Thanks John. Right now I have no reason to believe I’m F’d. As it happens we have a routine wire transfer scheduled today and I’ll be watching to see if it goes through as normal.
But it does sound a bit like a libertarian response- it’s my responsibility to make sure my bank is safe, but what about food? Drugs? Autos?
As the world becomes more complex, it’s necessary to let the experts expert.
I don’t know if this is directed at me, but you should read what I wrote over a series of posts more carefully. The fault here is 100% on inadequate regulation and reckless risk management by bankers.
I said that regulation should require sufficient transparency in the behavior of our banks that someone like @OldOlds has the information readily available to allow them choose a bank that behaves prudently.
Not just you, my friend, but we do have a fellow Doper here who is going through a problem and a little empathy is perfectly OK. 
This is silly. Banking isn’t entirely nationalized, but it is regulated to the point where it is reasonable to consider it a public utility. Expecting people to perform a quarterly risk assessment on complex financials of another institution is like asking them to check their tap water for metals or run their mains power through an oscilloscope to make sure the electricity is clean and unlikely to damage electronics.
True, you can do these things with OTC equipment bought off Amazon, but it’s simply not a reasonable expectation. It’s more reasonable to have regulatory entities functioning as intended, and updating legislation as needed.
This is why the current system, where you are only guaranteed $250,000 of protection, but actually are almost certain to be fully protected, is fair.
From the New York Times:
That’s why I snigger when people claim the US us a capitalist country. Businesses make money, they get to keep it. Businesses lose money, they whine they’re ‘too big to fail’ and get a bailout. It’s the perfect system – for concentrating wealth.
Let me just reiterate that I’m not saying it’s reasonable to expect customers to assess the behavior of bankers with the information that’s available now.
The fact is, right now there is so little transparency that nobody has adequate information on what the banks are doing. Neither the regulators nor the credit rating agencies saw this coming early enough. Forbes lauded them as one of the best banks in the country a couple of months before they failed.
I think “what non-experts with basic financial literacy can understand” is actually the correct standard for what regulators should be allowing banks to do. And I think the banks should be obliged to publish their financials, with complete transparency in near real time, including marking all assets to market. Banks should be obliged to publish specified summary statistics that are presented in exactly the same format for all banks so that we can all easily compare them and spot anomalies. Choosing a prudent bank can be conceptually no more difficult than researching what car you are going to buy without engineering expertise, if the regulators make it so.
SVB did not fail because of some opaque financial wizardry. They failed because they were massively exposed to interest rates going up. This is elementary risk management that should have been spotted internally and externally a mile off.
I agree with that, and even I understand that. I’m not a financial idiot, but I have no formal training in finance or economics. Just what I’ve learned through my career, which is more in line with business cases than mitigating liquidity risk.
But it does seem reasonable to me that our society and economy should have a safe place to park cash, whether savings or operational funds, where we don’t have to worry about it. And I think most people assume a checking account at a legit bank is more or less that (and yes, of course I’m aware that the FDIC limits are literally posted on the door of the bank).
But I’m saying when the experts and regulators don’t see it coming either, the problem is not the fact that you need to be an expert to understand it. The problem is that the regulations don’t require the relevant information to be transparent and accessible.
I mean, even if deposits aren’t fully guaranteed, in theory all you should need to do is check the bank’s credit rating, right? But the credit rating agencies can’t reliably figure out which banks are fucking up either.
Moody’s downgraded SVB from A1 to Caa2… on Friday. No shit, Sherlock Moody.
This statement is flawed in a couple of ways:
Last Thursday SVB took steps to shore up its portfolio. This should have resulted in nothing more than a hit to the share price. But they communicated in a way that was easily interpreted as instability, and accelerated social media communications caused the perception of instability to spread like wildfire, causing actual instability. This was intensified by the fact that SVB’s customers were all part of the same industry and same word-of-mouth networks.
I wouldn’t disagree with most of your prescriptions here. But I don’t agree that risk management and contingency modeling can be meaningfully reduced to a five-star scale of “bad” to “good”. At least not without adding a lot of brittleness by hampering a bank’s options to respond to a complex financial environment.
The implied prescription here, which I see people hinting at but not really developing, is the invention of “do-nothing banks”. They accept deposits and don’t do a lot of fancy back-end lending and investing. Without sophisticated lending products, the expenses would need to be backed by the government. A good real-world implementation would be postal banking. I’m familiar with Japanese postal banking and it works really well, perhaps there are other similar models to emulate.
No… they did a poor job of modeling interest rate risk, that much is true. When it threatened to bite them, they took reasonable steps to right the ship. They were reasonable and not extraordinary steps, and these steps almost always work. This bank wasn’t even close to insolvent. What killed them was:
Don’t mistake me here, regulation would have helped prevent this. But the uncomfortable truth is that even a healthy bank with high communication among customers has much greater deposit flight risk than in the past. When that panic takes hold, nobody’s looking at the financials to say “This portfolio can probably be fixed.” They head for the exits, and then it suddenly can’t be fixed.
So I agree that more transparency is needed, it was a mistake to remove it in 2018. But if we hang the whole problem on bad capital management, we’re missing the most critical risk – due to social media and democratized communications, it’s easier than ever to coordinate a bank run (intentionally or unintentionally).
Especially when you don’t even have to actually run to to the bank any more.
We used to have a Doper who’d I’d categorize as a radical libertarian who wanted to privatize the FDA, because he was convinced he was smart enough to understand the risks of new drugs without any of that ole gummint. I guess he had a lot of time on his hands. Even if you had the expertise to evaluate a bank, I’m betting you don’t have the time to do so in any reasonable manner.
My wife’s a biologist who writes about drugs, and even she trusts the experts. I wouldn’t even know where to get started reading a study, and I’m better trained in statistics than most.
I think there’s an excluded middle here. Banks should be boring. They should be regulated into such tedium that they never hit a headline ever again. Hearing about any bank should induce yawning. People like Henry Cavill or Margot Robbie should not be eligible for jobs in the banking industry. We don’t need to stick with sexist sterotypes, but we can keep the reverse-ageism: bankers should be middle aged with gray hair. In the short term, it will be bad for bank share prices, but after expectations adjust, they can just trade with boring predictable consistent profits like a utility.
It would likely mean a return of fees in checking accounts and business accounts, but that’s desirable. We really don’t want banks offering free services to attract deposit capital and then punting with that capital.
But this is misleading. A bank with a healthy balance sheet can borrow against its assets to meet withdrawals. The Fed is the lender of last resort without needing to go to receivership if there’s an unjustified crisis of confidence. Only a bank with a marginal balance sheet is vulnerable to panic.
Greater transparency means that banks will be forced to address potential problems by customers starting to withdraw funds much earlier - early enough that the bank has no choice but to fix the problem by cutting losses before they become an existential risk. Part of the problem with SVB is that they were using an opaque accounting system that did not require mark-to-market on their losing positions, so they had an incentive to just hang on, not crystallize any of the loss to reduce risk and perhaps lose their jobs, but just hope that they had seen the peak of interest rates. If banks are forced to mark to market, small losses are immediately transparent before they become large losses.
Well said. I think that that, unfortunately, is the tension that’s led to banks no longer being boring and transparent. I suspect that many of them want to grow more rapidly, and have a higher return on investment, than being boring allows for (and that’s why they have pushed for, and gotten, loosened regulations for decades).
And, the leadership of banks are probably chasing bigger salaries and more prestigious positions – leading a boring, predictable bank likely doesn’t lend itself to that.
I’ve met the type, which is why I always mention drugs in these discussions. I work in pharmaceuticals, and I can tell you it would be a disaster without the FDA. And it’s not because we’re all evil. It’s because the time and money to be compliant is staggering, and that compliance is what keeps people (mostly) safe.
I would agree with the statement that “there should be boring banks that are obviously boring.” And there are. We have credit unions. There could be a greater variety of boring banks such as government postal banks. The trouble is that when people are flush, they don’t want boring. They demand that banks help them take calculated risks, and it works as long as everyone calculates.
But it’s not clear that “boring” would have helped in SVB’s situation. They weren’t over-leveraged in complex credit swaps. They picked a boring asset and didn’t do a great job of managing it. And then they collided with the part that isn’t boring - the fact that they overspecialized serving Silicon Valley VC, a business segment that’s built on creating and spreading buzz and reacting instantly to information. The normal hysteresis that could have mitigated a bank run simply doesn’t exist anymore, or at least in this case it didn’t.
The Wall Street Journal had a decent opinion column on the failings of mangement.
Until Andy Kessler decided to end it this way.
In its proxy statement, SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have “1 Black,” “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans”. I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.
Holy Tucker Carlson Shit. I’m not saying that the right is a scumhole of filth and bigotry, but he didn’t even use an Oxford comma.
I think the big problem with SVB is that it was a venture capital firm masquerading as a bank. Wall Street On Parade has an in depth takedown of the company arguing that it should never have been allowed to exist and operate as it did, money quote:
To put it bluntly, this was a Wall Street IPO machine that enriched the investment banks on Wall Street by keeping the IPO pipeline moving; padded the bank accounts of the venture capital and private equity middlemen; and minted startup millionaires for ideas that often flamed out after the companies went public. These are the functions and risks taken by investment banks. Silicon Valley Bank – with this business model — should never have been allowed to hold a federally-insured banking charter and be backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer, who was on the hook for its incompetent bank management.
I can’t help but wonder if Glass-Steagall was still in place if it wouldn’t help head this kind of bullshit off at the pass.
Oh, and the lawsuits have already begun:
That’s weird. SVB didn’t go bust because they did VC investing. They didn’t go bust because they were big into crypto. They went bust from boring old bonds.
And bad communication. But were they supposed to refuse VC deposits?
Yeah, that last one is one of those sentences where everything before the ‘but’ doesn’t count.
And those who are saying that banks should be boring, like a utility, are missing the point. Shuffling money around is the way the uber-rich become more uber and the banks are the best venue for doing that. What the little people, and not so little companies want is immaterial compared to that.