The connections between Gavin, his lovely wife Jennifer, and SVB. She did not sit on the board. Why bother with such a pedestrian role, when she could just coo in her husband’s ear and, voila, instant cash for her nonprofit.
TEN KEY FACTS: UNDERSTANDING THE SILICON VALLEY BANK NEWSOM INC SCANDAL:
SVB gave a $100,000 donation to the Newsom nonprofit, California Partners Project, in 2021.
The $100,000 donation was "behested,” meaning it was solicited by the governor himself, Gavin Newsom, and the disclosure was forced by state ethics relations on state websites.
The SVB investment banking president, John China, is a founding director at the Newsom nonprofit, California Partners Project.
The Newsom nonprofit was founded in 2020 to expressly push Jennifer Siebel Newsom's public policy agenda at the Office of First Partner.
Gavin Newsom established The Office of First Partner as a taxpayer funded subdivision of the Office of Governor so Jennifer Siebel Newsom could push her public policy issues.
Taxpayers pay for nine staffers — $1 million per year for the Office of First Partner.
The Newsom's first victory in tandem with their nonprofit, California Partners Project, was legislation which mandated gender quotas on corporate boards... the legislation was ruled discriminatory and tossed out by California courts after litigation by Judicial Watch.
The investment banking arm of SVB helped finance THREE of the governor's private businesses!!
In 2018, Newsom said he would NOT sell his private businesses and called them "my babies, my life, my family... I can't sell them."
However, Newsom did sell interests in his businesses and presumably took home cash after SVB stepped in. All of this trading among insiders, friends, family, and acquittances needs scrutiny by regulators.
What was so valuable about Newsom's private businesses (wineries) versus the many other wineries across the state of California?
In 2008. the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act temporarily raised the limit of FDIC insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 per depositor, per institution. This increase was made permanent by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. These were acts of Congress. How can President Biden change the $250,000 maximum to an unlimited amount?
Pointing to the use of a communication app and suggesting that as the primary reason for the run on the bank is side-stepping the concerns raised by the bank's investment strategy. And, it does not direct any focus to the investment strategies of those heavily invested in that bank.
Bottom line is humans can't be trusted with smart choices 100% of the time. Hence prudent regulations are required. Trump's shortsighted rollback of some of those safeguards allowed for irresponsible decisions to be made. Now yet again the responsible pay for the consequences of the irresponsible. If you don't want regulation be prepared to face the consequences of stupidity.
Of course they do. What do you think regulatory capture is? Change that with our votes? We are awash in corruption and ineptitude. Those we have elected have escaped accountability for so long they are completely emboldened. At this point I would not be surprised if Hunter Biden were an investor, lender, borrower, customer and on the board of SVB.
Even if true it does not validate your statement regarding g humans and their need for regulation, by other humans. The moral of the Roman empire is that morality cannot be legislated. While what SVB leadership did was abhorrent the really immoral thing is the non-bailout bailout as it essentially rewarded bad behavior. Plus existing rules/laws were not followed and it appears the SF Fed was lax.
There's no perfect answer here as it's obvious humans cannot regulate themselves that's why we have roles in a civilized society. Regulators have the role of regulating, is it perfect? Not in the least but it is a deterrent.
Which are responsible for SVB? Or was it just stupidity of management? Like no risk officer for 9 months? Obvious imbalance in assets versus likely demand. I’m not sure any regulation or lack is responsible.
Yes, agree very much, but we can't cherry pick what contributed. All of it contributed. Rollbacks gave banks more free rein, but they are ultimately responsible for reckless behavior. Kind of like what happens when you buy your teenager a brand new car or allow them to stay home alone on a weekend you're away. You hope they act responsibly, but...
Possibly, though I suspect the lack of some or other reg didn't do these fools in. I'd have to be a whole lot more conversant with the process by which bank risk is managed in fact by knowledgeable people and what additional latitude (if that is the right word) these regionals got with the rollback.
I think the obvious things are no risk professional in place at the beginning - the start of inflation and the uptick in Fed rates together with the greed in seeking higher returns for the flood of new deposits - brought on by the insane "zero interest rate" Fed policy for decades. I'd say reg rollback is likely a pale companion to those items. Occam's Razor it seems applies here. And it seems the Fed is squarely at the center of this: Created zero interest rate free only, failed, though the SF Fed Bank to properly supervise, and now the lender of last resort to the depositors (to the tune of hundreds of millions for single depositors!!!).
1) Risk management was lax with SVB. SVB did not appropriately plan liquidity in the event of interest rate increases, thus ran out of cash.
2) I disagree on the bailout of deposits over the $250,000 FDIC insured limit. That limit and risk is well advertised. If you went above the known limit, my sympathy is limited. If 10 additional banks fail, is the government going to cover all deposits above $250k in those banks as well? If 100 banks fail? It’s a bad precedent and rewards irresponsible behavior.
3) Top executives from SVB cashed out a lot of their SVB stock a month or so before the run on the bank. Is that just a coincidence? It gives the appearance they knew things were going badly.
You mentioned possibly 'slowing down" the speed of information on platforms like Twitter but that same argument was used by governments to suppress accurate and dissenting opinions on Covid-19. If distrust can cause irrational bank runs, then banks should just be held to higher standards of ethical behavior when holding our deposits.
Mr Burgis would do well to familiarize himself with studies of the difference between survivors and fatal casualties in sudden disasters situations such as plane crashes and ferry capsizing and planes flying into buildings....the one single identifying factor in survivors is their instinct to react and move immediately rather than "sheltering in place" waiting for Godot to save them. When the situation and information changes, it may be very much the correct thing to change what you've been doing.
It sounds as though Mr. Burgis is sitting on a mountain someplace with his money tucked under his mattress and with little or not experience with the actual way some of his suggested solutions work in the real world. The reality is that when you are involved in a financial situation about which you have less than complete information when getting involved, there is always a risk that as information becomes more available or changes, you will discover your risk of loss is much higher than originally contemplated and of a much larger amount. Sometimes, "panic" and "stampede" ARE the optimal solutions. Indeed, if they were not sometimes and possibly often the correct action at the individual level, they would not likely have evolved to be such a universal part of humanity. The financial situation at SVB had changed very much for the worst and what it sounds like Mr. Burgis would have liked to happen is that everyone simply kept pretending the Emperor was fully clothed. As to such mechanisms for "slowing" crowd responses (ostensibly to give people time to change their minds concerning their risk/loss analysis - he needs to take a much closer look at how "circuit breaker stop-trading rules" actually work in real life. Any competent trader in financial markets would explain that as prices fall towards so-called "circuit breaker" levels, traders and investors with positions are faced with the possibility of becoming locked-in during the stop-trading periods with the risk that the situation will worsen or that more damaging information will emerge and they will be unable to exit until trading resumes with the damaging situation being MORE widely known and facing a more concentrated and damaging selling wave than if they had simply exited before the circuit breakers were activated. In real life, as prices move closer and closer to circuit breaker price levels, the result is an ACCELERATION toward that price level, NOT a reduction of the pressure in that direction. In a world in which information dispersion is accelerated, one should NOT usually slow their response but rather the opposite - as well as trying to get information more quickly than competitors of course.
... "Sometimes, 'panic' and 'stampede' ARE the optimal solutions. Indeed, if they were not sometimes and possibly often the correct action at the individual level, they would not likely have evolved to be such a universal part of humanity."
On the contrary, the best survival chances are with those who can somehow _avoid_ and control a, yes, "natural", impulse to panic. In a panicked state, one loses the capacity to think clearly and one's reactions can easily contribute to greater, not lesser, danger and risk. So, from an evolutionary biology perspective, "panic" is not selected for in natural selection's work.. Those less inclined to panic have a greater likelihood to survive and, therefore, to reproduce.
The simple fact that we, this highly-evolved species, still know so much in tendencies to panic doesn't invalidate natural selection or "prove" that panic must be a positive survival trait. Any and all rudimentary traits shall survive to the extent that their manifestations are not _so_ deliterious as to be positively life-threatening--for it's only then that they're de-selected evolutionarily (and this is a generational-time-scale phenomenon, not a matter of weeks, months, years or decades). So there's room for traits which are anything from neutral to somewhat but not regularly fatal being passed down. (And all these factors are "environment specific". That is, yesterday's positive survival traits can gradually become negative if environment's conditions change and make them so. This is the most basic Darwinian evolutionary biology theory.) What does have a sound basis in evolution is the natural tendency to sense danger and the natural autonomic physiology which springs from it: widened pupils to enhance vision, a rush of adrenaline (in mammals) lending instant muscle power for flight or fight instincts. All of "panic"'s attendant physiological responses have some positive survival value--except paralyzing fear which also frequently accompanies panic.
By insuring ALL deposits the Biden administration panicked. Ironically by panicking , the administration engaged in the kind of moral hazard that undermines the very belief in a sound banking system,. According to the Biden Administration its much more important to underwrite your donor constituency with political determinations than engage in sound policy. The bank run as political and moral bankruptcy was not addressed in this article which is myopic.
Yes, technically, the Fed guaranteeing deposits over and above the insured limit of$250k is not a bailout of SVB. It is a tax-payer funded bailout of individuals and companies who were too lazy or ignorant to manage their cash balances at SVB to avoid this risk. The end result is the same: you can be careless with your money or other people’s money but as long as you’re connected, it’s the rest of the American taxpayers that are slipped the bill to pay
Simple. SVB borrowed on a short term basis and invested on a long term basis, and then came the squeeze. Who on earth would have predicted their long term bond values would go down when rates rose? Whodathunk?
1. We already have a similar brake to keep stock balanced. We stop trading.
2. The money, by and large, is there. But because they don't hold it in cash, it has to be liquidated. What got destroyed was the banks 'good faith' value, not their deposit value.
Excuse me a moment: aren't some of us forgetting something when it comes to blaming the SVB failure on the bank's failure to cope with the sudden drop in bond-holdings' value due to one or more Fed increases in the basic intererst rate?
_All_ banks faced this "problem" of recently less-valuable bond portfolios. So what? They didn't all fold like a house of cards.
What distinguishes SVB--apart from its remarkably stupid management and board of directors generally--is that the banks' business was very heavily focused on _"Tech Start-Up"_ lending --and it is hardly a secret that this sector is extremely susceptible to sudden and wild swings-- it's sort of in its "DNA". Tech-Start-Ups are the Cloud Cuckoo land of investment and banking--and that is why they are usually financed by deep-pocketed venture-capitalists and hedge-funds, not consumer banks holding many thousands of ordinary families' financial affairs.
Had SVB spent more time diversifying its lending portfolio's _industry_ profile than its employees' racial, sexual or ethic diversity, the slump in tech start-ups should not have doomed it as it did.
This is truly a case of hubris à la "Long Term Capital Mangement, Inc." --- when "genius" went "nuts".
In this world, if you don't move quickly, you get run over. That's all.
The connections between Gavin, his lovely wife Jennifer, and SVB. She did not sit on the board. Why bother with such a pedestrian role, when she could just coo in her husband’s ear and, voila, instant cash for her nonprofit.
https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-bank-coverup-and
In a nutshell:
TEN KEY FACTS: UNDERSTANDING THE SILICON VALLEY BANK NEWSOM INC SCANDAL:
SVB gave a $100,000 donation to the Newsom nonprofit, California Partners Project, in 2021.
The $100,000 donation was "behested,” meaning it was solicited by the governor himself, Gavin Newsom, and the disclosure was forced by state ethics relations on state websites.
The SVB investment banking president, John China, is a founding director at the Newsom nonprofit, California Partners Project.
The Newsom nonprofit was founded in 2020 to expressly push Jennifer Siebel Newsom's public policy agenda at the Office of First Partner.
Gavin Newsom established The Office of First Partner as a taxpayer funded subdivision of the Office of Governor so Jennifer Siebel Newsom could push her public policy issues.
Taxpayers pay for nine staffers — $1 million per year for the Office of First Partner.
The Newsom's first victory in tandem with their nonprofit, California Partners Project, was legislation which mandated gender quotas on corporate boards... the legislation was ruled discriminatory and tossed out by California courts after litigation by Judicial Watch.
The investment banking arm of SVB helped finance THREE of the governor's private businesses!!
In 2018, Newsom said he would NOT sell his private businesses and called them "my babies, my life, my family... I can't sell them."
However, Newsom did sell interests in his businesses and presumably took home cash after SVB stepped in. All of this trading among insiders, friends, family, and acquittances needs scrutiny by regulators.
What was so valuable about Newsom's private businesses (wineries) versus the many other wineries across the state of California?
In 2008. the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act temporarily raised the limit of FDIC insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 per depositor, per institution. This increase was made permanent by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. These were acts of Congress. How can President Biden change the $250,000 maximum to an unlimited amount?
I think your point is quite right and the short answer is, "He can't." Eventually, his handlers shall explain this to him.
Pointing to the use of a communication app and suggesting that as the primary reason for the run on the bank is side-stepping the concerns raised by the bank's investment strategy. And, it does not direct any focus to the investment strategies of those heavily invested in that bank.
"this is very different from “bailing out” Silicon Valley Bank, by the way—it simply means that depositors won’t lose their money". hahahhahaha
Bottom line is humans can't be trusted with smart choices 100% of the time. Hence prudent regulations are required. Trump's shortsighted rollback of some of those safeguards allowed for irresponsible decisions to be made. Now yet again the responsible pay for the consequences of the irresponsible. If you don't want regulation be prepared to face the consequences of stupidity.
That is a tautology. You say humans need regulating because they aren't always right but who do you think creates the regulations?
People who create regulations don't have an incentive to profit from them. If there's corruption with regulations we change that with our votes.
Of course they do. What do you think regulatory capture is? Change that with our votes? We are awash in corruption and ineptitude. Those we have elected have escaped accountability for so long they are completely emboldened. At this point I would not be surprised if Hunter Biden were an investor, lender, borrower, customer and on the board of SVB.
If the guardrails were not removed by Trump SVB would not have been able to make risky investments without having enough collateral to do so.
Even if true it does not validate your statement regarding g humans and their need for regulation, by other humans. The moral of the Roman empire is that morality cannot be legislated. While what SVB leadership did was abhorrent the really immoral thing is the non-bailout bailout as it essentially rewarded bad behavior. Plus existing rules/laws were not followed and it appears the SF Fed was lax.
There's no perfect answer here as it's obvious humans cannot regulate themselves that's why we have roles in a civilized society. Regulators have the role of regulating, is it perfect? Not in the least but it is a deterrent.
Oh no! I will.miss you! 😘
Name one such Trump “rollback” that caused this.
May 2018: President Donald Trump signed the biggest rollback of bank regulations since the global financial crisis into law Thursday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/trump-signs-bank-bill-rolling-back-some-dodd-frank-regulations.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2018/11/01/the-finance-202-trump-era-rollback-of-dodd-frank-leaps-forward/5bd9e0291b326b37e00b5a51/
Which are responsible for SVB? Or was it just stupidity of management? Like no risk officer for 9 months? Obvious imbalance in assets versus likely demand. I’m not sure any regulation or lack is responsible.
Yes, agree very much, but we can't cherry pick what contributed. All of it contributed. Rollbacks gave banks more free rein, but they are ultimately responsible for reckless behavior. Kind of like what happens when you buy your teenager a brand new car or allow them to stay home alone on a weekend you're away. You hope they act responsibly, but...
Possibly, though I suspect the lack of some or other reg didn't do these fools in. I'd have to be a whole lot more conversant with the process by which bank risk is managed in fact by knowledgeable people and what additional latitude (if that is the right word) these regionals got with the rollback.
I think the obvious things are no risk professional in place at the beginning - the start of inflation and the uptick in Fed rates together with the greed in seeking higher returns for the flood of new deposits - brought on by the insane "zero interest rate" Fed policy for decades. I'd say reg rollback is likely a pale companion to those items. Occam's Razor it seems applies here. And it seems the Fed is squarely at the center of this: Created zero interest rate free only, failed, though the SF Fed Bank to properly supervise, and now the lender of last resort to the depositors (to the tune of hundreds of millions for single depositors!!!).
Some good analyses out there. A bit over my head.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
A few observations:
1) Risk management was lax with SVB. SVB did not appropriately plan liquidity in the event of interest rate increases, thus ran out of cash.
2) I disagree on the bailout of deposits over the $250,000 FDIC insured limit. That limit and risk is well advertised. If you went above the known limit, my sympathy is limited. If 10 additional banks fail, is the government going to cover all deposits above $250k in those banks as well? If 100 banks fail? It’s a bad precedent and rewards irresponsible behavior.
3) Top executives from SVB cashed out a lot of their SVB stock a month or so before the run on the bank. Is that just a coincidence? It gives the appearance they knew things were going badly.
You mentioned possibly 'slowing down" the speed of information on platforms like Twitter but that same argument was used by governments to suppress accurate and dissenting opinions on Covid-19. If distrust can cause irrational bank runs, then banks should just be held to higher standards of ethical behavior when holding our deposits.
Mr Burgis would do well to familiarize himself with studies of the difference between survivors and fatal casualties in sudden disasters situations such as plane crashes and ferry capsizing and planes flying into buildings....the one single identifying factor in survivors is their instinct to react and move immediately rather than "sheltering in place" waiting for Godot to save them. When the situation and information changes, it may be very much the correct thing to change what you've been doing.
It sounds as though Mr. Burgis is sitting on a mountain someplace with his money tucked under his mattress and with little or not experience with the actual way some of his suggested solutions work in the real world. The reality is that when you are involved in a financial situation about which you have less than complete information when getting involved, there is always a risk that as information becomes more available or changes, you will discover your risk of loss is much higher than originally contemplated and of a much larger amount. Sometimes, "panic" and "stampede" ARE the optimal solutions. Indeed, if they were not sometimes and possibly often the correct action at the individual level, they would not likely have evolved to be such a universal part of humanity. The financial situation at SVB had changed very much for the worst and what it sounds like Mr. Burgis would have liked to happen is that everyone simply kept pretending the Emperor was fully clothed. As to such mechanisms for "slowing" crowd responses (ostensibly to give people time to change their minds concerning their risk/loss analysis - he needs to take a much closer look at how "circuit breaker stop-trading rules" actually work in real life. Any competent trader in financial markets would explain that as prices fall towards so-called "circuit breaker" levels, traders and investors with positions are faced with the possibility of becoming locked-in during the stop-trading periods with the risk that the situation will worsen or that more damaging information will emerge and they will be unable to exit until trading resumes with the damaging situation being MORE widely known and facing a more concentrated and damaging selling wave than if they had simply exited before the circuit breakers were activated. In real life, as prices move closer and closer to circuit breaker price levels, the result is an ACCELERATION toward that price level, NOT a reduction of the pressure in that direction. In a world in which information dispersion is accelerated, one should NOT usually slow their response but rather the opposite - as well as trying to get information more quickly than competitors of course.
... "Sometimes, 'panic' and 'stampede' ARE the optimal solutions. Indeed, if they were not sometimes and possibly often the correct action at the individual level, they would not likely have evolved to be such a universal part of humanity."
On the contrary, the best survival chances are with those who can somehow _avoid_ and control a, yes, "natural", impulse to panic. In a panicked state, one loses the capacity to think clearly and one's reactions can easily contribute to greater, not lesser, danger and risk. So, from an evolutionary biology perspective, "panic" is not selected for in natural selection's work.. Those less inclined to panic have a greater likelihood to survive and, therefore, to reproduce.
The simple fact that we, this highly-evolved species, still know so much in tendencies to panic doesn't invalidate natural selection or "prove" that panic must be a positive survival trait. Any and all rudimentary traits shall survive to the extent that their manifestations are not _so_ deliterious as to be positively life-threatening--for it's only then that they're de-selected evolutionarily (and this is a generational-time-scale phenomenon, not a matter of weeks, months, years or decades). So there's room for traits which are anything from neutral to somewhat but not regularly fatal being passed down. (And all these factors are "environment specific". That is, yesterday's positive survival traits can gradually become negative if environment's conditions change and make them so. This is the most basic Darwinian evolutionary biology theory.) What does have a sound basis in evolution is the natural tendency to sense danger and the natural autonomic physiology which springs from it: widened pupils to enhance vision, a rush of adrenaline (in mammals) lending instant muscle power for flight or fight instincts. All of "panic"'s attendant physiological responses have some positive survival value--except paralyzing fear which also frequently accompanies panic.
Interesting article in the WSJ by SVB's former CEO explaining its demise.
By insuring ALL deposits the Biden administration panicked. Ironically by panicking , the administration engaged in the kind of moral hazard that undermines the very belief in a sound banking system,. According to the Biden Administration its much more important to underwrite your donor constituency with political determinations than engage in sound policy. The bank run as political and moral bankruptcy was not addressed in this article which is myopic.
Similar to the way it undermined confidence in the health business. Or the transportation industry. Or secure borders.
Yes, technically, the Fed guaranteeing deposits over and above the insured limit of$250k is not a bailout of SVB. It is a tax-payer funded bailout of individuals and companies who were too lazy or ignorant to manage their cash balances at SVB to avoid this risk. The end result is the same: you can be careless with your money or other people’s money but as long as you’re connected, it’s the rest of the American taxpayers that are slipped the bill to pay
Simple. SVB borrowed on a short term basis and invested on a long term basis, and then came the squeeze. Who on earth would have predicted their long term bond values would go down when rates rose? Whodathunk?
Two thoughts.
1. We already have a similar brake to keep stock balanced. We stop trading.
2. The money, by and large, is there. But because they don't hold it in cash, it has to be liquidated. What got destroyed was the banks 'good faith' value, not their deposit value.
Excuse me a moment: aren't some of us forgetting something when it comes to blaming the SVB failure on the bank's failure to cope with the sudden drop in bond-holdings' value due to one or more Fed increases in the basic intererst rate?
_All_ banks faced this "problem" of recently less-valuable bond portfolios. So what? They didn't all fold like a house of cards.
What distinguishes SVB--apart from its remarkably stupid management and board of directors generally--is that the banks' business was very heavily focused on _"Tech Start-Up"_ lending --and it is hardly a secret that this sector is extremely susceptible to sudden and wild swings-- it's sort of in its "DNA". Tech-Start-Ups are the Cloud Cuckoo land of investment and banking--and that is why they are usually financed by deep-pocketed venture-capitalists and hedge-funds, not consumer banks holding many thousands of ordinary families' financial affairs.
Had SVB spent more time diversifying its lending portfolio's _industry_ profile than its employees' racial, sexual or ethic diversity, the slump in tech start-ups should not have doomed it as it did.
This is truly a case of hubris à la "Long Term Capital Mangement, Inc." --- when "genius" went "nuts".