timesofisrael | Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday he’d been in touch
with senior Israeli tech figures vowing to assist affected companies.
“If necessary, out of responsibility to Israeli high-tech companies
and employees, we will take steps to assist the Israeli companies, whose
center of activity is in Israel, to weather the cash-flow crisis that
has been created for them due to the turmoil,” Netanyahu said in a
statement.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he was forming a special team
to look into the potential consequences for Israel from the collapse,
which will include the director general of the Treasury and officials
from the Bank of Israel, Securities Authority and Innovation Authority.
NextVision, a maker of micro stabilized cameras, said it managed on
Thursday to withdraw almost all of the $2.7 million it held in its
account at SVB, according to a regulatory filing to the Tel Aviv Stock
Exchange.
Qualitau Ltd, a developer of test equipment for the semiconductor
industry, said it held $16.8 million at SVB out of a total of about
$22.3 million it has in and outside the US.
In a statement to the TASE, the company disclosed that it has “no
information regarding the amounts it will be able to withdraw in the
future from the balance of the funds deposited in SVB and in relation to
the timing when it will be possible to withdraw these funds.”
“The company believes that despite the material impact of the event,
taking into account the cash balance of the customers, the existing
balance, and the backlog of orders (…) it is able to continue its
activities during the normal course of business.”
Israel’s two largest banks, Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim, set up a
situation room that has been operating around the clock to help firms
transfer their money from SVB — before it was seized — to accounts in
Israel. Over the past few days, teams at LeumiTech, the high-tech
banking arm of Bank Leumi, have been able to help their Israeli clients
transfer about $1 billion to Israel, the bank said.
LeumiTech said it will provide financing assistance and loans to
startups and other tech firms that were left without access to credit
lines and liquidity due to SVB’s collapse.
“I promise that we will continue to do everything to help and
accompany the companies and startups to safely overcome the challenges
and continue to support their growth,” said LeumiTech CEO Timor
Arbel-Sadras.
To help tech companies in immediate distress, Poalim Hi-Tech opened a
hotline offering bridge loans for the purpose of assisting companies in
paying salaries in the coming month against their commitment to
transfer deposit funds to their bank accounts in Israel.
Meanwhile, venture capital funds hoping that a fast solution will be
found in the form of a buyer that will purchase SVB as a going concern
or a federal bailout that will quickly get money to affected depositors.
Alan Feld, co-founder and managing partner of Israeli tech investment
firm Vintage Investment Partners, called on “regulators globally to
allow SVB to be acquired and recapitalized so that this wonderful bank
can serve all of us for the next 20 years.”
“Silicon Valley Bank has been a wonderful partner to Vintage and its
portfolio funds and companies since we started our firm 20 years ago,”
Feld said in a LinkedIn post.
It was not the venture-capital backed companies that chose or agreed to
keep all their deposits at SVB. It was their venture capital investors
that forced this arrangement on them, confirmed by a reader: “Speaking
as a former customer as dictated by my VCs.” This distinction matters
because it puts the locus of influence and favor-trading much higher up
the food chain.
nueberger |It’s highly possible, one could even say likely, that those
massive deposits — Roku alone kept almost half a billion dollars in a
single account — were part of a corrupt set of practices by the bank itself and its big-dollar clients.
SVB would typically require, as part of its venture debt investments into emerging companies, that the money would be held in an account with SVB. SVB would then offer concierge, I think they called it white glove, services to the founders including personal LOCs, mortgages etc.
David Dayen, in an excellent, comprehensive piece, writes:
“So you have depositors that either didn’t know the first thing about
risk management, or were bribed by the bank into neglecting it.”
Keep
in mind who these depositors are: the very very wealthy in the West
Coast venture capital world. The corruption didn’t start just with the
bank. The VCs often initiated it. As a friend and former Silicon Valley
entrepreneur pointed out to me recently:
SVB
was a special case. VCs required the companies they funded to keep their
cash there. So the companies (and their employees) really were victims,
not incompetent at risk management. In exchange the VCs received
various favors from the bank. This is how Silicon Valley works behind
the scenes. I was in one deal where the lead VC for our
funding required a secret kickback of a certain % of the company stock
and that this arrangement be kept secret from the firm. This is typical.
Where Does That Leave Us, Part I
Where
that leaves us is here: The U.S. banking system, which hasn’t been
private in my recent memory, has been officially taken under the wing of
the federal government, with every deposited dollar now de factoinsured by the FDIC.
The Fed says its new lending facility is big enough to cover all US uninsured deposits and that it is "prepared to address any liquidity pressures that may arise" https://t.co/XwS40BS4hk@FinancialTimes
To
cover these claims, the FDIC normally collects money from the banks
receiving the insurance benefit. This means that the covered banks
prepay a reasonable amount for a bailout of depositor funds up to
$250,000 per account.
What would a “reasonable amount” be to
cover all funds on deposit in the U.S.? Are the banks willing to prepay
it? Highly unlikely. After all, who’s going to make them? The government
they control?
So the federal government has nationalized the
banking system, or nationalized its insurance of bank deposits to 100%
of risk, all at no new cost to the banks.
What do you think these banks will do next, with that worry off their backs? I hesitate to find out, but I know we’re about to.
Where Does That Leave Us, Part II?
The
second “where does that leave us?” leaves the financial realm and
enters the political. If Saagar Enjeti is right (see the clip above),
the rich decided that taking even a 10% loss (“haircut”) via the normal
unwinding process was still too big an ask.
Meanwhile, in East Palestine OH where the working class makes its life, this went on:
With a population of about 5,000 people, there are roughly 2,600 residential properties in East Palestine
according to Attom, a property data provider. The average value of a
property there in January of this year, prior to the derailment, was
$146,000, according to Attom.
Taken together, the value of
all residential real estate in the town adds up to about $380 million,
including single family homes and multi-family properties.
Those
values are only a fraction of the money that Norfolk Southern earns.
Last year it reported a record operating income of $4.8 billion, and a
net income of $3.3 billion, up about 9% from a year earlier. It had $456
million in cash on hand on its books as of December 31.
It’s been returning much of that profit to shareholders, repurchasing $3.1 billion in shares last year and spending $1.2 billion on dividends. And it announced a 9% increase in dividends just days before the accident.
A
year ago its board approved a $10 billion share repurchase plan, and it
had the authority to buy $7.5 billion of that remaining on the plan as
of December 31. (Emphasis added)
The point couldn’t
be more simple. When the wealthy face losses, the government they
control bails them out, within days if necessary.
When the rest
of us faces losses, we’re on our own. Neither the wealthy who caused the
mess nor the government that represent “the people” will step up to the
plate.
And it will be this way forever unless force is applied.
decrypt |As
the fallout from the stunning collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)
plays out, numerous crypto companies have signaled their exposure to the
bank, which long maintained a reputation as one of the most prominent
lenders to tech startups in the world.
The bank’s closure Friday
by the California Department of Financial Protection marked the
second-largest bank failure in American history, after the undoing of
Washington Mutual during the financial crisis of 2008. Silicon Valley Bank reported $212 billion in assets last quarter.
The stock (SIVB) began spiraling late Wednesday after rumors circulated that the institution was seeking an acquisition after failing to raise sufficient capital to cover its obligations. In the hours and days that followed, numerous venture capital funds reportedly advised their clients to withdraw their funds, resulting in $42 billion of withdrawals initiated on Thursday, constituting a run on the bank. On Friday morning, the Nasdaq halted trading of SIVB shares.
Though it was venture capital firms and tech startups that were most severely affected by the SVB scare on Friday, numerous crypto companies have also disclosed their exposure to the bank. Here’s a running list of the crypto firms caught in the crosshairs of SVB's collapse, along with those that have publicly claimed they avoided the damage.
Note: On Sunday, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chairman Martin Gruenberg issued a joint statement saying that all Silicon Valley Bank depositors would be made whole and have access to their funds on Monday, March 13. The Federal Reserve is now investigating the bank's failure.
Counterpunch | The crashes of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and
the related bank insolvencies are much more serious than the 2008-09
crash. The problem at that time was crooked banks making bad mortgage
loans. Debtors were unable to pay and were defaulting, and it turned out
that the real estate that they had pledged as collateral was
fraudulently overvalued, “mark-to-fantasy” junk mortgages made by false
valuations of the property’s actual market price and the borrower’s
income. Banks sold these loans to institutional buyers such as pension
funds, German savings banks and other gullible buyers who had drunk Alan
Greenspan’s neoliberal Kool Aid, believing that banks would not cheat
them.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) investments had no such default risk. The
Treasury always can pay, simply by printing money, and the prime
long-term mortgages whose packages SVP bought also were solvent. The
problem is the financial system itself, or rather, the corner into which
the post-Obama Fed has painted the banking system. It cannot escape
from its 13 years of Quantitative Easing without reversing the
asset-price inflation and causing bonds, stocks and real estate to lower
their market value.
In a nutshell, solving the illiquidity crisis of 2009 that saved the
banks from losing money (at the cost of burdening the economy with
enormous debts), paved away for the deeply systemic illiquidity crisis
that is just now becoming clear. I cannot resist that I pointed out its
basic dynamics in 2007 (Harpers) and in my 2015 book Killing the Host.
Accounting fictions vs. market reality
No risks of loan default existed for the investments in government
securities or packaged long-term mortgages that SVB and other banks have
bought. The problem is that the market valuation of these mortgages has
fallen as a result of interest rates being jacked up. The interest
yield on bonds and mortgages bought a few years ago is much lower than
is available on new mortgages and new Treasury notes and bonds. When
interest rates rise, these “old securities” fall in price so as to bring
their yield to new buyers in line with the Fed’s rising interest rates.
A market valuation problem is not a fraud problem this time around.
The public has just discovered that the statistical picture that
banks report about their assets and liabilities does not reflect market
reality. Bank accountants are allowed to price their assets at “book
value” based on the price that was paid to acquire them – without regard
for what these investments are worth today. During the 14-year boom in
prices for bonds, stocks and real estate this undervalued the actual
gain that banks had made as the Fed lowered interest rates to inflate
asset prices. But this Quantitative Easing (QE) ended in 2022 when the
Fed began to tighten interest rates in order to slow down wage gains.
When interest rates rise and bond prices fall, stock prices tend to
follow. But banks don’t have to mark down the market price of their
assets to reflect this decline if they simply hold on to their bonds or
packaged mortgages. They only have to reveal the loss in market value if
depositors on balance withdraw their money and the bank actually has to
sell these assets to raise the cash to pay their depositors.
That is what happened at Silicon Valley Bank. In fact, it has been a problem for the entire U.S. banking system.
Tablet | So
what sort of investments did SVB make that went bad? One type of startup
appears to have occupied a large amount of space on the bank’s balance
sheet: eco-tech innovators, which traditionally require large upfront
investments to get off the ground. According to the bank’s website,
more than $3.2 billion of its funds were invested to finance companies
in “clean tech, climate tech, and sustainability industry, including
solar, wind, battery storage, fuel cell, utility storage and more.” The
bank’s investment in such virtuous technologies is so massive that 60% of community solar financing nationwide involves SVB. Just last week, the bank hosted Winterfest, a shindig for the climate-tech sector, at the Lake Tahoe Ritz-Carlton.
In
other words, the darling financial institution of the tech industry,
which donates heavily and almost exclusively to the Democratic Party, is
now bankrupt in part because it spent heavily on the Democratic Party’s
pet causes. SVB’s demise was followed at the end of last week by the
collapse of New York’s Signature Bank, which had former Democratic
regulatory guru Barney Frank on its board, and which famously stepped
into the political fray in January 2021 when it cut its long-standing
ties with Donald Trump and urged the president to resign.
This may help explain why Democrat-supporting big-time investors are now pressing
President Joe Biden to bail out SVB. But as the president announced, he
doesn’t need to do almost anything to help the banks that fund his
supporters and his party’s ideological agenda: For that, there are bank
fees. According to a 2020 survey,
bank fees are hitting record highs, with monthly service fees now at
$15.50 on average for accounts that don’t meet an ever-increasing
minimum monthly balance, now at an all-time high of $7,550.
Let’s
put it simply: If you have a million dollars in the bank, you suffer no
consequences. If you have $10 in the bank, you have to pay the bank $15
for the privilege of keeping it there, which means you owe the bank $5.
Bank fees are among our most shockingly regressive forms of taxation.
When the Biden administration promises that there’ll be no bailouts and
that no one will lose any money from SVB’s collapse, what they mean is
that the bailouts will be paid for by the poor, not by the banks.
What to make of all this? Two immediate lessons come to mind.
First, the collapse of FTX (which gave tens of millions to Democratic Party candidates and causes),
SVB, Signature Bank, and the financial institutions that will surely
follow isn’t part of some complex financial machination inscrutable to
all but the savviest among us. It’s part of the very same rot that has
already claimed our universities, our media, and other institutions
crucial to the functioning of a civil society.
SVB
was the financier of choice of one political party’s donor base. It
overwhelmingly paid for projects that fit that party’s agenda. And it
employed people who expended a lot of time and energy preaching its
gospel: The bank’s head of financial risk management in the U.K., for
example, Jay Ersapah,
took to the internet enthusiastically to both identify herself as “a
queer person of color” and announce that she had helped launch no less
than six employee resource groups at SVB, designed to “raise the
visibility of multiple dimensions of diversity.” As the saying goes, you
get what you paid for.
These
ideological convictions aren’t coincidences. They’re requirements. Just
as you have to pledge your allegiance to the most woke of persuasions
to get tenure, and just as you may no longer be a part of a major
American newsroom unless you see yourself as fully committed to seeing
virtually any Republican as an enemy of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, you may no longer be a part of the financial system unless
you’re ready to support leftist candidates and causes.
The
consequences of party control spreading from universities and media to
professional organizations and financial institutions are now plain.
It’s one thing when the ideological rot on campus leads to a gaggle of
law students honking at a circuit judge; it’s another when the same
convictions lead investors and regulators to slow-clap as billions
vanish from their accounts, knowing that doing so is now a requirement
of their jobs, and the costs will be passed on to taxpayers.
The
second lesson that may be learned from SVB’s collapse applies only to
Israelis, but it’s no less urgent: Sure, the Jewish state’s local
customs and arrangements are flawed in many ways, but importing
American-style politics and culture, at this particular moment in time,
is a very bad idea. America is no longer a liberal bulwark against the
storm. It is the storm. Emulating America means more contempt for
voters, more erosion of norms in the name of abstract virtue, more
mistrust, and, eventually, bankruptcy.
The
solutions are simple: Keep politics in the parking lot. Keep banks
focused on banking. Bring back trustworthy, nonpartisan regulation—the
loss of which, in all fairness, was brought about as much, if not more,
by Republicans as it was by Democrats. Resist the whole-of-society blob
model you get when a political party merges with the tech industry and
federal bureaucracies and leading newspapers and professional
organizations and financial institutions and everyone become too big to
fail. And realize that what’s true for the richest and most powerful
country in history is even more true for Israel, a country where failure
would be truly catastrophic—and is always just around the corner.
wired |When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on March 10, Garry Tan, president and CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, called SVB’s failure “an extinction level event for startups” that “will set startups and innovation back by 10 years or more.” People have been quicktopointout
how quickly the cadre of small-government, libertarian tech bros has
come calling for government intervention in the form of a bailout when
it’s their money on the line.
Late yesterday, the US government announced
that SVB depositors will regain access to all their money, thanks to
the Federal Deposit Insurance Company's backstop funded by member banks.
Yet the shock to the tech ecosystem and its elite may still bring down a
reckoning for many who believe it’s got nothing to do with them.
SVB’s 40,000 customers are mostly tech companies—the bank provided services to around half of US startups—but
those tech companies are tattooed into the fabric of daily lives across
the US and beyond. The power of the West Coast tech industry means that
most digital lives are rarely more than a single degree of separation
away from a startup banking with SVB.
The
bank's customers may now be getting their money back but the services
SVB once provided are gone. That void and the shock of last week may
cause—or force—startups and their investors to drastically change how
they manage their money and businesses, with effects far beyond Silicon
Valley.
Most immediately, the many startups who
depended on SVB have workers far from the bank’s home turf. “These
companies and people are not just in Silicon Valley,” says Sarah Kunst,
managing director of Cleo Capital, a San Francisco firm that invests in
early-stage startups.
Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham said yesterday that the incubator’s companies banking with SVB have more than a quarter of a million employers,
around a third of whom are based outside California. If they and other
SVB customers suffer cash crunches or cut back expansion plans, rent
payments in many parts of the world may be delayed and staff may no
longer buy coffees and lunches at the corner deli. Cautious about the
future, businesses may withhold new hires, and staff who remain may
respond in kind, cutting local spending or delaying home purchases or
renovation work.
The second- and third-order
impacts of startups hitting financial trouble or just slowing down could
be more pernicious. “When you say: ‘Oh, I don’t care about Silicon
Valley,’ yes, that might sound fine. But the reality is very few of us
are Luddites,” Kunst says. “Imagine you wake up and go to unlock your
door, and because they’re a tech company banking with SVB who can no
longer make payroll, your app isn’t working and you’re struggling to
unlock your door.” Perhaps you try a rideshare company or want to hop on
a pay-by-the-hour electric scooter, but can’t because their payment
system is provided by an SVB client who now can’t operate.
market-ticker | Next up - Republic, which apparently had lines out the door (if you believe the Internet) on Saturday. Again: So what?
Folks,
bubbles attract stupidity. Stupidity is a constant in the universe; in
fact it is likely the only thing that is truly infinite (with all due
respect to the late Mr. Einstein.)
The so-called "Chief Risk Officer" at SVB had a masters in..... public administration. Anyone care to bet if she passed any form of advanced mathematics -- you know, like for example Calculus or Statistics?Do you think she understood exponents and why this graph made clear that concentration of risk and duration was stupid and likely to blow up in everyone's face -- including hers?
How about Bill Ackman and the others on the Internet screaming for a bailout? How about the CFOs of public companies like Roku that stuck several hundred million dollars in
said bank? Was it not widespread public knowledge (and available to
anyone who took 15 minutes to do research, which you'd think someone
would do before putting a hundred million bucks somewhere) that this institution was chock-full of VC-funded startup companies which, historically fail 90% of the time and their debt becomes impaired or even worthless?
Where are the indictments for fiduciary malfeasance among these people?
It takes a literal five minutes with Excel to prove to yourself that if debt is rising faster than GDP no matter the interest rate eventually the interest payments on that debt will exceed all of the economy.
This of course is impossible because you cannot use over 100% of
anything as its not there, but long before you reach that point you're
going to have trouble putting food on the table, fuel in the vehicle and
paychecks are going to bounce. It was for this reason that one of the first sections in my book Leverage, written after the 2008 blowup which I chronicled and laid bare upon the table featured exactly this chart.
The last bit of insanity was just 15 years ago by my math. Did we fix it? No. What was featured in the stupidity of 2008? Allowing banks to run with no reserves. Who did that? Ben Bernanke, who got it into the TARP bill that eventually passed and which I reported on at the time. It
accelerated that which was already going to happen because Congress is
full of people who think trees grow to the moon, leverage is never bad and exponents are a suggestion.
Oh by the way, your local Realtor thinks so to as does, apparently, the former SVB "risk officer" who, it is clear, didn't understand exponents -- or didn't care.
The simple reality is that it must always cost to borrow money in real terms. This means the rate of interest must be positive in said real terms, which means across the curve rates must be higher than inflation -- again, in real terms, not in "CPI" which has intentional distortions in it such as "Owner's Equivalent Rent" when you're not renting a house, you're buying it. Had said "CPI" actually had home prices in it then it would have shown a doubling in many markets in that section of the economy over the last three years.
In other words housing alone would have resulted in a roughly 10% per year inflation rate, plus all the other increases, which means the Fed Funds rate should have been 300bips or so beyond that all the way back to 2020 -- which would put Fed Funds at about 13% for the last three years.
It isn't of course but if it had been then all those "housing price increases" would not have happened at all. Incidentally even today the Fed Funds rate is below inflation and thus the crazy is still on.
It's a bit less on however, and now you see what happens when even though they're still nuts being slightly "less" nuts means that these firms are no longer capable of operating without the wild-eyed crazy; even a slight reduction of the heroin dose caused them to fail.
Never mind the wild-eyed poor choices of executives (who signed off on all of this?) at SVB which the regulators all knew about and ignored. The CEO? A director of the San Francisco Federal Reserve. Why don't you look up a few of the other "chief" positions and what they used to do. Bring a barf bag. No, really.
And what did Forbes think of all this? Why it was good for five straight years of SVB being rated one of their BEST BANKS!
Negative real rates are never sustainable. The insidious nature of that nonsense is that it extends duration in pre-payable debt, specifically mortgages. Mortgages
have had a roughly 7 year duration forever, despite most of them being
30 year paper nominally because people move for other than necessity
reasons (e.g. "I want a bigger house", "I want to live here rather than
there" and so on.) A huge percentage of said paper was issued at 3% and now is double that or more. Since a mortgage is not transportable (when you sell the house you extinguish the old one and take a new one) and changing that retroactively would be both wildly illegal and ruin everyone holding said paper you can't retroactively patch the issue -- which is that now nobody with a 3% mortgage is going to prepay it and move unless they have to and so the duration is extending and will continue for the next couple of decades. This in turn means if you have a 3% mortgage bond, the new ones are 7% and there's 10 years left on the reasonable expectation of its life you're now going to have to discount the face value by the difference in interest rate times the remaining duration or I won't buy it since I can buy the new one at the higher rate! This
is not a surprise and that it would happen and accelerate was known as
soon as inflation started to rise and thus force The Fed to withdraw
liquidity. The Fed cannot stop because inflation is a compound function and at the point it forces necessities to be foregone the economy collapses and, if continued beyond that point THE GOVERNMENT collapses because tax revenue wildly drops as well. The only sound accounting move at that moment in time as a holder of said paper was to dispose of the duration or immediately discount the value of that paper to the terminal rate's presumption and adjust as required on a monthly basis.
Nobody did this yet to not do it is fraud as these are not only expected outcomes they're certain.
Where was the OCC on this that is supposed
to prevent such mismatches from impairing bank capital? How about The
Fed itself, or the FDIC? The San Francisco Fed was obviously polluted as the CEO was on their board (until
he was quietly removed on Friday) but isn't it interesting that all
these people who were intimately involved in firms that blew up in 2008
were concentrated in one place in executive officers with direct fiduciary responsibility?
And isn't it further quite-interesting that all the screaming you're
hearing right now is about how "terrible" it will be that "climate
change" related firms will be unable to make payroll and the new
upcoming VC-funded startups won't because their favorite conduit has
been disrupted? What's that about -- the entire premise of
these firms requires them to not only force their startups to bank in
specific places with large amounts of money (since they don't earn
anything they have to have access to and consume tens of millions or more a year) but cash management, you know, putting all of it other than what you need to make payroll next week in 4 week bills is too much to ask?
There's a rumor floating around (peddled by Bloomberg) that over one hundred venture and investment firms, including Sequoia, have signed a statement supporting SVB and warning of an "extinction-level event" for tech firms. Really? Extinction
for technology or extinction for cash-furnace nonsense funded by
negative real interest rates which make all manner of uneconomic things
look good but require ever-expanding, exponentially-so, levels of debt issuance?
Again, that is not possible on
a durable basis and once again the reason why is trivially discernable
with 5 minutes and an Excel spreadsheet and graph. It takes about an
hour to do it manually using graph paper, a basic 4-function calculator
or the capacity to perform basic multiplication on said paper and a pencil.
CNBC |The
two biggest banking institutions serving crypto businesses in the U.S.
have shut down in the last four days. Investors have worried that the
collapse of Signature Bank, whose assets were seized Sunday evening by
regulators, was inevitable following the impending liquidation of
Silvergate Bank and given the increasing regulatory hostility toward
crypto companies. Now that event is past us, and has left young
U.S.-based crypto startups with few options for banking relationships.
“There’s kind of a black mark on crypto deposits for the next few
weeks,” said Conor Ryder, research analyst at Kaiko. “It could be that
one of the smaller banks decides to raise their hand and take on the
deposits but I don’t think they’ll be jumping on that opportunity after
everything was done over the weekend.” The biggest priorities for the
industry now are around diversifying on-ramps into crypto and focusing
on policymaker education.
Before the end of Silvergate and Signature,
the regulatory crackdown on crypto had already started. The days before
the industry had crypto-forward banks to turn to were some of the
darkest for the industry. The inability to form banking relationships
was a big obstacle to growth. At the end of February, three major
banking regulators issued a joint statement warning banks of the
liquidity risks associated with banking crypto companies. In January,
the Wyoming-chartered special purpose depository institution and
famously unleveraged Custodia Bank set off the de-banking wave when its
application to become a member institution of the Federal Reserve was
denied. “Banks and law firms are getting a clear message from
regulators: distance yourselves from crypto companies,” said Ric
Edelman, founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial
Professionals. “This is blatant bias without legal standing, and if
sustained, it will harm U.S. innovation for decades to come,” he said of
the Signature closure. “But for the moment, crypto companies are
increasingly finding themselves where cannabis companies were a decade
ago.”
Stablecoins in focus Stablecoin regulation is set to take center
stage with the industry scrambling for banking alternatives, according
to various crypto market participants who are skeptical the remaining
banking institutions will welcome crypto with open arms. One of the most
clear paths forward is for crypto firms to transact in stablecoins.
“We’ve seen stablecoins crypto-pairs rise to an all-time high 90% of
trading volume on exchanges, up from 79% a year ago, at the expense of
the dollar,” Ryder said. “The industry has become less and less reliant
on the U.S. dollar and crypto firms are familiar with stablecoins, so
this could be a smoother transition than people expect.” Stablecoins
also satisfy the need for 24/7 payment rails, he added.
Both Silvergate
and Signature offered a service that allowed fiat money to easily flow
into crypto assets. Even if another bank opened its arms to crypto
companies, the industry is still feeling the loss of the Silvergate
Exchange Network and Signature’s Signet platform. Kaiko reported Monday
that liquidity is already suffering at U.S. exchanges. Gemini’s was down
74% in for the month, while Coinbase’s fell 50% and liquidity at
Binance.US dropped 29%. Binance, however, suffered a smaller, 13%
impact. The problem with the stablecoin route is it concentrates trust
in a handful of stablecoin issuers, who would likely need to be more
heavily regulated, Ryder said. Over the weekend Circle’s USDC stablecoin
broke its peg to the U.S. dollar, dropping below 87 cents. The frenzy
came after Circle said it has about $3.3 billion in SVB. It regained its
peg Monday.
nationalreview |The
2008 financial collapse and resulting Wall Street bailout popularized
the concept of “too big to fail” — the idea that certain institutions
were so massive, and so intertwined with the rest of the financial
system, that their failure could trigger a complete meltdown of the
economy.
Kinda insane that this entire debacle was potentially caused by @ByrneHobart's newsletter. Here's how the butterfly effect happened.
1) Byrne posts this article/Tweet calling out SVB's risk. 2) Pretty much every VC I know reads this newsletter 3) They all start to pay very,… https://t.co/zUSKF1ZW4J
While
I opposed that bailout on ideological grounds, I at least recognized
the tremendous risk that the implosion of the nation’s major investment
banks would pose for the broader financial system. But Sunday’s decision
by regulators to bail out uninsured depositors of the failed Silicon
Valley Bank would dramatically lower the threshold for federal
intervention in financial markets.
To
be sure, there are reasons to believe the collapse of SVB carries
broader consequences. While the FDIC guarantees deposits up to $250,000,
the overwhelming majority of SVB deposits exceeded that amount. It was
the bank of choice for many tech start-ups. Without access to their
cash, those companies would have difficulty meeting payroll.
Additionally, the sudden collapse of SVB could lead companies and
individuals who have deposits in other similar financial institutions to
withdraw their money starting on Monday, triggering more bank runs, and
more bank collapses.
While
regulators are not stepping in to rescue SVB as an institution, the
Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and FDIC have announced that they
will make sure that all depositors at SVB as well as another failed
institution, Signature Bank, will have access to their money on Monday
even if those deposits exceed the $250,000 threshold. In a statement, regulators promise, “No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.”
Defenders
of this decision will try to make it seem as if it’s an extraordinary,
one-off decision by regulators, but in practice, it has created a huge
moral hazard by signaling that the $250,000 FDIC limit on deposit
insurance does not exist in practice. The clear signal it sends is that
when financial institutions make poor decisions, the government will
swoop in to clean up the mess. There are plenty of ways in which poor
decisions made by financial institutions could have larger implications.
But in 2008, the justification for intervention was systemic risk.
This
was not a case in which the whole economy would be threatened if an
intervention were not taken. There would be disruption to a number of
companies in the tech sector and their employees, as well as potential
problems for similarly situated financial institutions. But the vast
majority of banks are well capitalized right now, and there is no
credible risk of this causing a complete financial meltdown.
In
fact, it isn’t even clear that depositors were going to be wiped out,
absent federal intervention. When SVB was shut down, it still had real
assets that were worth money, which can be sold to pay back investors.
Due to poor risk management, what they were not able to do is avoid a
panic in which a large number of depositors tried to withdraw their
money at the same time, which is what happened last week. Under one estimate
from a Jefferies analyst, when liquidated, SVB has the assets to pay
off 95 percent of deposits. This is no doubt one reason why regulators
are stating so confidently that they don’t expect this to cost taxpayers
money. Another reason is that they claim any losses incurred would be
repaid by “a special assessment on banks” which will inevitably end up
being passed on to their customers.
Anybody
who considers themselves a free-market conservative should be
especially concerned about this action. Regardless of the particulars,
it will just add to the talking point that when Wall Street or
well-connected tech companies are in trouble, the government swoops in
to the rescue. And yet lawmakers won’t eliminate student debt, give away
free health care, pay for child care, guarantee affordable housing . . .
and insert whatever cause you like. If you support socialism for tech
companies, don’t be surprised when you get it for everything else.
racket |The campaign against “disinformation” in this way has become
the proxy for a war against civil liberties that probably began in 2016,
when the reality of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination
first began to spread through the intellectual class. There was a
crucial moment in May of that year, when Andrew Sullivan published “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.”
This piece was a cri de coeur for
the educated set. I read it on the way to covering Trump’s clinching
victory in the Indiana primary, and though I disagreed with its premise,
I recognized right away that Andrew’s argument was brilliant and would
have legs. Sullivan described Plato’s paradoxical observation that
“tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy,”
explaining that as freedoms spread and deference to authority withered,
the state would become ungovernable:
The
very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly
intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention
the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of
women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A
father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a
son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before
or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is
frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light
of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich
mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The
foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
It
was already patently obvious to anyone covering politics in America
that respect for politicians and institutions was vanishing at warp
speed. I thought it was a consequence of official lies like WMD, failed
policies like the Iraq War or the financial crisis response, and the
increasingly insufferable fakery of presidential politics. People like author Martin Gurri pointed at a free Internet, which allowed the public to see these warts in more hideous technicolor than before.
Sullivan
saw many of the same things, but his idea about a possible solution was
to rouse to action the country’s elites, who “still matter” and
“provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.” Look,
Andrew’s English, a crime for which I think people may in some cases be
excused (even if I found myself reaching for something sharp when he
described Bernie Sanders as a “demagogue of the left”). Also, his essay
was subtle and had multiple layers, one of which was an exhortation to
those same elites to wake up and listen to the anger in the population.
Unfortunately,
post-election, each successive version of what was originally a careful
and subtle “Too Much Democracy” idea became more simplistic and
self-serving. By 2019 the shipwreck of the Weekly Standard, the Bulwark, was publishing “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,”
an article which insisted it wasn’t an argument for the vote to be
restricted, but “it is an argument for a political, social, and cultural
compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.” Soon we had
people like Joan Donovan of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center leading the
charge for “de-platforming,” not as a general principle of course, but
merely as a “short-term” solution. In its own way it was very Trumpian thinking: we just need to clamp down on speech until we can “figure out what is going on.”
Still, as far back as 2016, the RAND Corporation conducted a study showing the phrase most predictive of Trump support was “people like me don’t have any say.”
This was a problem of corporate and financial concentration invisible
to people of a certain class. As fewer and fewer people were needed to
run the giant banking or retail delivery or communications machines of
society, there were more and more going straight from college back to
their parents’ houses, where they spent their days fighting voice-mail
programs just to find out where to send their (inevitably unanswered)
job applications. This was going to inspire some angry tweets, and
frankly, allowing all of them was the least the system could do.
Instead
of facing the boiling-ever-hotter problem underneath, the managerial
types decided — in the short term only, of course — to mechanically
deamplify the discontent, papering things over with an expanding new
bureaucracy of “polarization mitigation,” what Michael calls the
Censorship-Industrial Complex. Instead of opening society’s doors and
giving people roles and a voice, those doors are being closed more
tightly, creating an endless cycle of anger and reaction.
Making a
furious public less visible doesn’t make it go away. Moreover, as we
saw at the hearing, clamping down on civil liberties makes obnoxious
leaders more conspicuous, not less. Democrats used to understand this,
but now they’re betting everything on the blinders they refuse to take
off, a plan everyone but them can see won’t end well.
kunstler | Since banks today exist in a vast matrix of
interconnected obligations — promises to pay this-and-that — fear grows
that the rot from one bank, such as SVB, will infect many other banks
that are no longer able to keep their promises about paying
this-and-that, leading to a daisy-chain of things not getting paid. For
an economy, that’s about the same as the blood ceasing to circulate in a
body.
The practice in situations such as
this (say, as in 2008-09) is for the governing authorities — who
supposedly rule over the banking world like gods — to rush to rescue
these outfits with “liquidity,” money (or representations of it) as
required to re-balance things, or, maybe provide the impression of
re-balancing until something else can be figured out. The Jupiter and
Minerva of American banking, Jay Powell and Janet Yellen, were faced
with just that sort of call for divine intervention over the weekend as
fear seeped into every nook and crevice of the money world that wealth
was flaring away in the long-feared-of conflagration out of the dumpster
banking had become.
Sunday morning, Ms. Yellen told CBS
News “bailouts, no way” but by the afternoon Mr. Powell cried “bailouts,
way,” and they had to get their story straight. They offered up
$25-billion to bail out depositors for a smoldering system that will
arguably require a trillion dollars or more of liquidity to quench the
spreading fires. One thing looks for sure: the interest rate hikes that
Mr. Powell spoke of so confidently only days ago just got stashed into
his folder labeled “Fuggeddabowdit.” So, the campaign to control
inflation must now yield to the urgent need to create a whole lot of
money to spray over those fires.
You may have noticed that the value
of your money has been slip-sliding away the past year or so. Peanut
butter at five bucks a jar, and all. The situation at hand kind of
guarantees that we’ll be seeing a whole ole lot more of that. And then
the gods of money will have lost control of the interest rate console
altogether. No more tweaking the broken knobs. More inflation will
prompt US treasury paper holders to dump what they can while there’s
still some value to retrieve. But the US has to issue more debt for all
the bail-outs and theoretical buyers of new debt will perforce bid up
the rates to keep up with inflation… and yet the US can’t possibly bear
the burden of paying higher interest on its debt. Looks like the
business model for running the USA is breaking down before our eyes.
Luckily, Cap’n “Joe Biden” is at the
helm of this steaming garbage barge. His conference room full of
geniuses is ready with the solution to our predicament: the
long-mythologized Central Bank Digital Currency — a dream-come-true for
would be tyrants… the Godzilla of unicorns whinnying atop the biggest
rainbow of all: the promise of endless magic money for everybody,
forever. All you have to do to get it is: surrender your decision-making
power over your own life. The government will amalgamate your few
remaining assets in a CBDC account, tell you exactly what to spend it
on, and shut off your little card if you show any contrary impulses.
Well, they can try it. I doubt it will
work. Instead, the government will melt down in its own rancid puddle
of insolvency, the meta-grift will grind to an end, and it will be
everyone for his / her / they self in the broke-down Palace of Chaos for
a while… until things emergently reconstruct. But I get a little ahead
of myself. It’s not even ten o’clock on Monday morning.
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