[dan-robertson]

One point is that hsbc might not be acquiring all of the liabilities – they might mostly get customer deposits but not eg some unsecured loan or bond issue. Regulators could be ok with such an outcome because a bunch of businesses losing bank deposits may be seen as worse than a single company defaulting on its debt.

Another is that SVB UK could be solvent so long as they don’t have to sell assets at a loss. Being part of hsbc stops the assets needing to be sold at a loss. And a separate thing is that even if the assets net liabilities are negative, the customer relationships could be valuable enough to hsbc to counteract that. Hsbc get a load of growing companies whom they can try sell banking services to. That assumes customers don’t all flee, but I don’t think they would because there isn’t a particular reason to fear hsbc in the way there was for SVB.

I don’t know what the commenter meant about JPM printing money.

[shapefrog]

> Being part of hsbc stops the assets needing to be sold at a loss

Borrowing in the maket at 5% so you can keep the bonds paying 1% for the next 10 years might not seem like a "loss" but it is a loss.

[dan-robertson]

For sure that’s a reasonable possibility. But even if this in particular is -ve, I think it could still be a good deal for hsbc for the reasons given above and below.