Correct. They were doing the same thing every other bank was doing, and an unnecessary panic run did them in. Depositors will get their money back because my bet is SVB gets acquired, as their balance sheet was actually fairly healthy (relative to other banks) pre-panic, but it's gonna have ripple effects for sure.
Say you are a Small Company with $5mm in a recent fund raise that you have at SVB. You use that $5mm to make payroll, pay amazon, your office, AT&T for your fiber, buy macbook airs for your employees, etc...
Now - you are listening to the recent news, and it looks like SVB is going to be taken over by the FDIC. If that happens, you will be insured up to $250K, but the rest of your $5mm, all $4.75mm is now frozen. You will be given a certificate for the uninsured funds, and you will be in line to be paid back, but (A) Not immediately, and (B) you may lose part of your funds.
You, as a rational CEO, would probably want to put your money in, say, Wells Fargo, where it wouldn't be frozen, and you wouldn't lose any of it.
That was the basis of the liquidity event that just happened.
How is the panic "unnecessary"? Are you saying that if your personal bank told you that you could get your money back, but just not right now, that you'd be ok with that?
Liquidity is a key feature of banks and it relies on trust. Without it, they have nothing. Trust isn't some ancillary thing for a bank. It is almost everything.
I would not find it surprising if bank liquidity was actually historically low, especially considering that many banks do maintain buffers _of the same covaried assets_ and that banks _induce covariance when they choose to use an asset class for liquidity_.
They had massive asset / liability duration mismatch. That’s gambling on low rates for an extended period of time.
It’d be like a traditional bank not reselling mortgages to Fannie Mae. You can’t have $1B of demand deposit liability and $1B of 10-year treasuries because a rate hike will wipe you out immediately if you need liquidity.
No bank is healthy once all its depositors pull their cash out. What their balance sheet looked like before the panic is what I'm talking about. Every bank dies from a bank run, period.
Wasn't their balance sheet before the panic what caused the panic? It wasn't some WSB meme that drove the bank run, they couldn't cover their normal day to day operations and started a bond fire sale and desperate equity raise.
IIUC: they could definitely cover their normal day-to-day. The thing that broke down is they had to announce true things that made investors conclude that their money wouldn't grow as fast as investors expected, and investors (understandably / justifiably) wanted to pull it out to somewhere it would grow faster.
(The investors don't actually know the money won't grow as fast... the Fed could decide to drop interest rates tomorrow, or something else could intervene making it sensible to drop interest rates. But "not growing as fast" was the very likely scenario).
Once everyone decided to pull, they were tanked because no bank keeps 100% liquidity.
> The thing that broke down is they had to announce true things that made investors conclude that their money wouldn't grow as fast as investors expected, and investors (understandably / justifiably) wanted to pull it out to somewhere it would grow faster.
SVB disclosed they took massive losses from high risk, high duration assets and were desperate for cash. Investors took large (up to 60% over 24h!) losses, paper or otherwise, to get out of the stock. That can't be just concern over not growing as fast, that's concern about solvency. VC's and depositors saw the same writing on the wall, but it was SVB who wrote it there.
If they were able to cover their normal operations, they wouldn't have needed the emergency equity raise.
High duration, yes, but actually extremely low risk.
The thing that killed SVB was the bank run. They would have been fine with the raise. Panic set in and killed them. FRB is not in a better position, but nobody is panicking, so they’ll survive.
Didn’t SVB directly cause the bank run that killed them though? It wasn’t some externally driven event outside the scope of risk management. The assets were fine but the high duration was the risk. They took it purposely and lost billions when their risky bets turned against them. The emergency equity raise and sale attempts were desperation, and seen as such.
Doesn’t feel much different than a yield farming crypto bank going under when they are forced to fire-sale thinly traded sh*tcoins and take a beating.
No bank keeps 100% liquidity, but my understanding is that most banks are capable of getting liquidity -- at least from the lender of last resort (LoLR) -- for massive withdrawals based on the value of their loan portfolio, and SVB's portfolio had tanked too low to do this based on interest rates the LoLR would lend to them at.
Won't lots of investors (aka depositors) start making this same analysis? Whether you have $10K or $10M, right now you don't want your cash anywhere it's not earning 3%+. So it's back to whether they're unique in finding themselves uncompetitive as a place to park cash at a market rate.
This one is largest than the 100 previous ones combined.
And the point is that there may be many reasons why a bank may want to acquire a smaller failed one to integrate it in its operations but "the previous owners used to have a well-capitalized business until they somehow lost it all" is not a strong reason on its own.
They've been acquired by a newly formed bank from the FDIC. I'm not sure that bank will be around much longer than it takes to mark their assets to market, since the press release said they didn't know:
> At the time of closing, the amount of deposits in excess of the insurance limits was undetermined. The amount of uninsured deposits will be determined once the FDIC obtains additional information from the bank and customers.
No bank is gonna buy another bank until that is cleared up.
I love the optics of remnants of Silicon Valley bank being owned by the gov alongside Fannie and Freddie. Behold the graveyard of poor risk management.
We shall see.