All opinion aside a recession is a liquidity crisis. The people who loaned money either want it back or want more for it. If you are a healthy borrower you adjust and recalculate your profits. If you are an inexperienced CEO and have a faulty balance sheet-well, your pledged assets are at risk. If your assets have declined in value then the liquidity event is existential. The key is basic risk management.
Sounds like a serious mismatch in their fixed income deposits. It was not difficult to see interest rates were going up. Somebody was asleep at the switch.
One more thing. Peter Thiel only cried fire in a burning theater. Google Marc Cohedes he shorted the stock months ago. The info was out there. All you had to do was look. The SF Fed played blind.
The bank collapsed because of duration risk. That is obvious. It collapsed because it had no risk manager for 4 months. It collapsed because of the underwater warrants it took from its startup customers. It collapsed because of woke culture and putting capital security second. It ultimately collapsed because the easy fiat money regime is collapsing. Look at the FED. Their bond portfolio is under water and they have negative net worth of 1.1 trillion dollars. They are just like SVB. However, they are also different. They can print money and they will. Inflate or die! There is no free lunch in America.
The bank takes it’s deposits and invests them - in loans or in other debt instruments so as to generate income for the bank. Prior to the fed raising rates to combat inflation, SVB was trying to generate income by investing in longer term debt instruments as short term yielded close to nothing. When rates started going up, SVB didn’t react. When rates go up, the value of the debt instrument goes down. And banks have to value their assets at market value. When that happened, they reflected a large loss.
I doubt this is the only cause of their demise. But it certainly contributed to it.
All opinion aside a recession is a liquidity crisis. The people who loaned money either want it back or want more for it. If you are a healthy borrower you adjust and recalculate your profits. If you are an inexperienced CEO and have a faulty balance sheet-well, your pledged assets are at risk. If your assets have declined in value then the liquidity event is existential. The key is basic risk management.
Sounds like a serious mismatch in their fixed income deposits. It was not difficult to see interest rates were going up. Somebody was asleep at the switch.
One more thing. Peter Thiel only cried fire in a burning theater. Google Marc Cohedes he shorted the stock months ago. The info was out there. All you had to do was look. The SF Fed played blind.
The bank collapsed because of duration risk. That is obvious. It collapsed because it had no risk manager for 4 months. It collapsed because of the underwater warrants it took from its startup customers. It collapsed because of woke culture and putting capital security second. It ultimately collapsed because the easy fiat money regime is collapsing. Look at the FED. Their bond portfolio is under water and they have negative net worth of 1.1 trillion dollars. They are just like SVB. However, they are also different. They can print money and they will. Inflate or die! There is no free lunch in America.
The bank takes it’s deposits and invests them - in loans or in other debt instruments so as to generate income for the bank. Prior to the fed raising rates to combat inflation, SVB was trying to generate income by investing in longer term debt instruments as short term yielded close to nothing. When rates started going up, SVB didn’t react. When rates go up, the value of the debt instrument goes down. And banks have to value their assets at market value. When that happened, they reflected a large loss.
I doubt this is the only cause of their demise. But it certainly contributed to it.