Play bank run games, win bank run prizes.<p>Really, I don't love the regulatory arbitrage played by SVB and unhedged duration risk, nor the moral hazard created by the bailout, nor the somewhat bizarre attitude of companies holding huge $100Ms of uninsured deposits earning minimal interest (why have more than 1 months cash flow?), but really this was a bank run pure and simple. When you have to plan to lose >20% of your deposits in a single day you're not a bank anymore. That is a money market account or some other product, which doesn't lend long. It's a bit apropos that those who started the run will pay part of the price, although there's a LOT of collateral damage, and I don't doubt those who started it will ultimately turn that to their advantage since they have the deepest pockets.<p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/tech/viral-bank-run/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/tech/viral-bank-run/index.htm...</a><p>BTW you can blame the Fed for low interest rates, but it's the yield curve inversion and long rates which caused the liquidity/solvency problem not the short term rate hikes (not raising short rates would increase inflation expectations and push 10y rates even higher!). And there is no hard line between solvency and liquidity, because it all has to do with time scale. If I say you have to give me $1000 in the next 3 seconds or I take your car, you can't do it because you can't reach your wallet fast enough.
As an independent developer (misv) working on my projects part time out of necessity, I look forward to a tech market where well funded businesses give away their software for free until they establish a monopoly mostly disappear. I don’t think this will do it, but it helps make me think they won’t have spigots of easy money flowing in to their accounts.
Startup valuations had gotten too rich.<p>Now they're coming down to more reasonable levels, in fits and starts.<p>VCs and their LPs don't want the write-offs. They're painful.<p>But ultimately, I think the write-offs will prove healthy.
Can’t be the only one who thinks this is possibly a ploy by VC bros to make Fed blink on interest rate hikes. Only they could have triggered such a bank run and only SVB.
<i>“There are enough zombie companies with frothy valuations that need restructuring, price discovery and of course re-tooling of their business models to a world of tighter credit, subdued revenue and higher rates,”</i><p>SVB has nothing to do with that problem. It's about higher interest rates. The end of free money for stupid stuff. Now companies have to make money.<p>So who's going down? TSLA, UBER, and RBLX already made it to the public markets; they're out of the VC sector. Those are the biggest ones. What are the remaining big money-losers still owned by VCs?
The whole idea of venture capital comes from the broken taxation model. The people who actually produce things, you know doing the work and have knowledge how to do something are burdened with heavy taxation, because years ago, when companies had high headcount, it was a way to make companies pay taxes. Now that everything gets offshored, including work, that model doesn't work anymore, but politicians for known reasons (corruption) don't want to change that, so to plug the tax gap, they increase taxes on labour and continue the squeeze, while not touching the big companies and the rich.
This has created a situation, where educated and hardworking people can't amass enough capital to start their own business and their only way to get their idea running is to beg venture capitalists for money in exchange for a slice of their business or banks for a loan.<p>This has created a divide and widens the inequality gap on a scale not seen before in our lifetimes.<p>The rich get extremely rich, because they don't pay the same taxes as labour and they have so much money they own politicians and can make sure the status quo never changes.<p>This has caused things like "quiet quitting", because people no longer see work is worth anything anymore if you can't progress your life in any meaningful way.<p>All ladders to wealth and fulfilment that our parents and grandparents had have been destroyed.
Pardon my ignorance, but why would VC backed companies not have CFOs and general VC advice against putting all or even a majority of their funds in a single bank? Why would they not split it among several mid to large sized banks?<p>[Edited for typo]
Good. All those 0% interest leveraged VC funds can go burn in a fire. They pumped stupid money into companies and inflated valuations. Now that things are getting saner with real interest rates above 0 and getting higher sanity will reign again in the markets.
Investing in startups that make no profit is a risky business. The volume of money that's poured into tech startups over the last 10 years has been insane, anything that breathed was having money showered on it. It's as if risk control was just thrown out of the window.
I wonder how this will play out for today's mid stage startups. Do they acknowledge their prior rounds as being inflated? Do they try to say the course and double again? Their burn rates will likely not be easy to cut down in the short run.
I'm waiting for hedge funds to start blowing up from all of these multi-sigma moves in what should be relatively stable investments. I'm also waiting for Softbank to implode but somehow they're still around.
But why were these companies holding so much money in an uninsured account? I heard something mentioned about SVB incentivizing them somehow? I can't understand why these companies didn't put the money in short term treasuries instead of keeping the money uninsured. If they needed short term liquidity it would not be a problem. Did SVB have an obligation to give them floating interest rate without properly adjusting for the risk? It's not possible that all these companies didn't expect a yield curve inversion as it was obvious it would happen.
I mean considering that many expected venture backed startups to bring us through this upcoming recession and be the silver lining, SV’s problems seem more than a little problematic.<p><a href="https://medium.com/prime-movers-lab/venture-backed-startups-will-lead-us-out-of-a-recession-7fa61f1f397" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/prime-movers-lab/venture-backed-startups-...</a>
It simply wasnt booked, some might say "they" needed an excuse to justify markdowns. So many assets are not marked to market which gives outsiders the false impression.
why are we all acting as if its impossible to have a bank that DOESNT spend all the depositors money on god knows what positions?<p>imagine if you will, some kind of place you could deposit your money, and they WOULDNT get to gamble with it, outside of with consent.<p>imagine the depositor being able to say "i wish to allow the depositors to be used for whatever the bank pleases", or "i wish to not participate in this"