The situation at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is not particularly complicated. In short, they borrowed short and invested long, mismanaged their liquidity, and caused their own demise. The specific steps were as follows: low-interest deposit-taking, overzealous investment in Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), short-term liquidity gaps, forced selling of assets, and market panic.
Low-interest deposit-taking: Between 2020 and 2021, due to the Federal Reserve's extended period of 0% interest rates, there was a huge financing boom in the tech industry, with a significant portion of cash flowing into SVB. SVB's deposit liabilities surged from $61.8 billion at the end of 2019 to $189.2 billion at the end of 2021, with interest rates on this portion of deposits only around 0.25%.
Overzealous investment in MBS: With so much low-interest money, SVB naturally engaged in carry trade. Typically, banks focus on lending, but SVB invested a large portion of its funds in MBS. Their financial statements showed they held $13.8 billion of MBS at the end of 2019, which had grown to $98.2 billion by the end of 2021. In other words, over 65% of the deposits they took in went towards buying MBS.
Short-term liquidity gap: Normally, investing in MBS is not a problem because they can be redeemed at maturity. But SVB's problem was that it held too many MBS and had too few short-term liquid assets. In today's high-interest rate environment, tech companies are struggling to survive and are gradually withdrawing money from their deposits, causing SVB's liquidity pressures to soar.
Forced selling of assets: To solve the liquidity problem, management chose the cheapest option, which was to sell their MBS holdings. But now, market interest rates had increased from nearly 0 to 5% for 2-year Treasury bonds, and asset prices had fallen significantly in sync. Selling $21 billion of assets resulted in an $1.8 billion loss.
Market panic: For SVB, the $1.8 billion loss was still manageable because their shareholder equity was $16 billion. However, the problem was with the $100 billion of MBS that they had not yet sold. If there was a run on the bank, this could result in a potential loss of $15 billion, causing SVB to go bankrupt. Therefore, there was a great deal of panic in the market, causing the stock price to plummet by 60% in a single day.
SVB has now declared bankruptcy, and the US government has intervened. It is being managed by a specialized institution.
When a bank of this size collapses, there are bound to be chain reactions. The institutions known to be affected include Circle. For those who invest in stocks, they may not have heard of it, but those who invest in cryptocurrencies certainly have, as the most famous stablecoin, USDC, is issued by Circle. The total amount is $40 billion, and in today's announcement, they revealed that $3.3 billion of their assets were stuck in SVB, accounting for almost 8%.
This means that those who invest in cryptocurrencies suddenly find that their $100 has shrunk to $92. To say that it's a seismic event is not an exaggeration.
There are likely dozens of institutions of a similar scale to Circle that are also trapped, but for various reasons, they are not disclosing their situation. We'll have to wait and see when they come forward.
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