[tripletao]

Put it in bonds of whatever duration the bank chooses, but require sufficient equity that the shareholders will bear the loss and not the depositors?

Interest rates didn't increase in a single step. If the SVB had been forced to recognize their losses on a continuous MTM basis, then they'd have been forced to raise capital (or liquidate if they couldn't) by late 2022, when they were undercapitalized but not insolvent. The shareholders might still have been zeroed, but the depositors would have been fine.

In fact, the SVB designated those bonds as held-to-maturity, which allowed them to avoid reporting the loss, leaving them adequately capitalized for regulatory purposes despite being MTM insolvent. That accounting treatment doesn't change the actual economics though, so they still blew up.

[selectodude]

>Put it in bonds of whatever duration the bank chooses, but require sufficient equity that the shareholders will bear the loss and not the depositors?

But that's literally what they did. They put it in 10 year treasuries that they had to sell for 87 cents on the dollar because every "thought leader" in Silicon Valley had the same idea at the same time and triggered a bank run on their own bank.

Everybody who has deposits will get 100 percent of their money back and everybody who holds equity in SVB will be (mostly) wiped out.

[tripletao]

The depositors are getting 100% of their money now because the FDIC has guaranteed all deposits, including deposits in excess of the usual $250k limit. Any shortfall will be socialized among all participating banks. The SVB's shareholders didn't get bailed out, but their depositors absolutely just did.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

If the SVB had been forced to recognize its loss sooner, then this government bailout wouldn't have been necessary. Perhaps they'd have succeeded in raising more capital, and survived as an operating business; or perhaps their shareholders would still have been zeroed and their creditors would have seen a partial recovery. The depositors would have been fine either way though, no government bailout required.

[selectodude]

The depositors are getting 100% of their money because the fed is lending against their assets at par. [1] The FDIC can be confident that they'll be able to make everybody whole because their assets exceed their liabilities. The Fed is going to hold the assets to maturity and get paid back by the Federal Government. "Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law." is legalese, nothing more.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

[tripletao]

> The depositors are getting 100% of their money because the fed is lending against their assets at par.

And FMV is less than par, so that's an undercollateralized loan. That's another component of the subsidy to SVB depositors, and also a subsidy to shareholders of other banks that overexposed themselves to long-term debt (though too late for the SVB shareholders). There's no rational economic basis for this change in policy, and it goes against all modern central banking theory.

https://twitter.com/DanielaGabor/status/1635167154042716161

I hope you don't think holding the bond to maturity somehow means the loss isn't real? All bonds get held to maturity by someone (unless they default, but that's not the problem here). The FMV of a bond is ultimately determined by the value of those cash flows to that person; so if the FMV went down, then that should be a clue that value was fundamentally lost, regardless of who holds it.

The SVB's problem was that their HTM accounting treatment didn't model economic reality. The government is leaning into that fiction somewhat here, out of some combination of favoritism and concern for systemic risk. That doesn't make the fiction true though, and it doesn't mean the loss disappears; it just means the loss gets socialized.

[MrMan]

the assets certainly do not exceed their liabilities. stop spreading this lie!