With just hours left until futures open for trading late on Sunday afternoon, the situation remains extremely fluid and for now it appears that regulators, central bankers and treasury officials (we won't mention the White House where the most competent financial advisor is Hunter Biden) still don't have a clear idea of how they will coordinate or respond. Take Janet Yellen, who said on Sunday morning that the US government was working closely with banking regulators to help depositors at Silicon Valley Bank but dismissed the idea of a bailout.
Speaking with CBS on Sunday, the treasury secretary sought to assure US customers of the failed tech lender that policies were being discussed to stem the fallout from the sudden collapse this week. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporate (FDIC) took control of the bank on Friday morning.
“Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out . . . and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again,” Yellen said (oh but you will, you just don't know it yet).
“But we are concerned about depositors, and we’re focused on trying to meet their needs.”
It wasn't clear which depositors she meant: as we first pointed out on Friday, out of SIVB’s $173 billion of customer deposits at the end of 2022, $152 billion were uninsured (i.e., over the $250,000 FDIC insurance threshold) and only $4.8 billion were fully insured. As we also noted last week, a further look at SIVB funding (pie charts) shows unusually high reliance on corporate/VC funding; only the small red private bank slice looks like traditional retail deposits to us.
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