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SVB Hall of Shame

svbhallofshame.wordpress.com

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Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#91

Post by kondro »

Call me naïve, but if I put money in a bank I should be able to get it back whenever I want. If I didn't want it to be liquid, I'd buy something less liquid. The very concept of a bank run is ridiculous. If all a bank's customers want their cash back, they should be able to get it back without affecting the liquidity of the bank.

Transaction accounts don't earn me anything and have fees of their own. There's little incentive to stay at one bank over another. If they want equity, they should sell long-term secured loans with LVRs under 100% or lock in my cash with term deposits or any number of other less liquid asset classes. But why should I feel guilt over moving my cash from one bank to another?

Maybe it's because I'm Australian but I feel our banking industry is significantly more stable. The last time a bank had any serious issue was 1990 and it was a (single bank that itself was bailed out by the government). Australian banks make their money through mortgages (averaging less than 80% LVR or insurance-backed if higher and with fixed terms of generally no longer than 5 years), credit cards and management fees on long-term investment products -- they don't rely on investing cash deposits on long-term illiquid instruments.

The fact this doesn't seem to be the case should raise questions over the entire US banking industry. Cash should be liquid.

Edit: For reference, APRA (bank regulator in Australia) has some very strict liquidity risk management requirements and most banks own liquidity requirements are significantly higher than this: https://www.apra.gov.au/apra-explains-liquidity-banking -- an Australian bank would never be allowed to purchase a 10-30 year bond to match against cash assets.

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#92

Post by aristophenes »

I’m sorry, this was an utter mess, shouldn’t have happened and lots of people share blame. But I don’t think it was wrong for depositors to pull deposits from an insolvent (or nearly insolvent) bank. Neither is it wrong to encourage companies you’ve invested in to move money. The only thing I have a problem with is when some of the VCs, like Jason Calacanis, deliberately tried to spread panic to other banks to make SVB more important to the government so they’d backstop his deposits. That was pretty bad.

But realizing your badly run bank is badly run and pulling your funds and encouraging others to do the same is a very reasonable thing to do. Certainly not worthy of this virtual tar and feathering. They are, or would have been, the innocent victims of this banks poor risk management.

Edit: Link to tweet of screenshot of Jason trying to get everyone to panic about the entire banking system, with the only fix is the government to backstop large SVB deposits. https://mobile.twitter.com/nuancerocket/status/1634922146555...

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#93

Post by RyanGWU82 »

xoa wrote: post #69
kamikaz1k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but it is entirely prisoner's dilemma. The rational decision, when you know you cannot control how others will act, is to minimize the pain. If you saw the HN thread on Thursday, there were founders posting that they were told it will be fine. How do you think they were feeling on Friday? And it is not a personal decision, continuity of business is a pretty big deal. Nobody in the company would forgive…

> You're right, but it is entirely prisoner's dilemma. But part of what makes that whole bit of game theory interesting is that it has a lot more complexity then just the simple version. Yes in a plain prisoner's dilemma betray can make sense, but in an iterated prisoner's dilemma that's no longer true. That's been part of the debate around the whole debacle, for much of SV's history it was very much iterated, it was…

The Prisoners' Dilemma analogy was covered in Ben Thompson's Stratechery article this week: https://stratechery.com/2023/the-death-of-silicon-valley-ban...

He first made this argument in 2017 in an article about Uber: https://stratechery.com/2017/the-uber-dilemma/

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#95

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jsemrau wrote: post #76

Auditors signed-off their audits : https://www.businesstoday.in/silicon-valley-bank/story/silic... with a clean bill of health nonetheless.

This was commented elsewhere, but the auditors were correct in that situation. This was not a case of fraud, where the bank had less money than they said they did. KPMG's job was to verify that SVB's public statements were accurate, and they were.

SVB's precarious position was not a secret - saw a good post from mid-Feb that predicted exactly how this eventually played out. The only other thing KPMG could have done is give a "going concern" warning, and that would have been incredibly reckless because it would itself have caused a run on the bank.

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#96

Post by vivegi »

You can't blame the depositors or the VCs in this case for SVB's failure. Only SVB was responsible for taking on naked long-term risk and being unable to meet current obligations.

At the time the VCs advised their portfolio cos to pull funds out of SVB, it was a perfectly rational reason because only 2.7% of SVB's deposits were FDIC insured. That means, there was no guarantee of the Fed, treasury and FDIC would take the action to make good all depositors.

The entire site appears like something from an affected party (shareholder/investor/exec/boardmember of SVB) who lost their shirt in this fiasco and has an axe to grind. Just saying. Not sure why the are not naming and shaming the former SVB execs and boardmembers who missed to identify these risks early on and mitigate them.

The failure of SVB is just capitalism, isn't it? They risked their capital on a business that took bad decisions, so it is only fair that the specific company (SVB) ceases to exist and something else comes up to take its place.

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#97

Post by dehrmann »

naet wrote: post #61

I don't think I agree with this as a mark of "shame". Were these companies wrong to pull money out of SVB when they (correctly) thought the bank might be insolvent or headed for trouble? Are we celebrating those who left their money in, despite the warnings, when they could have potentially lost it all if the government didn't step in and make an unprecedented promise to honor the deposits? Would that have been "hero…

VC and startups were facing a prisoner's dilemma, and they picked a viable strategy.

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#98

Post by zarzavat »

xoa wrote: post #69
kamikaz1k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but it is entirely prisoner's dilemma. The rational decision, when you know you cannot control how others will act, is to minimize the pain. If you saw the HN thread on Thursday, there were founders posting that they were told it will be fine. How do you think they were feeling on Friday? And it is not a personal decision, continuity of business is a pretty big deal. Nobody in the company would forgive…

> You're right, but it is entirely prisoner's dilemma. But part of what makes that whole bit of game theory interesting is that it has a lot more complexity then just the simple version. Yes in a plain prisoner's dilemma betray can make sense, but in an iterated prisoner's dilemma that's no longer true. That's been part of the debate around the whole debacle, for much of SV's history it was very much iterated, it was…

I don’t understand how the iterated prisoner’s dilemma makes a difference.

If you are a founder who withdrew all your company’s money, then your reputation is neutral or perhaps positive. You saved your company. You did “whatever it takes”. These are good qualities in a founder.

If you are a founder who left your company’s money in SVB, nobody is going to give you a medal for that. Instead it exposes you to questions such as “Why did you have so much cash in one place?”. If depositors hadn’t gotten bailed out then you also face the collapse of your startup, your coworkers losing their jobs, etc. So this is definitely a much more negative outcome iterated or not.

Re: SVB Hall of Shame

#100

Post by whateveracct »

kondro wrote: post #91

Call me naïve, but if I put money in a bank I should be able to get it back whenever I want. If I didn't want it to be liquid, I'd buy something less liquid. The very concept of a bank run is ridiculous. If all a bank's customers want their cash back, they should be able to get it back without affecting the liquidity of the bank. Transaction accounts don't earn me anything and have fees of their own. There's little i…

To be pedantic, I'm pretty sure a big enough bank run could topple your banks too. Where do you think they get the cash to lend out from?
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