Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty baffled to see so much of this on HN. Like a whole lot of people here, I've worked at startups for my whole career. People here are effectively suggesting that I shouldn't get my paycheck and that the company I work for should lose most of its money because our CEO used a well-reputed bank? Absolutely wipe out the equityholders of SVB. They deserve nothing, because that's what you should end up with if you…
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Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'm not getting paid the entire team was essentily furloughed (~25 ppl) No idea what's going to happen with insurance since some people were expecting I'm generally treating it as being laid off with no severance and looking elsewhere
I'm sad to hear that, but by all accounts you should be able to receive your salary on Monday, when at least $250k should become available to your employer (though hopefully significantly more).
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but "worth" is a complicated concept here. What's probably going to happen is that a big bank like JPMorgan is going to buy the remaining assets at 100% book value, and the depositors are going to be made whole out of that. That's not their current market value if sold at fire-sale prices, but banks have the time horizons to hold those assets to maturity and not worry so much about their market value. The stabil…
> not their current market value if sold at fire-sale prices Fire sale means the selling of the assets pushes their value down. This is not that. It’s insolvency; the assets were and are worth less than their book value. > stability of the US banking infrastructure Speaking anecdotally, New York is surprised and the Bay Area scared. This is a local problem. Not a systemic one.
As has been repeated many times, the bank was never and is not insolvent.
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#524I see a lot of unexpected saltiness and clear misconceptions in any thread about SVB. “Depositors shouldn’t get anything beyond the insured $250,000”. Then what do we do with the billions in remaining assets? Appropriate them, and leave small and mid businesses hanged to dry? “This is a bailout”. It would be if shareholders were to get their money back, which doesn’t seem likely. The government will use the bank asse…
The last I saw from Moody's was they're expecting "eighty-something" percent recovery rate, assuming no bailout or rule flexibility and no last minute forced merger.
This isn't like FTX where all the money is gone and ha ha you're not getting a penny of it back, ever. The SVB situation is a hyper regulated industry and the regulators flipped out when the asset ratio dropped below 95% or something like that, and as such, there will be inevitable expenses of a total shutdown, so figure everyone below $250K gets 100% back via insurance and everyone else gets $250K plus whatever was above $250K paid out at probably around eighty five percent when its all said and done (this is a guess although Moody's usually isn't all that wrong).
Historically when smaller banks collapsed (my hometown bank for example back in '08) the regulators semi-forcibly merge the small bank into a large bank and there's zero loss, you're just magically now a customer of some out of town megabank. The big bank eats the loss in a wink-and-nod agreement where the big bank gets some future favorable regulatory treatment in exchange, semi-informally. The problem with SVB is it is, or was, huge. So finding a huger bank to merge with will be tricky to impossible. Which was kind of the point of regulation intended to keep competition higher by making lots of small banks instead of few large ones.
The worst case outcome according to the last I saw from Moodys was big depositors will take maybe a fifteen percent haircut over $250K. The propaganda claims, of course, that all the money is gone and its 1933 again on Monday morning and the usual workers of the world unite stuff. But its not really THAT bad.
Idle speculation I've seen in chats that the solution to SVB being way too f-ing huge to merge with anyone is a forcible separation followed by a forcible multi-merge. So each 1/4 of you will be new customers with 100% rate of return of JP, BoA, Citi, and WF respectively. (off the top of my head those are the four largest banks by assets, I could be wrong) This is just internet chat nonsense I wouldn't plan on it. Although it is an innovative solution to having a "too big to fail" bank failure.
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand this debate. The article says nothing about whether or not depositors will be bailed out.
It says exactly that: “ Janet Yellen said on Sunday that the US government was working closely with banking regulators to help depositors at Silicon Valley Bank but dismissed the idea of a bailout. […] “Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out . . . and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again,…
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#526I see a lot of unexpected saltiness and clear misconceptions in any thread about SVB. “Depositors shouldn’t get anything beyond the insured $250,000”. Then what do we do with the billions in remaining assets? Appropriate them, and leave small and mid businesses hanged to dry? “This is a bailout”. It would be if shareholders were to get their money back, which doesn’t seem likely. The government will use the bank asse…
I just don’t understand why folks on the internet are so passionate about the depositors being hit by this. In terms of avoiding moral hazard they are about as far down the list as possible, and bankruptcy law supports that. First stock holders get wiped out (common then preferred), then debt holders (folks who have lent money to SVB won’t get their money back), only then would it hit depositors - and in the case of…
If depositors with deposits above the FDIC insurance limit _are_ protected then there will be nothing stopping this from happening repeatedly in the future. Depositors that exceed the FDIC insurance limit should be taking a haircut so they learn to do better risk analysis of their bank or purchase auxiliary deposit insurance on their assets at a bank or both. VCs/investors in the companies whose deposits exceed the FDIC insurance limit should take a bath for pushing one specific bank with bad risk management. (How this fact escaped VCs/investors is beyond me. I'm not a risk manager or investment manager by any stretch of the imagination but even I would recognize that investment in long-term near-0% bonds would have nowhere to go but down.)
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#527I see a lot of unexpected saltiness and clear misconceptions in any thread about SVB. “Depositors shouldn’t get anything beyond the insured $250,000”. Then what do we do with the billions in remaining assets? Appropriate them, and leave small and mid businesses hanged to dry? “This is a bailout”. It would be if shareholders were to get their money back, which doesn’t seem likely. The government will use the bank asse…
I'm pretty baffled to see so much of this on HN. Like a whole lot of people here, I've worked at startups for my whole career. People here are effectively suggesting that I shouldn't get my paycheck and that the company I work for should lose most of its money because our CEO used a well-reputed bank? Absolutely wipe out the equityholders of SVB. They deserve nothing, because that's what you should end up with if you…
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then what do we do with the billions in remaining assets? Appropriate them, and leave small and mid businesses hanged to dry? Easy, pay out $250K per account, then distribute the rest pro rata based upon closing balance from when the fed's took over. If they have to wait because assets need to be liquidated then sucks to be them. I'm sure they can get their money faster if they agree to a haircut. > “This is a bail…
This is short sighted. If the government doesn’t make depositors whole then people and companies all over the world lose trust in US banks and eventually US dollars. This is a federal problem. It makes sense to make depositors whole, they’re innocent here. It doesn’t make sense to make SVB whole for managing their risk poorly.
Good. That's exactly what should happen. It should happen every single time, repeatedly. People should have to learn the hard way that banks and the government cannot be trusted.
These are the consequences of their irresponsibility. They should not get to avoid those consequences just because "banks and USD are important" or whatever excuse they come up with. If the US really is all about the free market as it claims, it should allow these banks to fail and everyone who trusted those banks to lose. Customers lent their monet to this bank and they lost. Allow them to face the consequences of their actions.
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#529These SVB threads really highlight how uninformed the SVB readership is lately. If you don't understand tech and finance why are you here?
Because they heard about HN from 4chan's /g/ board. You can spot the language they use from a mile away.
Re: Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout
#530I think Yellen is signalling the right approach, frankly. First, the balance between the bank's assets (its loans and the investments it made with depositors money, plus the bank's capital) and its liabilities, is such that SVB has enough holdings to cover nearly all of its deposits. The banks capital (that is its equity, and subordinated debt) should all go toward making depositors whole. That's what bank capital is…