because they entirely failed to do their job.
Banks that primarily serve ordinary workers typically have over 50% of total deposits in accounts that are under the limit, and are fully insured.
But for SVB, less than 3% of deposits are in accounts with less than $250k.
The cold, hard fact is that if the bank doesn't have sufficient assets to pay back depositors, no regulatory sleight of hand changes that fact.
There's a reason why large deposits aren't insured, and that's because the rich have the knowledge and resources to take care of themselves, and shouldn't co-opt the power of the state to force ordinary people to subsidize them when their bets go bad.
It would be hideously immoral to bail out fabulously wealthy VCs with funds from taxpayers and small depositors.
Contractual obligations often prevent this, btw. Many SVB customers had loans with SVB, which prevented them from using other banks.
https://www.usbank.com/bank-accounts/fdic-deposit-insurance-...
Is it typical for business accounts to be owned by someone other than the business?
Looks like not just startups, e.g. Roku had ~500M in SVB
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/10/business/roku-svb-cash/in...
Wealthfront offers me as an individual better tools for managing risk that it sounds like people who banked with SVB were getting.
That's not normal; FDIC works quite hard to find a bank willing to take over - usually they can work out what the "cost" is to take over, and FDIC pays the receiving bank that amount to "eat" the dying one.
If they don't announce they have a bank to assume SVP by Monday, it's quite abnormal.
This arrangement usually results in all depositors being made whole, and the FDIC fund not taking any, or many, actually losses, because most of the loans will still pay back, at least partially
They also do this before seizing the bank, so that it's all very orderly and calms any panics
SVB was looking for a buyer on the open market and that failed--no surprise
That the FDIC also could not find a buyer that they could subsidize and announce the same day as the seizure is very damning. I would be shocked if someone comes in later and tries to buy it
Also, the fact the seizure happened in the middle of the business day, and not at the close of business yesterday points to a somewhat disorderly and rapidly deteriorating condition. I think maybe the run picked up a lot faster than they expected
https://twitter.com/business/status/1634211584657571843?s=20
If I had $1m in my account and it was invested 100% in MBS around in 2021, it could take 10 years to actually get the whole $1m back, and only be worth like $800k now. I have effectively lost that 20% because you could just give me $800k now and I could put it in a MBS myself to get the same results.
https://dfpi.ca.gov/2023/03/10/california-financial-regulato...
If the asset/deposits balance hasn't changed much since December (which I'm not sure is the case), depositors are likely to eventually be made whole for the deposit amounts, but liquidity issues and facilitating sale of assets to make that happen may result in substantial delays. For depository accounts businesses relied on for regular operations, that...may still create substantial additional costs that will not be compensated.
So, in a more holistic sense, it seems likely that depositors will not be made truly whole for the impacts, even if they eventually recover deposits.
- "it had reserves in excess of its liabilities" - "They can't unwind that position and cover all possible demands"
I'm guessing that you're thinking of some sort of valuation of their assets that says something like "well they're really worth more than they're currently valued at", which is a common claim on this story but it's a pretty bold one?
An analogy: you (hypothetically) keep your money in some 6-month CDs, with about a month's worth of expenses in your savings account in case something unexpected comes up. Then you lose your job and by the end of the month you haven't found a new job. You could liquidate your CDs, but the early-liquidation penalty might mean you still won't have enough to pay your bills. If only you could wait for maturity.
So yes, at mark-to-market firesale prices that means SVB can't pay out in full today to every account holder and so FDIC has to step in. But FDIC (who has a very large balance sheet) also seizes those assets. They give the accounts to another bank. Then FDIC can unwind those seized assets in whatever timely fashion it wants.
There's a second factor: in a secular banking crisis they may pay out only the guarantee (currently $250K; for a while (during the GFC IIRC) it was temporarily $500K. But we are not in a secular banking crisis; not only has the Fed completely restructured bank reserve requirements in response to the GFC but SVB is a single, small bank, not even a regional one, with a run-of-the-mill crisis. This is the kind of failure that you put all the new hires on because they can learn without any up-to-the-minute crisis stress. This is what they learned during onboarding :-). In such a situation it's better to pay out move than the $250K, probably several million, to prevent any "contagion" (since SVB has "Silicon Valley" in its name).
I have no special knowledge of FDIC's internal thinking: they could make them whole now, or make up to $250K whole now and pay out some later, or yes, they could force a few people to take a haircut. Those (small number of) panicing VCs would be better off calling their senators than their portfolio companies.
PS: BTW hypothetical you has more options than those above: you could take out credit card debt, perhaps tap a HELOC you might already have in place, etc. SVB had similar options: they did have a $15B fire sale and got an investment from General Atlantic. It wasn't enough.
Agreed. The FDIC report shows $209b in assets and $175b in deposits.
Even if they took the full $15b estimated loss to liquidate their HTM bond portfolio, they'd have $20b to spare before not being able to cover deposits.
Am I misunderstanding?
You go ahead and think that...
https://www.svbsecurities.com/team/joseph-gentile/
Joseph Gentile is the Chief Administrative Officer at SVB Securities.
Prior to joining the firm in 2007, Mr. Gentile served as the CFO for Lehman Brothers’ Global Investment Bank where he directed the accounting and financial needs within the Fixed Income division.
Does that really matter though? Anyone can buy and hold to maturity. The market price indicates that that's not good business.
Unfortunately much of their balance sheet is illiquid (consider loans they've made to venture-backed businesses, and of course a poor choice they made in government debt maturity).
Thus a liquidity crisis; technically also insolvency, but not gross mismanagement and excessive leverage by any means. Unwinding it will be quite routine (see my reply to kmod).
The reason why depositors are going to lose money I think is because the fire-sale valuation of the assets << valuation on the books. I think depositors will lose a fairly big chunk of their money, maybe 10-30% if not more.
Their money was not sitting around in cash. It was in bonds which lost a lot of value in the last several months. They also have more exotic investments in the startups they work with, which depending on how it works, could get a really bad valuation as well.
The Demise of Silicon Valley Bank - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35098607 - March 2023 (64 comments)
The previous major threads appear to be these (did I miss any?):
SVB in talks to sell itself after attempts to raise capital fail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094466 - March 2023 (270 comments)
Ask HN: How is the SVB situation affecting your startup? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35094447 - March 2023 (130 comments)
Banks lose billions in value after tech lender SVB stumbles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087666 - March 2023 (9 comments)
Bank run on Silicon Valley Bank? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086836 - March 2023 (791 comments)
What I don't get is all this pro-SVB, anti-VC sentiment, how "some VC's yelled fire in a crowded theater" and caused the poor bank to collapse. Isn't it just common sense though, to protect your money? The bank fucked up by doing risky reckless things, it got exacerbated because the customer base is not as diverse as a big bank - it's all startups that are subject to the same patterns, and SVB is not as big for the govt to bail out, so the bank customers did the only logical thing which is to withdraw your money before it disappears, yet they get lectured for doing that.
https://twitter.com/msuster/status/1634203251758469120
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/few-thoughts-svb-jeremy-solom...
I think you'll find a lot of the people complaining are people who got hit and are bitter about it.
e.g. some CFO's seem to be complaining about VCs - the CFOs likely didn't do their job, one part of it is "treasury/cash management". Some VCs are complaining about other VCs - probably they weren't paying attention and their portfolio companies got hammered.
Remember - SVB dusted ~$15 bill on their long term bond bet, it was almost their entire equity base. Pulling your money out was the only sensible action.
> Also, I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors. If some depositors get spooked and take their money out, and other depositors evaluate your balance sheet and decide things are fine and keep their money in, and lots more depositors keep their money in because they simply don’t pay attention to banking news, then you have a shot at muddling through your problems.
But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time. In fact, Bloomberg reported yesterday:
Unease is spreading across the financial world as concerns about the stability of Silicon Valley Bank prompt prominent venture capitalists including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund to advise startups to withdraw their money. …
Founders Fund asked its portfolio companies to move their money out of SVB, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Coatue Management, Union Square Ventures and Founder Collective also advised startups to pull cash, people with knowledge of the matter said. Canaan, another major VC firm, told firms it invested in to remove funds on an as-needed basis, according to another person.
SVB Financial Group Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker held a conference call on Thursday advising clients of SVB-owned Silicon Valley Bank to “stay calm” amid concern about the bank’s financial position, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Becker held the roughly 10-minute call with investors at about 11:30 a.m. San Francisco time. He asked the bank’s clients, including venture capital investors, to support the bank the way it has supported its customers over the past 40 years, the person said.
Nah, man, you don’t get to be a successful venture capitalist by taking a long view or investing in relationships or being contrarian. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this is unfair. Of course they were right — Silicon Valley Bank did collapse, and if you got your money out early that was good for you — but that is largely self-fulfilling; if all the VCs hadn’t decided all at once to pull their money, SVB probably would not have collapsed.[6]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-10/startu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
It's the same dynamic as the toilet paper shortages at the beginning of covid: most people weren't panic buying because they thought that there wouldn't be enough toilet paper to go around if everyone kept cool, they were panic buying because they knew not enough other people were keeping cool.
If it looks like the only reward you'll get for keeping your cool is a few weeks with a dirty bottom, it's hard to avoid joining in the run.
PS. the sentiment still makes no sense, SVB customers did not sign up for the bank to gamble with their money and they have a full moral right to do whatever it takes to get their working capital back the second they start to sense any trouble. These withdrawals are not just stupid meme stock lulz, this money belongs to the customers.
The point is that they are supposed to have capitalization requirements and regulations that show they actually have more assets than liabilities.
But in reality they don’t so fractional reserve doesn’t work here. In fractional reserve the bank still has assets worth more than liabilities. That’s the whole point of the regulation.
This bank doesn’t meet that basic requirement.
This is due to the rate hikes, yes, but just like all the recent events if the bank had properly adjusted its portfolio after the hikes, making losses and having a shitty stock price for a while, it would have been able to weather this storm. The storm came because the bank never adjusted until too late. It waited until it was negative from asset devaluation due to interest rate hikes
Instead, they waited until it was way too late (by most accounts, the fed is going to do another 50bps hike next) and all it took was some fear for the house of cards to come crumbling down.
This does feel like a regulatory failure though. Reserve requirements don't quite prevent a bank taking on massive undiversified risk like this.
It is all relative, not all relevant
Anything is liquid if you will lower the price enough
In more mature industries, people would have been confident that the government wouldn't let their bank go under, because the government usually doesn't, and as a result the government usually doesn't have to. Instead, startup culture is so low-trust that we shot ourselves in the foot.
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London, 10 March, 2023: Silicon Valley Bank UK, the financial partner of the innovation economy, today moved to confirm to its UK clients, partners and external stakeholders its financial position as a standalone independent banking institution that is regulated and governed by the PRA in the UK.
Silicon Valley Bank UK has been an independent subsidiary since August 2022 with a separate balance sheet to the SVB Financial Group and an independent UK Board of directors. Silicon Valley Bank UK fully abides by the UK regulatory requirements as covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and by the Financial Ombudsman Service. SVB UK, Ltd. is ring-fenced from the parent and its other subsidiaries.
Notes to editors
Funds from client deposits placed with SVB UK, Ltd. are managed in the UK for the benefit of our UK clients. None of our operations in the EU outside our UK Subsidiary are licensed to or take deposits.
https://www.svb.com/press/release?Channel=45991&Account=SVB_...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-10/svb-s-uk-...
>The FDIC prefers to close a bank over the weekend, shutting it down on Friday and reopening Monday, Steven Kelly, senior research associate at the Yale Program on Financial Stability, told me.
>“The midday takeover suggests the bank couldn’t responsibly operate until the end of the day,” Kelly said.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2023-03-10/the-fall...
It's straightforward to reckon their exposure to interest rates: they had $90B in 10-year fixed rate bonds, so they lose $9 billion per % of interest increase. They must have known that a 4% increase in interest rates would put them underwater, but they did it (and were allowed to do it) anyway. It'll be interesting to learn about the process behind that decision.
Once their HTM assets’ market price fell enough that rebalancing would force them to admit to insolvency by recomputing their reserves, they literally could not do anything with them except hold and pray that they make it, which may have just made things worse. Who knows how long they’d really been underwater
How would that have helped?
zero risk is not a thing
The whole point of capitalization stress-tests is to determine that banks can withstand a certain amount of withdrawals.
It of course is going to be much much more likely on a bank that only has 3% FDIC - I have no desire to "run" on my bank because I am below the $250k limit, and even if the accounts were frozen for a week it wouldn't be that worrisome.
But if I were a startup with $100m at SVP, I would have been freaking out earlier this week.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...