Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt Levine reports that the reason they had to buy those low-yield investments that plummeted is because it’s tech-sector customers had too much money in the boom times. Too much deposits means they need to buy a lot of something , and in the boom times that was low-yield stuff.
Sort of the other way to handle it would be to say “we can’t find risk-free yield for the volume of cash we just had deposited, so deposits now get 0.8% instead of 1.0%” Which is kinda fine? Means you might lose some business as others chase yield. But I feel like most startups don’t actually have that much cash in the bank so they shouldn’t really be chasing yield anyway. It didn’t take a genius to predict interest…
Everyone is a genius in hindsight. You could have made millions out of a few thousands if you were able to predict an interest rate regime change. But where are your millions?