Silicon Valley’s ‘greed and avarice’ have ‘finally come home to roost’ in SVB collapse, trader says

The fallout from the shuttering of Silicon Valley Bank — the second-largest bank collapse in U.S. history — continued Monday, dragging down international banking stocks.

European banking stocks were down 6.3% at 12:40 p.m. London time on Monday, after closing 4% lower on Friday, as U.S. financial regulators shut down SVB and took control of its deposits. All major U.S. indexes closed at least 4% lower on the week Friday amid the SVB panic, while regulators shut down Signature Bank — one of the cryptocurrency industry’s main lenders — on Sunday, citing systemic risks.

U.S. federal regulators said that all deposits will be made whole, in a relief to many depositors. But the SVB crisis is far from an isolated incident, and its roots lie in a bigger systemic problem, many investors and analysts say.

“With regard to who’s to blame here, I think that the greed and avarice that has long been present in Silicon Valley has come home to roost,” Keith Fitz-Gerald, a trader and principal of the Fitz-Gerald Group, told CNBC’s Capital Connection on Monday.

“We had the Federal Board of Reserve change from fractional reserves to no reserves, and that let banks like SVB go out and start buying assets instead of simply loaning money,” he said. “My contention is banking should be boring, a lot like watching paint dry — and any time it’s not, you’ve got a problem. Which is unfortunately what happened.”

SVB — the 16th biggest bank in the U.S. at the start of last week — had been operational for 40 years and was considered a reliable source of funding for tech startups and venture capital firms. The California-based commercial lender was a subsidiary of SVB Financial Group, and it was Silicon Valley’s largest bank by deposits.

SVB Financial Group’s holdings — assets such as U.S. Treasurys and government-backed mortgage securities viewed as safe — were hit by the Fed’s aggressive interest rate hikes, and their value dropped dramatically.

The company’s tipping point came Wednesday, when SVB announced it had sold $21 billion worth of its securities at a roughly $1.8 billion loss and said it needed to raise $2.25 billion to meet clients’ withdrawal needs and fund new lending. That news sent its stock price plunging and triggered a panic-induced wave of withdrawals from VCs and other depositors. Within a day, SVB stock had tanked 60% and led to a loss of more than $80 billion in bank shares globally.

SVB employees received their annual bonuses Friday just hours before regulators seized the failing bank, according to people with knowledge of the payments. And the bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, sold $3.6 million in company shares on Feb. 27, less than two weeks before SVB revealed the massive losses that prompted its collapse, according to regulatory filings.

Many market analysts say that regulators have been asleep at the wheel. SVB’s strategy — relying heavily on corporate deposits as opposed to retail and holding a large proportion of assets in loans and securities — actually made it significantly riskier than many other banks.

Some argue that the bank’s downfall was due to its leaders’ greed for yield: its holdings were disproportionately exposed to long-term interest rates, which are at a 15-year high in an effort to bring down inflation. The increased rates hit the value of SVB’s securities, which subsequently damaged depositors’ confidence.

“SVB was in a league of its own: a high level of loans plus securities as a percentage of deposits, and very low reliance on stickier retail deposits as a share of total deposits,” Michael Cembalest, J.P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy, wrote in a weekend note to clients.