I think we’re too accustomed to startups here to recognize that SVB was actually assuming quite a bit of risk.
We acknowledge most banks don’t want to touch startups and that startups will have a harder time banking in the future. Yet I don’t see much consideration for the fact that there is a good reason most banks see startups as risky. It’s just explained away as “they don’t understand .”
Also consider the past 10 years have probably been the friendliest 10 years to startups ever.
I don’t think startups will have a harder time banking in the future.
This isn’t even the fault of startups. It’s a complete risk management mistake on the side of the bank. Buying 10 year low yield securities and not hedging them against rising rates.
Plenty of banks would love to have the deposits of startups and VCs.
I bet a bank like Mercury or some other ones will grow to take SVB’s place.
Banks assume a lot of risk if they are overweight in any single sector. Having some startups is fine if it’s not a giant portion of your depositor base to the point that you have major sector risk.
I’m really glad ZeroTier used a boring old mainstream bank that didn’t specialize in any one sector. We looked at SVB. Bullet dodged.
> [...] SVB was actually assuming quite a bit of risk.
Honest question: compared to what?
Did long duration assets (like bonds) comprise a greater proportion of SVB's assets compared to, say, JP Morgan?
Or is the case that JP Morgan is as insolvent as SVB, but JPM's depositors are less likely to withdraw their funds (because it's a big bank and it has primarily retail customers)?
These are honest questions; I'm not suggesting JPM is in the same situation. However, I'd like to see some numbers.
What bank ever refused a Startup if what they are looking for is just banking? And what do startups want with a bank? Are they not capitalized by the VC's?
"The liabiity issue: extreme reliance on institutional/VC funding rather than traditional retail deposits While capital, wholesale funding and loan to deposit ratios improved for many US banks since 2008, there are exceptions. As shown in the first chart, SIVB was in a league of its own: a high level of loans plus securities as a percentage of deposits, and very low reliance on stickier retail deposits as a share of total deposits. Bottom line: SIVB carved out a distinct and riskier niche than other banks, setting itself up for large potential capital shortfalls in case of rising interest rates, deposit outflows and forced asset sales..."
This is rather silly explanation of what happend, especially from JP Morgan...
Everyone who have ever managed bond portfolio knows that he must hedge interest rate risk. And every bank is doing that. SVB didn't.
Since April 2022 till January 2023 SVB had vacant position of Credit Risk Officer.. And the explanation is simple - SVB's former head of risk, Laura Izurieta had left after 1Q2022 when looses from bond portfolio started to grow. She has probably already realized the final outcome as this is ABC of risk management (and in April 2022 the path of rate increases had been already set in motion by FED).
Now look at the timing of insiders selling shares of SVB...
Which part is silly though? The JPM report is indeed essentially saying that they didn't properly hedge interest rate risk.
It just adds that SVB's situation was exacerbated by the fact that the health and size of the deposit base they had cultivated was also inversely correlated with interest rates (ie VC and startup activity declines with rising rates), which made their situation even more precarious than at other banks.
> Everyone who have ever managed bond portfolio knows that he must hedge interest rate risk.
Just a thought: the UK gilt crisis in December was related to pension funds holding long term gilts. And these pension funds all properly hedge the interest rate risk, they normally don't care how rates evolve.
However, the market value of the gilts was changing too fast for the hedging to work. My understanding is that money couldn't be moved around fast enough to meet margin calls. Which then caused a bad feedback loop of forced liquidations of gilts, and the Bank of England had to step in to handle the crisis.
So with this new story of duration risk at SVB, I'm wondering now whether other banks are in danger. They may have hedged their duration risk, but what if the hedging mechanism turns out to be broken?
This really sheds clarity on the situation. SVB was in bad shape long before the run, and there is no apparent next domino to fall. FDIC limits are very well understood and relatively easy to work with (despite the rampant FUD about “who’s going to use multiple bank accounts”, deposit sweep programs are highly available and convenient). This is a risk management failure by depositors (in addition to the bank of course), and should be treated as such.
what you have to ask is how much of the "deposits" were loans from SVB? that is the real issue. SVB "loaning" money to startups on the premise that they would park it in SVB accounts. nobody knows how big that number is, but it is the real problem.
This appears to be the case - the JPMorgan analyst is (paraphrasing) saying that if you did a fire sale on all of the assets of the banks in isolation the difference between their capital ratios (the amount that they have to have on hand to meet depositors) is minimal. Notice that of all of the banks in the fifth chart the blue line and the bronze line are nearly even - except for SIVB, which has no bronze line. That's not good. I can't speak to this person's methodology, but if what he is saying is true there's almost no risk of contagion in the broader banking sector. And if that's true then there's $152 billion dollars of VC capital that's going to evaporate Monday morning.
It should be noted that JPMorgan participated in the bailout in 2008, with the resulting headaches that that entailed, and Dimon has explicitly stated that he wouldn't participate in a current bailout. So JPMorgan may not be entirely objective. However, to my eyes, this appears rather clear.
This is not risk management failure by depositors.
Depositors can and should assume that regulations prevent banks from assuming outsize risk like this.
This is a policy failure of the regulators that oversee banks. Banks should not be allowed to have so little cash on hand, especially when we knew with high likelihood the fed would raise rates.
I am surprised they show JPM in all their comparison charts (typically research doesn't cover their own employer). By showing JPM as an outlier on the opposite of the spectrum to SVB, it feels a little bit like a marketing document.
I can't speak for literally all businesses, but more or less everything a business publishes is marketing/PR. They fully control what they allow to be published, why wouldn't they make sure it paints them in a positive light wherever possible?
the irony of this whole situation is VCs and startups pouncing on the chaos to encourage people to move their money into even more opaque neobanks eg Mercury/Brex/Ramp as if they don’t have the same issues with relying on VC funded startup deposits but even worse in that their balance sheets are hidden.
We use their Treasury account type for most of our cash. It's split between Morgan Stanley and Vanguard funds.
Now, if Mercury fails it's going to be a pain in the ass to get at the money in these backer accounts. So we keep what we need for 2 months of operations with another bank. We were using SVB for this, now we have to find a new emergency backup bank.
Agreed that these neobanks aren't a wise choice, but I still think the VCs made the right call in advising their portfolio companies - they had a literal vested interest in their success, they had to do something, this eventually was going to happen.
Maybe a stupid question: if banks can collapse from a bank run, shouldn’t the entire model be questioned? A bank run is simply when a threshold number of customers decide to withdraw their cash, with every right to do so. With social media + frictionless mobile banking, the entire notion of teetering your model on mitigating the risk of a “bank run” seems anti-customer, regressive, and unsustainable.
SVB didn’t collapse because of the bank run. There was a bank run because they collapsed. It is true that the bank run may have accelerated the collapse slightly but they were in really bad shape before it started.
A lot of people want to blame depositor panic, but I don’t think that is really fair. In a properly managed bank, the assets exceed the liabilities, which means that if people want their money out, the bank can liquidate their assets to pay them and still have money left over. SVB’s assets are worth far less than their liabilities (to the tune of nearly $100B dollars by some estimates). Panicking depositors didn’t cause that.
Customers also want to earn easy, high interest, that's the main issue. You're taking a risk (albeit a small one) with your deposits; your money is being lent by the bank and they pay you interest in return.
If you only want your cash to be held safely, put it in a safety deposit box.
The chart titled “Impact of unrealized securities losses on capital ratios” really shows just how inadequate the tier 1 capital ratio is (what regulators use). Ignoring the impact of unrealized losses in assets marked as held to maturity is crazy. Seems like a regulator problem to me, no bank taking deposits should be able to make high duration and negatively convex (from high MBS holdings) without hedges.
An important stand out quote to me here: “ It’s fair to ask about the underwriting discipline of VC firms that put most of their liquidity in a single bank with this kind of risk profile“.
I really don’t understand why these firms didn’t use at least two banks for their deposits. Surely these tech firms have heard of single points of failure being problematic?
If you get any kind of loan from SVB, you're required to keep your cash with SVB.
I think it was entirely reasonable for Series B and earlier startups to keep all their money in SVB. It was wrong, in hindsight, but reasonable. Bank failure is not the thing that's going to kill most startups. SVB just failed spectacularly, and it sure seems like it's not going to put anyone out of business.
In other articles I've read where some of these VCs had "levers" into the bank where they could keep track of what their companies were doing. Not sure what exactly that means, or if it was legal, but it makes sense.
What I find most disingenuous in this whole saga is the conflating of small business payroll depositors with all depositors. Circle & USDC rely on the interest rate earned on the stablecoin deposits for their business and SVB was providing that with poor risk management. With a $3B deposit (or more since they likely moved money out and partially caused the collapse), Circle should have been doing additional risk management beyond SVB, not just collecting interest. Now taxpayers are supposed to cover that failure?
The other thread was wild and the conclusions in this memo disagree with many of the assertions that commenters have been throwing around–accusing depositors of recklessly banking at SVB to chase higher yields and accusing SVB of playing fast and loose with risky investments.
JPM says neither of these were the case:
> “At the end of 2022, SIVB only offered 0.60% more on deposits than its peers as compensation for the risks illustrated below; in 2021 this premium was 0.04%.”
> “The irony of SIVB is that most banks have historically failed due to credit risk issues. This is the first major one I recall where the primary issue was a duration mismatch between high quality assets and deposit liabilities.”
Good analysis. Everyone should be very worried about these charts. In short, a lot of banks are sitting on assets that have significant unrealized losses, which is very similar to the situation leading up to 2008. If there is some event down the road that forces the banks to dip into their HTM assets to cover withdrawals or losses, then we could be looking at yet another systemic crisis. The cause will be different. But the banks are in a precarious position. Perhaps more importantly, this puts a ceiling on what the Fed can do to fight inflation. If they keep jacking rates the magnitude of the unrealized losses will increase.
> The liabiity issue: extreme reliance on institutional/VC funding rather than traditional retail deposits
Unsurprising how the bank failed due to the VC driven mania and now that the pyramid scheme collapsed right in front of everyone; taking the majority of startups in the tech industry with it.
Now we will see how unprofitable these startups really are and have been fully dependent of constant VC cash. A very big lesson to learn about risk.
I don't see the same red flags in FRB's filings that were present in SVB's filings. SVB had almost half their assets in held-to-maturity securities. FRB has 12%. SVB had triple the short-term credit from FHLBs compared to FRB.
Not quite sure how much to look into but the operating of the UK side seems flawed. One Director left in Jan, and the particular Director has previously had 35 businesses all of which were lending companies and paid significant dividends. There seems to be a trend. I dont think this is poor risk management, I think this was very intentional.
Does any one knows if VCs have contracts with startups where they have to deposit X amount weekly or monthly? Now if they can't because of the SVB debacle, can the startups sue them? This would put these VCs in even worse situation - not only they could be out of their money deposited at the bank but now they owe even more money to the startups.
The VCs don't "owe" money to the startups: they "buy" equity with their money. The VCs aren't "out" the money deposited by the startup at SVB; that money was already exchanged for equity in the startup.
The VCs aren't happy because they and the startup both expected that the money-equity exchange meant that the startup would have working capital, so potentially the value of the equity that they got has fallen. This is a problem for both parties.
A child-like regulatory question: Why aren’t HTM portfolios for retail banks frequently marked to market? Wouldn’t this force more accurate accounting in the event a bank needed to sell bonds in a capital crunch?
Not an HTM certified, not even a practitioner here. But it's also an accounting question.
The way it's done: asset is valued per maturation. It would mudd the water even further I think to have the quarterly reflect the "at current market" value. Things go up and down. What matters is how you close (realised gains or loss), and, at SVB's demise: your cashflow.
No cash? Then sell your assets. Creditors/depositors ain't gonna wait.
Realised loss? That's your balance going down in true accounting terms now.
Accountings get disclosed? Those quarterly release are mandatory for all publicly trading company: that could cause worry among investors, and in the case of a bank a panic a bank run.
What a market valuation made at each quarter could achieve is give a momentarily evaluation of what a fund's assets is made of if they were to liquidate right then, or that day. But it isn't how it works*
It does work for goods though, amortization is accounted for and a well oiled exercise. Futures, bonds, stocks? Good luck with that. If we could predict the future the game would be a whole lot different.
On reflection, one wonders why all bank deposits don't have insurance.
I'm guessing the answer is: something something make more profit...
E.g. my businesses are required to carry liability insurance. I have to do that because we have big company customers who made it a condition of doing business with them. So why do big companies hand $nB over to another company for safe keeping but not require insurance?
The only truly viable deposit insurance is from the government, because they can print money
What good is private insurance from an insurance company if they go insolvent because of massive numbers of bank failures
So, now the answer to your question is a political one: are we willing as a society and government to potentially put that much taxpayer money at risk. I think it's a perfectly valid discussion to have, but it's one we haven't had yet, and one we refuse to have until the shit has hit the fan
Isn't it up to the depositor in a way? Normal people are 100% protected up to $250k, and then large investors can choose between boring, low interest, extremely safe banks vs high interest risky banks. Although as the analysis pointed out, the higher interest was nominal in this situation so it was a poor choice.
It is important for banks to always have a balanced portfolio and regulations to force them to have it.
Otherwise, it’s weakness will soon be recognized by some billionaires, Thiel in this case, and they will take advantage of this weakness to become even richer.
nonethewiser|3 years ago
We acknowledge most banks don’t want to touch startups and that startups will have a harder time banking in the future. Yet I don’t see much consideration for the fact that there is a good reason most banks see startups as risky. It’s just explained away as “they don’t understand .”
Also consider the past 10 years have probably been the friendliest 10 years to startups ever.
senttoschool|3 years ago
This isn’t even the fault of startups. It’s a complete risk management mistake on the side of the bank. Buying 10 year low yield securities and not hedging them against rising rates.
Plenty of banks would love to have the deposits of startups and VCs.
I bet a bank like Mercury or some other ones will grow to take SVB’s place.
api|3 years ago
I’m really glad ZeroTier used a boring old mainstream bank that didn’t specialize in any one sector. We looked at SVB. Bullet dodged.
ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago
It is now time for Bilious[0] to appear.
[0] https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Bilious
runeks|3 years ago
Honest question: compared to what?
Did long duration assets (like bonds) comprise a greater proportion of SVB's assets compared to, say, JP Morgan?
Or is the case that JP Morgan is as insolvent as SVB, but JPM's depositors are less likely to withdraw their funds (because it's a big bank and it has primarily retail customers)?
These are honest questions; I'm not suggesting JPM is in the same situation. However, I'd like to see some numbers.
bigbillheck|3 years ago
belter|3 years ago
m00dy|3 years ago
lbotos|3 years ago
It wasn’t because of “Startups”.
belter|3 years ago
runeks|3 years ago
What they're saying is: "JPM is just as insolvent as SIVB. The only difference is that JPM's customers are less likely to withdraw their funds."
woeirua|3 years ago
chewz|3 years ago
Everyone who have ever managed bond portfolio knows that he must hedge interest rate risk. And every bank is doing that. SVB didn't.
Since April 2022 till January 2023 SVB had vacant position of Credit Risk Officer.. And the explanation is simple - SVB's former head of risk, Laura Izurieta had left after 1Q2022 when looses from bond portfolio started to grow. She has probably already realized the final outcome as this is ABC of risk management (and in April 2022 the path of rate increases had been already set in motion by FED).
Now look at the timing of insiders selling shares of SVB...
deet|3 years ago
It just adds that SVB's situation was exacerbated by the fact that the health and size of the deposit base they had cultivated was also inversely correlated with interest rates (ie VC and startup activity declines with rising rates), which made their situation even more precarious than at other banks.
wcoenen|3 years ago
Just a thought: the UK gilt crisis in December was related to pension funds holding long term gilts. And these pension funds all properly hedge the interest rate risk, they normally don't care how rates evolve.
However, the market value of the gilts was changing too fast for the hedging to work. My understanding is that money couldn't be moved around fast enough to meet margin calls. Which then caused a bad feedback loop of forced liquidations of gilts, and the Bank of England had to step in to handle the crisis.
So with this new story of duration risk at SVB, I'm wondering now whether other banks are in danger. They may have hedged their duration risk, but what if the hedging mechanism turns out to be broken?
runeks|3 years ago
How are other banks hedging interest rate risk?
And how is the opposite end of this hedge hedging their position?
m3kw9|3 years ago
trailrunner46|3 years ago
ericpauley|3 years ago
metalspot|3 years ago
dhbanes|3 years ago
patientplatypus|3 years ago
It should be noted that JPMorgan participated in the bailout in 2008, with the resulting headaches that that entailed, and Dimon has explicitly stated that he wouldn't participate in a current bailout. So JPMorgan may not be entirely objective. However, to my eyes, this appears rather clear.
siftrics|3 years ago
Depositors can and should assume that regulations prevent banks from assuming outsize risk like this.
This is a policy failure of the regulators that oversee banks. Banks should not be allowed to have so little cash on hand, especially when we knew with high likelihood the fed would raise rates.
cm2187|3 years ago
kfarr|3 years ago
schrodinger|3 years ago
Waterluvian|3 years ago
tetrep|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
notyourwork|3 years ago
tempsy|3 years ago
btown|3 years ago
But given https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/19/brex-applies-for-bank-char... and the fact that https://www.brex.com/svb-emergency-line emerged literally overnight... it's unclear to me whether these strategies are truly robust, or whether much of this is hype driven by Thiel and other Brex etc. investors - who are, at the very least, incentivized to capitalize on this situation.
mrkurt|3 years ago
We use their Treasury account type for most of our cash. It's split between Morgan Stanley and Vanguard funds.
Now, if Mercury fails it's going to be a pain in the ass to get at the money in these backer accounts. So we keep what we need for 2 months of operations with another bank. We were using SVB for this, now we have to find a new emergency backup bank.
Brex and Ramp are similar to Mercury.
cloudking|3 years ago
"Mercury checking and savings deposits are FDIC-insured up to $1M. As a broader effort, we are working on expanding all coverage up to $4M."
https://mercury.com/faq
Eumenes|3 years ago
notmindthegap|3 years ago
benchaney|3 years ago
A lot of people want to blame depositor panic, but I don’t think that is really fair. In a properly managed bank, the assets exceed the liabilities, which means that if people want their money out, the bank can liquidate their assets to pay them and still have money left over. SVB’s assets are worth far less than their liabilities (to the tune of nearly $100B dollars by some estimates). Panicking depositors didn’t cause that.
itsoktocry|3 years ago
Customers also want to earn easy, high interest, that's the main issue. You're taking a risk (albeit a small one) with your deposits; your money is being lent by the bank and they pay you interest in return.
If you only want your cash to be held safely, put it in a safety deposit box.
yCombLinks|3 years ago
Gare|3 years ago
trailrunner46|3 years ago
Scubabear68|3 years ago
I really don’t understand why these firms didn’t use at least two banks for their deposits. Surely these tech firms have heard of single points of failure being problematic?
woeirua|3 years ago
mrkurt|3 years ago
I think it was entirely reasonable for Series B and earlier startups to keep all their money in SVB. It was wrong, in hindsight, but reasonable. Bank failure is not the thing that's going to kill most startups. SVB just failed spectacularly, and it sure seems like it's not going to put anyone out of business.
mixdup|3 years ago
poof131|3 years ago
nullc|3 years ago
molsongolden|3 years ago
JPM says neither of these were the case:
> “At the end of 2022, SIVB only offered 0.60% more on deposits than its peers as compensation for the risks illustrated below; in 2021 this premium was 0.04%.”
> “The irony of SIVB is that most banks have historically failed due to credit risk issues. This is the first major one I recall where the primary issue was a duration mismatch between high quality assets and deposit liabilities.”
woeirua|3 years ago
rvz|3 years ago
Unsurprising how the bank failed due to the VC driven mania and now that the pyramid scheme collapsed right in front of everyone; taking the majority of startups in the tech industry with it.
Now we will see how unprofitable these startups really are and have been fully dependent of constant VC cash. A very big lesson to learn about risk.
ummonk|3 years ago
jeffbee|3 years ago
zhiQ|3 years ago
One4QualityNewS|3 years ago
6d6b73|3 years ago
egl2021|3 years ago
The VCs aren't happy because they and the startup both expected that the money-equity exchange meant that the startup would have working capital, so potentially the value of the equity that they got has fallen. This is a problem for both parties.
fach|3 years ago
hirako2000|3 years ago
No cash? Then sell your assets. Creditors/depositors ain't gonna wait. Realised loss? That's your balance going down in true accounting terms now. Accountings get disclosed? Those quarterly release are mandatory for all publicly trading company: that could cause worry among investors, and in the case of a bank a panic a bank run.
What a market valuation made at each quarter could achieve is give a momentarily evaluation of what a fund's assets is made of if they were to liquidate right then, or that day. But it isn't how it works*
It does work for goods though, amortization is accounted for and a well oiled exercise. Futures, bonds, stocks? Good luck with that. If we could predict the future the game would be a whole lot different.
notmindthegap|3 years ago
dboreham|3 years ago
I'm guessing the answer is: something something make more profit...
E.g. my businesses are required to carry liability insurance. I have to do that because we have big company customers who made it a condition of doing business with them. So why do big companies hand $nB over to another company for safe keeping but not require insurance?
mixdup|3 years ago
What good is private insurance from an insurance company if they go insolvent because of massive numbers of bank failures
So, now the answer to your question is a political one: are we willing as a society and government to potentially put that much taxpayer money at risk. I think it's a perfectly valid discussion to have, but it's one we haven't had yet, and one we refuse to have until the shit has hit the fan
schrodinger|3 years ago
didip|3 years ago
Otherwise, it’s weakness will soon be recognized by some billionaires, Thiel in this case, and they will take advantage of this weakness to become even richer.
workOrNah|3 years ago
kfarr|3 years ago
moremetadata|3 years ago
[deleted]