Reply to SVB Bank Run: Fed Calling Emergency Meeting

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "SVB Bank Run: Fed Calling Emergency Meeting "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The taxpayers will ultimately backstop these bad bonds owned by banks without proper hedging protocol

[twitter]https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1635316221108449280?t=TcxsbRBSNzolPcDVpeVkZw&s=19[/twitter][/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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 [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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 [/quote]

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.[b] I havent seen any case made yet that their investments were unwise. [/b][/quote]

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

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

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.)[/quote]

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

That was their entire AFS portfolio and the loss they took on its sale.  The HTM securities couldn't be sold without cratering the bank.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics