SVB Bank Run: Fed Calling Emergency Meeting

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

They didn’t hedge their 11-figure one-way interest rate risk. That’s their “unwise” investment.

+1 has nothing to do with ESG, DEI, being “woke” or any other right wing be-afraid-of-this terms.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We don't have hyper-inflation. They should have forseen some inflation and rate hikes. But this really needs to be repeatedly said. There is no mix of securities that would have allowed them to survive the bank run. This bank run wasn't thousands of relatively small deposit holders. It was a couple dozen at best large scale deposit holders. $42 billion in one day. One third of their total deposits. No bank holds one third of their deposits in cash.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We’ve not had anything like hyperinflation. We have had rapid interest rate increases after a very long period of ZIRP. The rate increases were guaranteed to produce losses in portfolios with long-duration (aka the cash is set to come back years into the future) portfolios. And Bloomberg has reports claiming that employees were concerned by the bank’s long-duration assets, but management, which gets bonuses based on short-term profitability, refused to change course.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

They didn’t hedge their 11-figure one-way interest rate risk. That’s their “unwise” investment.

It was only a 5% loss. No bank can survive a bank run like they experienced.

The bank run was a product of their business model. It’s so, so far from almost any other bank.

The big irony there was that SVB was known for their customer service. Helping out start ups when needed and facilliatating venture capitalists. Those exact same people that they did favors for turned around and destroyed SVB through a coordinated bank run.

The kicker? Most of those deposits went to Brex a venture capital funded bank startup.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We don't have hyper-inflation. They should have forseen some inflation and rate hikes. But this really needs to be repeatedly said. There is no mix of securities that would have allowed them to survive the bank run. This bank run wasn't thousands of relatively small deposit holders. It was a couple dozen at best large scale deposit holders. $42 billion in one day. One third of their total deposits. No bank holds one third of their deposits in cash.

So then is it really a deficit in their risk assessment? I mean if no bank could survive it, why are pp's calling for them to be criminally charged? It honestly just sounds like a sh-- sandwich, not a bad call on SVB's part.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

The mark to market applies even at the end of the duration. The value of that bond could be valued at 80 cents on the dollar and the taxpayers will pay the difference.

Um, Treasuries pay out their full face value at maturity.

+1000. Why do people who have no idea what they are talking about insist on posting drivel?

A few of you need to figure out how rates impacts value. Getting your nominal principal back in a decade or three ain’t what it used to be.

Average duration of SVB’s portfolio was around 5-6 years.

Tell me the % of the book that was long-dated. Averages can obscure bigly.

From the year end 2022 financials:

Securities maturing 1 year or <: $1 billion

>1 year to 5 years: $15 billion

> 5 years: $101 billion

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We’ve not had anything like hyperinflation. We have had rapid interest rate increases after a very long period of ZIRP. The rate increases were guaranteed to produce losses in portfolios with long-duration (aka the cash is set to come back years into the future) portfolios. And Bloomberg has reports claiming that employees were concerned by the bank’s long-duration assets, but management, which gets bonuses based on short-term profitability, refused to change course.

Ok, but was this foreseeable in 2020?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

Treasuries do equal safety. The mistakes they made were duration and depositer risk. There is nothing they could have done to survive the run once it started. Looking back, it was probably a really bad idea to have 25% of their deposit base under the control of a single well known a-hole.

Long-maturity assets belong more on insurance company and pension fund balance sheets. The bank should have been buying short t-bills and getting used to less spread.

The problem of concentration includes Thiel and friends, but is clearly much larger than them. We clearly didn’t get post-2008 finreg and, gasp, political economy right.

Depositors sticking with their banks was one of the few bright spots of the GFC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

The mark to market applies even at the end of the duration. The value of that bond could be valued at 80 cents on the dollar and the taxpayers will pay the difference.

Um, Treasuries pay out their full face value at maturity.

+1000. Why do people who have no idea what they are talking about insist on posting drivel?

A few of you need to figure out how rates impacts value. Getting your nominal principal back in a decade or three ain’t what it used to be.

Average duration of SVB’s portfolio was around 5-6 years.

Tell me the % of the book that was long-dated. Averages can obscure bigly.

From the year end 2022 financials:

Securities maturing 1 year or <: $1 billion

>1 year to 5 years: $15 billion

> 5 years: $101 billion

Yup, as I had guessed: ridiculous amounts of long-maturity bonds and not a lot of short stuff.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

They didn’t hedge their 11-figure one-way interest rate risk. That’s their “unwise” investment.

It was only a 5% loss. No bank can survive a bank run like they experienced.

More than that. Their locked up HTM securities equaled $91 billion in amortized cost. The fair value was $75 billion--almost a 20% embedded loss they would have had to realize if they sold even one of those securities for liquidity. That was approximately equal to their equity capital and would have made them instantly insolvent. (End of year numbers.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We don't have hyper-inflation. They should have forseen some inflation and rate hikes. But this really needs to be repeatedly said. There is no mix of securities that would have allowed them to survive the bank run. This bank run wasn't thousands of relatively small deposit holders. It was a couple dozen at best large scale deposit holders. $42 billion in one day. One third of their total deposits. No bank holds one third of their deposits in cash.

So then is it really a deficit in their risk assessment? I mean if no bank could survive it, why are pp's calling for them to be criminally charged? It honestly just sounds like a sh-- sandwich, not a bad call on SVB's part.

Mostly politics but it was also a variable that SVB could control. SVB couldn't predict or control the coordinated bank run. They could however control their duration risk. People like easy analytical explanations and it is really hard to comprehend the amount of money that was withdrawn and that only a handful of people were behind it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

They didn’t hedge their 11-figure one-way interest rate risk. That’s their “unwise” investment.

It was only a 5% loss. No bank can survive a bank run like they experienced.

More than that. Their locked up HTM securities equaled $91 billion in amortized cost. The fair value was $75 billion--almost a 20% embedded loss they would have had to realize if they sold even one of those securities for liquidity. That was approximately equal to their equity capital and would have made them instantly insolvent. (End of year numbers.)

They sold $20b and took a realized loss of $1b. That's what led to the attempted share sale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We’ve not had anything like hyperinflation. We have had rapid interest rate increases after a very long period of ZIRP. The rate increases were guaranteed to produce losses in portfolios with long-duration (aka the cash is set to come back years into the future) portfolios. And Bloomberg has reports claiming that employees were concerned by the bank’s long-duration assets, but management, which gets bonuses based on short-term profitability, refused to change course.

Ok, but was this foreseeable in 2020?

That when rates raise the longer assets will lose money? 100% predictable, it’s in finance textbooks. But managers that want big bonuses can juice shorter-term profits making the bank more vulnerable when rates do rise. The Bloomberg article makes it sound like the denial stretched from 2021 into the present.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-13/svb-failure-sparks-blame-game-over-trump-era-regulatory-rollback?sref=frV97TwV

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We don't have hyper-inflation. They should have forseen some inflation and rate hikes. But this really needs to be repeatedly said. There is no mix of securities that would have allowed them to survive the bank run. This bank run wasn't thousands of relatively small deposit holders. It was a couple dozen at best large scale deposit holders. $42 billion in one day. One third of their total deposits. No bank holds one third of their deposits in cash.

So then is it really a deficit in their risk assessment? I mean if no bank could survive it, why are pp's calling for them to be criminally charged? It honestly just sounds like a sh-- sandwich, not a bad call on SVB's part.

Mostly politics but it was also a variable that SVB could control. SVB couldn't predict or control the coordinated bank run. They could however control their duration risk. People like easy analytical explanations and it is really hard to comprehend the amount of money that was withdrawn and that only a handful of people were behind it.

The coordinated bank run is a risk of having an extra-concentrated deposit base. It’s a flaw in the business model.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

Uh, only if the fed turns around and tries to sell the bond on the open market. If they just hold it to duration (which they almost certainly will), then they haven't lost anything.

Exactly.

It is amazing the legnths the right is going to right now to cause misinformation and uncertainty in our financial markets.

It's like they want a crash to hurt Biden.

While there’s clearly right-wing noise (and a few folks yelling ‘fire’), fact is that they were going to be taking loses on long-dated assets regardless. HTM was never a viable path out of this, at least absent lower rates.

I still don’t understand SVB’s strategy. They had a robust corporate treasury….wtf were they thinking? Everyone knew the Fed was about to embark on a long journey of interest rate hikes and SVB decided to load up on long dated assets after 3x their deposits in 18 months. They didn’t even try to hedge their interest rate risk with derivatives.

It like they did all of this on purpose. I still can’t figure it out.

They got a massive influx of deposits in 2020 during ZIRP and thanks to ZIRP. They turned around and put those deposits into treasuries at one of the worst times possible. There are almost 4,500 FDIC insured banks; I'm be shocked if some of them didn't make terrible risk management decisions from time to time. This one likely would have flown under the radar if SVB was just a normal community bank, but once VC funds told their companies to pull out, it was over

The VC money tsunami acted like leverage: all decisions were genius in good times…and foolish in bad times. Given their role in being essentially treasury for the VC ecosystem makes me wonder if anyone at the bank understood they had super-easy fee income if they kept assets low-key.

It seems like they were being as conservative as the could, but risk management doesn't pay well and often gets ignored. I'd bet a lot of money that someone high up thought that treasuries = safety and they either ignored opposing views or those views just weren't aired

It's not clear that even a proactive risk assessment would have caught that long term US bonds would cause the bank to fail. Bonds are very low risk. And at the time they bought them, this would have looked to be among the most conservative options.

Im an R and listening to R news and the take is basically "well they were driven by ESG and focused too much on woke stuff." That may well be true, but the investments were in long term US bonds, not used as venture capital. I'm going to need to see a fuller case against these bankers. Some risk is acceptable-- it is part of life. I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise.

I’m guessing PP wasn’t involved in finance the last time interest rates were rising quickly. This was to be expected and they did manage the cash tsunami poorly.

They bought these in 2020 when the market was tanking.

Ive never been involved in investment banking, so this may seem like a simple mistake to a pro. But no one is laying out the case that they should have foreseen hyperinflation. There may be a case, but no one is making it.

We don't have hyper-inflation. They should have forseen some inflation and rate hikes. But this really needs to be repeatedly said. There is no mix of securities that would have allowed them to survive the bank run. This bank run wasn't thousands of relatively small deposit holders. It was a couple dozen at best large scale deposit holders. $42 billion in one day. One third of their total deposits. No bank holds one third of their deposits in cash.

So then is it really a deficit in their risk assessment? I mean if no bank could survive it, why are pp's calling for them to be criminally charged? It honestly just sounds like a sh-- sandwich, not a bad call on SVB's part.

No bank can withstand a withdrawal of 30% of it deposits in one day. However, I think this ignores that the reason for the withdrawals in the first place. People suddenly realizing how much interest rate risk the bank had taken on and the embedded securities losses. I think the planned capital raise caused people to look closely at the financials and those raised the concerns.