Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shapefrog 1201 days ago
They bought £5bn of assets and liabilities and bunch of admin work integrating it all. I highly doubt anyone is bothering to break out the champagne for this one - it is a rounding error at best.

This isn't 4d giga brain chess stuff, its adults walking into the room. A meaningless tiny bank with assets and liabilities broadly matched has gone under - the regulator has stepped in, phoned around the market and somebody had to take it. £1 is the best they could do - and I expect that it is going to, directly at least, be a loss of money for HSBC all the same.
1 comments
rtpg 1201 days ago
"We just got 3,000 new business accounts" feels like a good deal to me! Gotta open accounts somehow.

And yeah, 80 million pounds of profit last year. I'd buy that for a dollar

link
shapefrog 1201 days ago
SVB parent group made 1.8bn last year - they are insolvent now.

From here HSBC will spend ~10mil on just the purchase legals. Then they will spend 100s mil when inevitably the equity / bond holders of SVB parent co sue them looking to adjust up the price, and their opening ask will be £1bn+.

All 3,000 business accounts (if there were that many) were up for grabs anyway so they could have had many using a photocopier and handing out flyers at silicon roundabout without any of the hassle.

HSBC looked at their own existing liabilities - looked at how many customers of theirs were paid from SVB (and paid their HSBC mortgages with the proceeds) and did the BoE a favour, and there will be a quid pro quo for that quid they paid at some point.

link
Teandw 1201 days ago
"And yeah, 80 million pounds of profit last year. I'd buy that for a dollar"

In business, last years profits are often irrelevant. This is a good example. It's a constant treadmill of trying to stay profitable - which isn't as easy as it sounds.

More so when businesses of this size are usually built on owing large sums of money.

link