by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
If you keep a diary or news journal, be sure to write down March 9, 2023 as the day that a full-blown bank run began at non-traditional banks in the U.S.
Bank depositors were already nervous after federally-insured Silvergate Bank (ticker SI) announced on Wednesday evening that it was closing and liquidating. Its publicly-traded stock had already lost over 90 percent of its market value over the prior 12 months at that point.
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Silvergate had made the fatal decision several years ago to become the go-to bank for crypto companies, including scandalized Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed house of frauds, FTX and Alameda Research. As details of its questionable activities related to Bankman-Fried’s enterprises emerged, 68 percent of its deposits related to crypto companies took flight in just the last quarter of 2022. After Silvergate confirmed in an SEC filing on March 1 that an investigation of its conduct was underway at the U.S. Department of Justice, and that it had doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern, its fate was sealed.
Now, for the second time in less than two weeks, depositors are panicking over the fate of another federally-insured bank. This time it’s Silicon Valley Bank (ticker for holding company is SIVB) which, like Silvergate Bank, had become a go-to bank for a special niche customer. Instead of crypto, its niche was venture capital outfits and private equity firms.
Silicon Valley Bank is not a small bank. According to its regulatory filings, as of December 31 it held $161.4 billion in domestic deposits and $13.9 billion in foreign deposits.
The bank panicked investors and depositors alike on Wednesday when it said it would issue $2.25 billion more in stock (thus diluting other stockholders) and that it had taken a $1.8 billion loss on substantially all of its available-for-sale bonds. The stock price reacted by plummeting yesterday, closing down 60.41 percent in one trading session. In premarket trading this morning, the shares were down another 40 percent at one point.
As for the potential for a continuance of a depositor run this morning, the bank is likely feeling the pain from the following paragraph that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last night:
“Garry Tan, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, posted this internal message to founders in the program: ‘We have no specific knowledge of what’s happening at SVB. But anytime you hear problems of solvency in any bank, and it can be deemed credible, you should take it seriously and prioritize the interests of your startup by not exposing yourself to more than $250K of exposure there. As always, your startup dies when you run out of money for whatever reason.’ ”
The figure, $250,000, refers to the amount of federal deposit insurance per depositor, per insured bank.
Unfortunately, the bank panic spread quickly yesterday to other banks – both large and small. PacWest Bancorp (ticker PACW) lost 25.45 percent of its market value by the closing bell yesterday while First Republic Bank (ticker FRC) fell by 16.51 percent. Mega banks on Wall Street were also not immune to the fallout: Bank of America (ticker BAC) lost 6.20 percent while the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase (ticker JPM) – which is also battling lawsuits and escalating press about its ties to deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – fell by 5.41 percent.
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