Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Ha I thought the same thing

And of course the prisons are full of parents, so...

Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging. AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible.

— Gaurav Munjal (@gauravmunjal) January 21, 2023

The builders who survive (aka thrive) over the next several years will be those who are fundamentally self actualizing on some core vector via what they’re building.

Too hard otherwise.

— Geoff Lewis (@GeoffLewisOrg) March 8, 2023

It says so much.

"Bedrock is a technology investment firm in search of narrative violations."

what happened to Silicon Valley Bank???

it almost seems like an old fashioned bank run - lots of companies pulling their deposits

I think it was exactly an old-fashioned bank run.

what was the cause of it though?

Per SF Chronicle:

SVB lost $1.8 billion in the sale of U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities in which it had invested, thanks to rising interest rates, TechCrunch reported. On top of that, the bank was facing shrinking deposits as the tech industry struggled.

Amid these concerns, the company announced it would sell $1.25 billion of its common stock to investors, $500 million of depositary shares and, separately, $500 million of common stock to private equity firm General Atlantic. After the announcement, shares in SVB plummeted nearly 70% before trading was halted before the opening bell on the Nasdaq, the Associated Press Reported. Clients began pulling out their money, leading to a run on the bank.

But I'm sure there's more BS at work too.

one of my very first bookkeeping clients 20 years ago had an account there, and they would mail the checks they received from customers to the bank for the bank to deposit ... I thought that was kinda dumb tbh.

SVB plummeted nearly 70% before trading was halted

So much for the 'free market'... so many of these companies welcome regulation-free laissez-faire markets, and yet still the paternal stock markets will swoop in and halt trading before things get out of hand

I say let 'em sink to the bottom

the money's not here. your money's in joe’s apes, right next to your apes. and in the full self driving cybertruck, and mrs. macklin's metaverse, and, and a hundred other memecoins pic.twitter.com/Iqo9JEyYQx

— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) March 10, 2023

I mean in the case of banks it’s bc the FDIC steps in to liquidate the bank. This was the bottom.

Unexpected fallout!

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/silicon-valley-bank-wine-california-17831927.php

yeah exactly, it sounds like SVB is going to be allowed to fail and other than the FDIC insuring retail customers up to $250k, this liquidation is pretty much the definition of a free market.

if you have stock in SVB the value of that has been zero'd out as of today, notwithstanding what it says on your brokerage page. maybe it'll go up if the FDIC helps find a buyer for this pig.

There is a zero perfect chance Silicon Valley Bank fails, despite the current bank run.

There is no world where the US Gov let’s a top 20 bank fail to honor deposits.

— Nick Huber (@sweatystartup) March 9, 2023

good and sober piece on how SVB implosion happened (and why it was self-inflicted since the Fed has been telegraphing it’s moves for a long time…)https://t.co/145RjXPbJa

— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) March 10, 2023

that tweet aged well xp

matt levine seems to think theres a good chance another bank will buy it and make its customers whole since it still does have a lot of assets theyre just in illiquid bonds

and the government is hard at work

I’m working with my CA colleagues to address the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. We must make sure all deposits exceeding the FDIC $250k limit are honored. Banking is about confidence. If depositors lose confidence on the safety of their deposits over 250k then we are in trouble.

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) March 10, 2023

heres the levine piece https://archive.ph/pe8MY

thank you sir, looking out for the wealthiest underinsured people, and making sure they get more free insurance.

pic.twitter.com/YW1XEPEzVv

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) March 10, 2023

the bonds are actually very liquid since they're treasuries xp

i mean you cant pay them out to the people lining up to get their money

if i had my emergency fund in one of those weird little fintech startup banks people use for an extra $35.17 a year in interest i’d be moving it to marcus right about now, even if it was FDIC insured.

Yeah those things seem super sketchy

they could sell it all the treasuries at once, but it would just mean that people wouldn't get all their money since i'm presuming they own less in bonds than they have obligations to their depositors/creditors... aka they're insolvent xp

xp i have some cash in betterment earning 4%, i am OK with reaping the whirlwind for now. i dunno if i'd move it to marcus per se since goldman lost something like $2b on their retail banking division last year and the future is uncertain. (not saying that you'd lose your money, just that i dunno goldman might sell marcus or something and you might end up banking with like regional bank of the ozarks?) ally bank might be a better destination with less headache long term.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/27/why-goldmans-marcus-project-failed-and-what-it-means-for-ceo-solomon.html

i would worry about goldman selling marcus if it happened. right now they seem like the best best for an emergency fund that pays meaningful interest.

bit worried we're going to find out on monday that ADP or one of the other major payroll providers was with SVB.

seriously doubt that for ADP

I don’t know why everyone doesn’t bank with a credit union, seems like a no-brainer

I mean I suppose startups probably can’t, but human beings.

xxp at least one payroll provider lost the money they had custody of yesterday

Effective immediately & going forward, Rippling payroll runs will process through JPMC. However, pay runs in flight for today out of SVB have not been paid. The latest we heard from SVB this morning was that this was an operational delay and funds will be released.

— Parker Conrad (@parkerconrad) March 10, 2023

My post to our employees. This is dumpster fire. From regulators to SV investors doing nothing to bailout their companies from breaching contracts. pic.twitter.com/ye8W8AkNaq

— Alex Meshkin, GED (@alexmeshkin) March 10, 2023

via read max https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-happened-with-silicon-valley

they could sell it all the treasuries at once, but it would just mean that people wouldn't get all their money since i'm presuming they own less in bonds than they have obligations to their depositors/creditors... aka they're insolvent xp

― 龜, Friday, March 10, 2023 4:38 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure they could sell them and they may have already but theyre worth more when held to maturity which is why even tho they have been declared insolvent by the fdic they might be seen as worthy of being bought by some other bank, this is obvs all speculation they might just have nothing be committing fraud or whatever, or maybe they were in a survivable position but got taken out by a bank run

doe

i would worry about goldman selling marcus if it happened. right now they seem like the best best for an emergency fund that pays meaningful interest.

they could sell it all the treasuries at once, but it would just mean that people wouldn't get all their money since i'm presuming they own less in bonds than they have obligations to their depositors/creditors... aka they're insolvent xp

― 龜, Friday, March 10, 2023 4:38 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure they could sell them and they may have already but theyre worth more when held to maturity which is why even tho they have been declared insolvent by the fdic they might be seen as worthy of being bought by some other bank, this is obvs all speculation they might just have nothing be committing fraud or whatever, or maybe they were in a survivable position but got taken out by a bank run

yea related info from this piece https://www.netinterest.co/p/the-demise-of-silicon-valley-bank

When banks purchase securities, they are forced to decide up-front whether they intend to hold them to maturity. The decision dictates whether the securities are designated as “held-to-maturity” (HTM) assets or as “available-for-sale” (AFS) assets. HTM assets are not marked to market: Banks can look on nonchalantly as bonds lose value; they remain glued to balance sheets at amortised cost regardless. By contrast, AFS assets are marked-to-market—a purer designation but one that injects an element of volatility into a bank’s capital base. For smaller banks, regulators look through this volatility but for banks with over $700 billion in assets, that volatility directly impacts regulatory capital.

Initially, banks favoured the flexibility that AFS gave them. If conditions changed and they wanted to sell, they could do so without much fuss. Sell even a single bond out of an HTM portfolio, however, and the entire portfolio would need to be re-marked accordingly. Through 2020, around three quarters of banks’ securities portfolios were held as AFS.

But then interest rate expectations started to shift and bond prices began to slide. Having been sitting on mark-to-market gains on their securities portfolios, banks started to see losses emerge. Unrealised gains of $39 billion across banks’ AFS portfolios at the end of 2020 swung to unrealised losses of $31 billion by the end of 2021.

To staunch the bleed, many banks reclassified AFS securities as HTM. This meant recognising losses upfront, but the switch would protect balance sheets from further losses as bond prices continued to fall. The largest bank, JPMorgan transferred $342 billion of securities from AFS to HTM, taking its weighting of AFS down to 30%. Others followed suit: Across the industry, the weighting of banks’ securities held as AFS shrank from three-quarters to just over half by the end of 2022.

i'm with ally. recommended.

ok this is serious now tv is at stake

From an 8-K just filed: Roku has more than a quarter of its cash at SVB. Roku "does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB."https://t.co/mvvW4GEpX1

— Stephen Nellis (@StephenNellis) March 10, 2023

i’m doing the jack nicholson hand rubbing gif right now

A few friends absolutely roasted today. Terrible.

fwiw as someone very unqualified to speak on this the payroll stuff seems like it’ll resolve itself whenever svb gets un-ddos’d, if they are just acting as a conduit between company’s bank and employee banks for ripple - there is money coming in the door that can’t be touched other than for being sent out the door to employee accounts, but right now the switchboard is fully lit up so they gotta wait.

the companies that are funding payroll through accounts held at svb, however…

i think one problem is that banking infrastructure in the us is literally all in COBOL, perhaps the us government could hire elon to help with a full rewrite?

cobol is nice its just doing its thing