Silicon Valley Bailout

A number of things went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank over the last days, weeks and years, there were huge failures of risk management. The risk manager would have some tough questions to answer, except that it appears that they didn’t have a risk manager on staff for almost nine months of the last year. There were issues tied to the different regulations applied to community banks when compared to national banks in the United States. There were investment decisions that were made that are difficult to understand, and the final stroke was a capital raise attempt that had next no chance of succeeding. You can’t raise capital from investors on the same day that you announce a close to two-billion-dollar hole in your balance sheet and the equity is tanking in value. Anyhow, let’s go over the issues at Silicon Valley Bank, try and understand how banks work, look at the latest news (at date of publication), and try to imagine how things might work out going forward.

Bank Runs! What's Going On?

Banks don’t fail very often, and bank runs appear to be mostly a thing of the past. The last bank failure in the United States happened in 2020 when a small bank in Kansas failed. That two-year streak was broken this Wednesday with the failure of the crypto focused bank Silvergate, and on Friday with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.