SVB's fall happened in less than 48 hours and nobody actually thought they'd fail until they did - with FRB, people took the risk seriously because of the precedent.
SVB's liquidity problems were known for months because they were a function of interest rates and failure to manage interest rate risk on their part - besides, the CEO was on the board of the SF Fed. It's not like they weren't in communication with other banks about what's going on with the markets and the Fed itself.
But SVB was solvent and basically fine long-term. If VCs hadn't panicked at herd-mentality stampeded $40,000,000,000 out of the bank in a day, forcing it to sell 10 year treasuries at depressed market rates, it would have been fine.
SVB isn't like the 2008 banks that held mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be full of people who lied about their income and assets and would never get repaid. SVB had treasuries that absolutely would have been repaid.
SVB was trying to do an equity raise to solve their short-term liquidity issues. If they'd done so quietly, and gotten money from a big institution before going public, they'd probably have been fine. Instead, the public equity raise spooked people, caused a bank run, and made their liquidity go from "risky" to broken.
> If VCs hadn't panicked at herd-mentality stampeded $40,000,000,000 out of the bank in a day, forcing it to sell 10 year treasuries at depressed market rates, it would have been fine.
Is there any (publicly viewable) analysis of the extent to which this is - or isn't - true?
It certainly would have survived longer, and for all I know maybe they would have been fine for the 6-7 (iirc) years remaining on those 10yr assets.
But at the same time, with money no longer as cheap as it had been for a long time, it's likely that had they not had the immediate run they would have seen money gradually leaving the bank as less new money gets put into VC and as their startup customers gradually spent down their investment lump sums without raising any new money. Would that gradual trickle out have been strong enough to push them under in the following months or years even without a bank run?
The liquidity problems caused the flight - why else would they take a $1.8b haircut on a securities portfolio and then try a bone-headed cap raise to cover the difference?
However, just because the link can be drawn, doesn’t mean it was the ultimate underlying cause. If the depositors weren’t so heavily coordinated and concentrated together, there’s no way the money would have come out that fast, if at all. Regardless of the loss on the bond sale.
