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FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

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Re: FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

#361
What I don't understand is why do banks work this way?

Imagine you were designing the bank from scratch having no knowledge of the current banking system. How would you do it? The most obvious thing would be if a customer deposits money, you would hold 100% of the money 1 to 1 exactly how they deposited it. Then the bank could make money by providing services to their customers.

If I had to bet, most people who have money in a bank today think this is how banks work.

But in reality, when a bank receives money, a bank will take some percentage of their customers deposits (90% or so), and then invest that money trying to make a return on it. This works as long as all customers don't try to withdraw their money at once.

But when enough customers... say 10% of the customers try to withdraw money from the bank at once, since 90% of the money was in other investments, the money isn't really there, and you get a bank run.

Silicon Valley Bank is not new, the whole reason we have FDIC insurance is to protect against bank runs. As long as this is the system we follow, we will continue to get bank runs.

I feel like the entire banking system is broken because "The money isn't actually there". There needs to be a better way then relying to the government to bail out banks who make bad investments. Either a bank should be backed 1 to 1, or there should be some other way to keep hold of your money.

Re: FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

#364
post #173

But I thought only crypto was risky? And that over-regulated bank sector was totally safe? Imho, this is a great argument for the return of Free banking (including crypto) as we see time and again that regulations do not work. Fail early and fast, let the market innovate and pick its winners and losers.

> regulations do not work

That's quite a lot of extrapolation from one bank failure.

Re: FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

#367
An explainer post [1] connected to that Tweet is something I found extremely informative (assuming it's accurate):

"- In 2021 SVB saw a mass influx in deposits, which jumped from $61.76bn at the end of 2019 to $189.20bn at the end of 2021.

- As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital. As a result, they purchased a large amount (over $80bn!) in mortgage backed securities (MBS) with these deposits for their hold-to-maturity (HTM) portfolio.

- 97% of these MBS were 10+ year duration, with a weighted average yield of 1.56%.

- The issue is that as the Fed raised interest rates in 2022 and continued to do so through 2023, the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted. This is because investors can now purchase long-duration "risk-free" bonds from the Fed at a 2.5x higher yield.

- This is not a liquidity issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits, since these securities will pay out more than they cost eventually.

- However, yesterday afternoon, SVB announced that they had sold $21bn of their Available For Sale (AFS) securities at a $1.8bn loss, and were raising another $2.25bn in equity and debt. This came as a surprise to investors, who were under the impression that SVB had enough liquidity to avoid selling their AFS portfolio."

[1] - https://twitter.com/jamiequint/status/1633956163565002752

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