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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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They could have put their money in larger more diversified bank subject to more regulations including liquidity stress tests that SVB successfully lobbied to be exempted from. The VC world and their startups weren't seeking maximum safety and unfairly barred from seeking it. They sought out a smaller bank with less regulatory oversight that specialized in their industry presumably because that offered benefits.

Greg Mankiw says that the stress tests probably wouldn't have caught this, although I imagine that they'll be modified to cover this scenario in the future.

Would those stress tests actually detect any issues, or would SVB have been fine either way, with or without the changes they lobbied for? Has anyone actually checked that, or is this just an empty pro-government regulation talking point?

I am not an expert on how the Dodd Frank Act Stress Test is conducted and I don't know whether it would have caught this. Forbes says that "will we get fucked if the fed raises rates" is a basic scenario they should have been testing for and that they were exempt from disclosing whether they had enough high quality liquid assets to cover 30 days of distressed cash flow. I don't know whether the standard definition of distressed cash flow includes this sort of bank run. I suspect someone who is an expert on all this will do a big analysis in the next week or so.

I'm suggesting that the VC & startups were not maximally risk averse in their banking selection. Even if you think regulation adds no security, "hey let's put all our money in a bank specializing in one industry" seems obviously more risky than "let's deposit in a massive diversified bank like BoA. The idea that because The Narrow Bank was shut down they had no safer option than SVB doesn't make much sense to me.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2023/03/11/warning-signals-about-silicon-valley-bank-were-all-around-us/amp/

The burden of proof is on people calling for regulation and complaining about SVB lobbying to actually show that the stress tests they were allegedly exempt of would actually have prevented the situation. Otherwise, this is just pure partisanship without any substance: if you claim the problem here is lack of regulation and stress test, you better show that what you propose is more than empty quasi-religious ritual to appease the regulation gods, and that it would actually causally achieve substantial outcome.

+1

Elizabeth Warren sent up her offering the regulations Gods in this morning's NYT.

Which also means she had her staff write the op-ed over the weekend. What a great boss.

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