Two large regional banks failed within a period of only two days, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 10, and Signature Bank on March 12. Both banks had a combined aggregate asset size of $319 billion as of Dec. 31, 2022, with SVB and Signature ranked as the 16th- and 29th-largest banks in the United States, respectively, based on total assets of $209 billion for SVB and $110 billion for Signature.
The failure of SVB is the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, behind only the failure Washington Mutual in September 2008. So, are the failures of SVB and Signature only isolated problems without systemic contagion, or do they represent the proverbial canary in the coal mine, warning of greater systemic troubles ahead? Here is a summary of the causes behind the failures of both banks, the response by the federal banking regulators, and the potential consequences.
Impact of Federal Reserve Policies
The Fed’s policy of artificially low interest rates and massive purchases of U.S. government debt since 2008, especially since 2020, has encouraged banks and businesses to engage in speculative activities that have not been driven by true market forces. This macro-financial environment can lull banks into a false sense of acceptable market and interest-rate risk.
With interest rates near zero from March 2020 to March 2022, along with an extraordinary 41 percent increase in the M2 money supply during that time period, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) reached a 41-year high in 2022. This prompted the Fed to abruptly change course in March 2022 with rapid increases in its Fed Funds Rate from 0.25 percent to 4.75 percent in February 2023. Such a swift increase in interest rates over the past year would require banks to adjust their asset-liability management to protect against interest-rate duration mismatches between assets and liabilities, known in banking terms as “duration risk.”
In the case of SVB, it was guilty of gross mismanagement of its duration risk over the past year, as it reported an abnormally high 41 percent of its total assets in Held-to-Maturity (HTM) securities, amounting to $91 billion at the end of 2022. These HTM securities, while mostly long-term U.S. government securities with little or no credit risk, had substantial duration risk in a rising-interest-rate environment, as fixed-rate securities fall in price when interest rates rise. This is how SVB got hammered, as it was forced to sell its HTM securities at big losses to cover the run-on-cash withdrawals by its deposit customers in the days leading up to its closure.
Flawed Regulatory Ratios for Assessing Bank Capital
Thomas Hoenig, a former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and former vice chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), made insightful comments in a March 17 article in the Wall Street Journal. He said that the use of the government-derived “risk-weighted capital” in evaluating a bank’s capital position is a major problem because it does not describe real, tangible capital. In the case of SVB, Hoenig notes in a March 10 article that SVB’s regulatory risk-rated “Tier 1 Capital Ratio” was around 16 percent, a presumably safe capital position, but the more market-realistic “Tangible Capital-to-Asset Ratio” was only around 5 percent. Hoenig is concerned that the use of risk-weighted capital ratios, adopted by bank regulators around the world in 2014, will lead to more problems in the banking sector. Hoenig makes this point in his Wall Street Journal article.
“The other thing about risk weight,” Hoenig said, “is that it’s a political process. It’s not a market process. The market no longer determines capital in the banking, industry. It’s now politicians, lobbyists and the regulators who have to battle it out among themselves. Therefore, you get these nonmarket solutions like risk-weighted capital. And banks are incentivized to increasingly leverage their balance sheets.”
Questionable Bank Regulator Oversight
The deposit runs that occurred with both SVB and Signature Bank raise serious questions about the competence and/or possibly even the corrupt complicity of the regulators with oversight responsibility for the two banks. While the management of the two banks appropriately deserve blame for their failures, the relevant bank regulators also need to be held accountable for missing obvious regulatory red flags from such large banks well in advance of their failures.
In addition to the asset-liability duration mismatch at both banks, other red flags included abnormally high growth rates and concentrations in risky business sectors (green energy technology startups at SVB and crypto exposures at Signature) and extraordinarily high amounts of uninsured deposits.
Looking at data for the end of 2022, SVB had only 12.5 percent of its total deposits within the FDIC-insured limit of $250,000 per deposit account, which indicates that a whopping $151.5 billion of its total deposits of $173.1 billion were uninsured. A similar situation existed at Signature Bank, with only 10.3 percent of its total deposits of $88.6 billion under FDIC deposit insurance, indicating $79.5 billion in uninsured deposits. Thus, the combined uninsured deposits of both failed banks amounted to $231 billion, which should have alerted the banking regulators of duration risk and potential liquidity risk.
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It is unclear at this point how these regulatory red flags were missed by the relevant regulators. The primary financial regulators for SVB and Signature Bank were their respective district Federal Reserve banks, i.e. the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (SF Fed) for SVB and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NY Fed) for Signature. The FDIC was also involved in its traditional role as regulatory supervisor over the banks’ deposit insurance. The state banking regulators in California and New York also conduct bank examinations.
Because of the unexpected large-scale deposit run on Silicon Valley Bank that resulted in its failure, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced on March 13 that the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, Michael Barr, would lead a six-week review of the Fed’s regulatory supervision surrounding SVB. The Fed has committed to releasing Barr’s report by May 1.
Concerning Reactions by Federal Banking Regulators
The response to the failures of SVB and Signature Bank, and more recently to the troubled First Republic Bank, is extremely concerning for several reasons.
- Bailout of Uninsured Deposits: The decision of federal regulators (the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC) to guarantee funds for all depositors of both failed banks makes a mockery of the FDIC’s $250,000 deposit-insurance limit and signals a new acceptance by the federal regulators to bail out all depositors in any bank failure. This effectively means that the FDIC will now be expected to cover all of the deposits in the U.S. banking system.
At the end of 2022, the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund (“DIF”) was $128 billion in comparison to the $17.7 trillion in total bank deposits in the entire U.S. banking system. The total deposits of SVB alone ($173 billion on Dec. 31, 2022) are enough to wipe out the entire balance of the DIF. So, how will deposits in excess of the Deposit Insurance Fund be funded? On March 12, a joint statement by U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC announced that any losses to the DIF would be recovered by a “special assessment on banks.” Such a special assessment means that the entire U.S. banking system will need to raise fees and/or charge higher interest rates on its customers in order to cover the cost of the newly mandated special assessment to cover the mismanagement of failed banks.
- Creation of a New Emergency Lending Program for Banks: On March 12, the Federal Reserve announced the creation of a new emergency lending program for banks, the “Bank Term Funding Program” or “BTFP.” This new program will allow banks to obtain cash from the Fed’s discount window with one-year term loans backed by collateral comprising U.S. government securities. In addition to providing yet more government support to the banking system, the BTFP also allows banks to pledge their collateral at par. This is another misguided Fed policy action, as it allows banks to offload securities with below-par market values onto the Fed at par value. This will not only encourage less prudent risk management by banks, but will also likely result in further expansion of the Fed’s already massive $8.6 trillion balance sheet.
Within the first three days of its start, banks had already borrowed $11.9 billion from the new BTFP. For the week ending March 17, banks had borrowed another $148.2 billion from the Fed’s 90-day discount window, the largest weekly amount since September 2008.
- Inability to Sell the Failed Banks: Typically, the FDIC will have a buyer lined up ahead of the closing of a failed bank, typically another bank in good standing, but, as of Monday, the assets of neither bank have been sold. The market rumors indicate that the FDIC has, in fact, received several expressions of interest from legitimate institutional buyers, but they have been rejected by the FDIC Board. It is unclear why the FDIC has been rejecting interest from apparently legitimate buyers. Some market observers have speculated that it is due to the political ideology of the current FDIC Board, as it opposes mergers or acquisitions that lead to larger banks.
- Evidence of Political Corruption: When the FDIC initially announced the closure of SVB on March 10, it stated that uninsured depositors would not be covered in accordance with standard FDIC practice. However, just two days later on March 12, the FDIC did a complete reversal, stating that all uninsured depositors would be covered. The federal regulators justified taking this abrupt action by calling it a “systemic risk exception,” despite neither SVB nor Signature Bank having been designated as systemically important banks by the Federal Reserve.
This has led to scrutiny over the profile of the uninsured depositors at both banks and is revealing some noteworthy political connections. For example, the Intercept reported that Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been a client of SVB for many years and is associated with at least five bank accounts at SVB, including the accounts of three winery companies he owns. As for Signature Bank, it could not be more ironic that former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), coauthor of the largest banking reform bill in history, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, has been serving on the board of directors of Signature since 2015 and has earned compensation of over $2.4 million. Multiple media reports indicate that both SVB and Signature have been heavy donors to the Democrat Party and that uninsured depositors at both banks include other high-profile names that have been big donors to Democrats. Thus, evidence of possible political corruption behind the uninsured depositor bailouts of both banks needs to be thoroughly investigated (but don’t hold your breath).
Consequential Impact on Moral Hazard
The unprecedented bailout of $231 billion in uninsured deposits at two large regional banks, plus a new Federal Reserve emergency bank lending program with weak collateral requirements, will lead to yet more moral hazard in an American financial system already accustomed to being bailed out by the federal government. It also throws out the much-heralded objective of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to eliminate “Too Big To Fail” government bailouts in the U.S. financial system.
Contagion Outlook
It remains to be seen whether the failures of SVB and Signature will result in any significant financial contagion into other banks and financial institutions. However, the two failures clearly affected New Republic Bank, which subsequently suffered $70 billion in deposit withdrawals. This triggered the collaboration of 11 of the largest U.S. commercial banks to transfer $30 billion in deposits to New Republic to save it from the same bank-run failure that SVB and Signature experienced. An important banking sector metric of concern is the explosive growth in unrealized losses in 2022. At the end of 2022, the U.S. banking sector held $620 billion in unrealized losses. This may indicate that more turmoil lies ahead for the U.S. banking sector. Stay tuned.
This article originally appeared on the American Spectator.
Steve Dewey
Steve Dewey is a retired federal financial regulator and managing director of the Bastiat Society of Washington, D.C. He is also the founder of GeoFinancial Trends, LLC, and writes on Substack.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
