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  • Interest rates are high. These are the best places to park your cash | CNN Business

    Interest rates are high. These are the best places to park your cash | CNN Business

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    Editor’s Note: This is an update of an article that originally ran on September 20, 2023.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Reserve on Wednesday chose not to raise its key interest rate, the same decision it took following its September meeting, leaving its benchmark lending rate at its highest level in 22 years.

    Given that the Fed influences — directly or indirectly — interest rates on financial accounts and products throughout the US economy, savers and people with surplus cash still have many opportunities to get a far better return on their money than they’ve had in years — and even more importantly, a return that outpaces the latest readings on inflation.

    Here are low-risk options to get the best yield on funds you plan to use within two years, and also on cash you expect to need within the next two to five years.

    The average annual percentage yield on bank savings accounts was just 0.59%, according to an October 31 survey from Bankrate. That average is kept low by a nearly zero APY at the biggest brick-and-mortar banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, which were each offering rates of just 0.01%.

    But many online, FDIC-insured banks are offering well north of 5% on their high-yield savings accounts.

    Those accounts are a great place to deposit money that you will likely deploy within the next two years — to cover anything from a planned vacation or big purchase to an emergency expense or an unexpected change of circumstance like a job loss.

    While bank deposit account yields can change overnight, they have remained high for months and are likely to continue to do so. “In the last few months, the Fed has signaled that it intends to keep rates higher for longer. … Some banks have responded to this new ‘higher for longer’ expectation by offering promotional rate guarantees on their savings or money market accounts. In the guarantee, a competitive rate is guaranteed to last for several months on the savings or money market account,” said Ken Tumin, founder of DepositAccounts.com.

    An online savings account is what certified financial planner Lazetta Rainey Braxton, co-CEO at 2050 Wealth Partners, calls your “cushion” account. She likes the word “cushion” because it describes the flexibility and options such an account gives you to handle both what you want to do in the near term and what you might need to do.

    Another way high-yield accounts can be useful, Braxton said, is to house money you’ll need to pay off a purchase for which you’ve secured a 0% financing deal for a limited period of time. In that case, you won’t owe interest on your purchase so long as you pay it off in full before the end of the promotion period, which can be anywhere from six to 24 months. In the meantime, the money can grow by 4% to 5% a year in your high-yield account.

    For your regular household bills, Braxton recommends keeping just enough cash to cover a month or two in a regular checking account for fastest access. “Not too much, because [those accounts] won’t yield much,” she said.

    You can always link your high-yield account to your checking account to transfer funds when needed — just know it may take up to 24 hours for the transferred money to show up in your checking account, Braxton noted.

    Money market accounts and funds

    If you don’t want to set up an online savings account at another bank, your own bank may offer you a money market deposit account that pays a higher yield than your regular checking or savings accounts.

    Money market accounts may have higher minimum deposit requirements than a regular savings account, but they are more liquid than a fixed-term certificate of deposit or Treasury bill, meaning they give you access to your money more quickly while still potentially giving you some of the highest yields available, said Doug Ornstein, senior manager for integrated solutions at TIAA Wealth Management.

    But don’t confuse money market accounts with money market mutual funds, which invest in short-term, low- risk debt instruments. As of Oct 31, they had an average 7-day yield of 5.19%, according to the Crane Money Fund Index, which tracks the top 100 taxable money market funds.

    Unlike money market deposit accounts, money market mutual funds are not insured by the FDIC. But if you invest in a money market fund through a brokerage, your overall account is likely to be insured through the Securities Investor Protection Corp (SIPC), which offers protection in the event your brokerage ever goes under.

    Another high-return, low-risk investment that is great for money you likely won’t need to tap for a few months or even a couple of years are certificates of deposit.

    You can get the best returns on CDs through a brokerage such as Schwab, E*Trade or Fidelity. That’s because you can comparison shop for CDs from any number of FDIC-insured banks and will not have to set up individual accounts with each institution.

    To get the greatest benefit from a CD, you have to leave the money invested for a fixed period. You can always access your principal sooner if you need to, but if you do you will forfeit at least some interest.

    As of November 1, CDs listed on Schwab.com with durations of three months, six months, nine months, one year and 18 months were all yielding at least 5.5% .

    Say you invest $10,000 in a six-month CD with a 5.5% APY. At the end of that period, you’ll get your principal back plus nearly $274 in interest when the CD matures, according to Bankrate’s CD calculator. If you put it in a one-year CD you’d earn $555 in interest, while an 18-month term will generate $844.

    If you don’t go through a brokerage you may get a reasonable deal from your primary bank. Tumin said. For example, he noted, Citi came out with an 11-month CD Special with a rate of up to 5.65% APY. But he cautions that with any big bank CD you should take your money out at the end of the term, otherwise your bank may automatically renew it and lock you in to a much lower-yielding CD.

    Another option for money you can leave untouched anywhere from several months to a few years are short-term Treasury bills, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

    Three- and six-month bills had yields of 5.46% and 5.54% respectively on November 1, while nine-month and one-year bills were offering 5.46% and 5.43%, according to rates posted on Schwab.com for a $25,000 investment.

    If you’re someone who manages your portfolio like a hawk, you may feel comfortable buying T-bills on your own from TreasuryDirect.gov. But if you don’t, it might be easier just to buy new issues through your brokerage account or invest in a short-term bond index fund or ETF, said Andy Smith, executive director of financial planning at Edelman Financial Engines.

    And if you’re looking at money that will be needed in three to five years, you might consider a diversified fund of highly rated government and corporate bonds, Ornstein said. Yields on four-year, AAA rated corporate bonds, for instance, were yielding 4.97% this week, and three-year AAA-rated municipal bonds (which are issued by local governments) had rates of 4.59%, according to Schwab.com.

    When deciding on the best accounts and investments for your specific goals and peace of mind, it may pay to consult a fee-only fiduciary adviser — meaning someone who doesn’t get paid a commission to sell you a particular investment.

    What you’ll always want to do is build in flexibility for yourself so you can easily access cash, regardless of your timeline for key goals. “What happens if something changes and you need that down payment a lot sooner — or your parents need medical care fast?” Smith said.

    That means balancing your desire for great yield with a need and desire for ease of access without penalty. Translation: Don’t chase yield for yield’s sake.

    Think of it this way, Ornstein said: Unless you have huge sums to invest or are an institutional investor, the difference between getting a 5.1% yield versus 5% is negligible, and in fact it could even cost you more if there are penalties for taking your money out early. “Most of the time convenience is really important. Give up the 0.1%,” he advised.

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  • Big banks are bidding for troubled First Republic as FDIC deadline looms | CNN Business

    Big banks are bidding for troubled First Republic as FDIC deadline looms | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Federal regulators are holding an auction for ailing regional bank First Republic, a person familiar with the matter tells CNN.

    Final bids are due for First Republic Bank at 4 p.m. ET on Sunday, the source said.

    The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the independent government agency that insures deposits for bank customers, is running the auction.

    Neither First Republic nor the FDIC were immediately available for comment.

    Shares of First Republic

    (FRC)     plunged from $122.50 on March 1 to around $3 a share as of Friday on expectations that the FDIC would step in by end of day and take control of the San Francisco-based bank, its deposits and assets. But that never happened.

    The FDIC had already done so with two other similar sized banks just last month — Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — when runs on those banks by their customers left the lenders unable to cover customers’ demands for withdrawals.

    The Wall Street Journal previously reported that JPMorgan Chase and PNC Financial are among the big banks bidding on First Republic in a potential deal that would follow an FDIC seizure of the troubled regional bank.

    PNC declined to comment. JPMorgan did not respond to requests for comment.

    “We are engaged in discussions with multiple parties about our strategic options while continuing to serve our clients,” First Republic said in a statement Friday night.

    If there is a buyer for First Republic, the FDIC would likely be stuck with some money-losing assets, as was the case after it found buyers for the viable portions of SVB and Signature after it took control of those banks.

    A kind of shotgun marriage, arranged by regulators who didn’t want a significant bank to end up in the hands of the FDIC before it was sold, occurred several times during the financial crisis of 2008 that sparked the Great Recession. Notably, JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns for a fraction of its earlier value in March of 2008, and then in September bought savings and loan Washington Mutual, soon after Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch.

    The failure of Washington Mutual in 2008 was the nation’s largest bank failure ever. First Republic, which is bigger than either SVB or Signature Bank, would be the second largest.

    Soon after collapses of SVB and Signature in March, First Republic received a $30 billion lifeline in the form of deposits from a collection of the nation’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase

    (JPM)    , Bank of America

    (BAC)    , Wells Fargo

    (WFC)    , Citigroup

    (C)     and Truist

    (TFC)    , which came together after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen intervened.

    The banks agreed to take the risk and work together to keep First Republic flush with the cash in the hopes it would provide confidence in the nation’s suddenly battered banking system. The banks and federal regulators all wanted to reduce the chance that customers of other banks would suddenly start withdrawing their cash.

    But while the cash allowed First Republic to make it through the last six weeks, its quarterly financial report Monday evening, with the disclosure of massive withdrawals by the end of March, spurred new concerns about its long-term viability.

    The financial report showed depositors had withdrawn about 41% of their money from the bank during the first quarter. Most of the withdrawals were from accounts with more than $250,000 in them, meaning those excess funds were not insured by the FDIC.

    Uninsured deposits at the bank fell by $100 billion during the course of the first quarter, a period during which total net deposits fell by $102 billion, not including the infusion of deposits from other banks.

    The uninsured deposits stood at 68% of its total deposits as of December 31, but only 27% of its non-bank deposits as of March 31.

    In its earnings statement, the bank said insured deposits declined moderately during the quarter and have remained stable from the end of last month through April 21.

    Banks never have all the cash on hand to cover all deposits. They instead take in deposits and use the cash to make loans or investments, such as purchasing US Treasuries. So when customers lose confidence in a bank and rush to withdrawal their money, what is known as a “run on the bank,” it can cause even an otherwise profitable bank to fail.

    First Republic’s latest earnings report showed it was still profitable in the first quarter — its net income was $269 million, down 33% from a year earlier. But it was the news on the loss of deposits that worried investors and, eventually, regulators.

    While some of those who had more than $250,000 in their First Republic accounts were likely wealthy individuals, most were likely businesses that often need that much cash just to cover daily operating costs. A company with 100 employees can easily need more than $250,000 just to cover a biweekly payroll.

    First Republic’s annual report said that as of December 31, 63% of its total deposits were from business clients, with the rest from consumers.

    First Republic started operations in 1985 with a single San Francisco branch. It is known for catering to wealthy clients in coastal states.

    It has 82 branches listed on its website, spread across eight states, in high-income communities such as Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Napa Valley, California; in addition to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Outside of California, branches are in other high-income communities such as Palm Beach, Florida; Greenwich, Connecticut; Bellevue, Washington; and Jackson, Wyoming.

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  • Silicon Valley Bank collapse renews calls to address disparities impacting entrepreneurs of color | CNN Business

    Silicon Valley Bank collapse renews calls to address disparities impacting entrepreneurs of color | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    When customers at Silicon Valley Bank rushed to withdraw billions of dollars last month, venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton stepped in to help some of the founders of color who panicked about losing access to payroll funds.

    As a Black woman with nearly 10 years of business experience, Hamilton knew the options for those startup founders were limited.

    SVB had a reputation for servicing people from underrepresented communities like hers. Its failure has reignited concerns from industry experts about lending discrimination in the banking industry and the resulting disparities in capital for people of color.

    Hamilton, the 43-year-old founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital, said that when it comes to entrepreneurs of color, “we’re already in the smaller house. We already have the rickety door and the thinner walls. And so, when a tornado comes by, we’re going to get hit harder.”

    Established in 1983, the midsize California tech lender was America’s 16th largest bank at the end of 2022 before it collapsed on March 10. SVB provided banking services to nearly half of all venture-backed technology and life-sciences companies in the United States.

    Hamilton, industry experts and other investors told CNN the bank was committed to fostering a community of minority entrepreneurs and provided them with both social and financial capital.

    SVB regularly sponsored conferences and networking events for minority entrepreneurs, said Hamilton, and it was well known for funding the annual State of Black Venture Report spearheaded by BLK VC, a nonprofit organization that connects and empowers Black investors.

    “When other banks were saying no, SVB would say yes,” said Joynicole Martinez, a 25-year entrepreneur and chief advancement and innovation officer for Rising Tide Capital, a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 to connect entrepreneurs with investors and mentors.

    Martinez is also an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council, an invitation-only organization for business and career coaches. She said SVB was an invaluable resource for entrepreneurs of color and offered their clients discounted tech tools and research funding.

    Minority business owners have long faced challenges accessing capital due to discriminatory lending practices, experts say. Data from the Small Business Credit Survey, a collaboration of all 12 Federal Reserve banks, shows disparities on denial rates for bank and nonbank loans.

    In 2021, about 16% of Black-led companies acquired the total amount of business financing they sought from banks, compared to 35% of White-owned companies, the survey shows.

    “We know there’s historic, systemic, and just blatant racism that’s inherent in lending and banking. We have to start there and not tip-toe around it,” Martinez told CNN.

    Asya Bradley is an immigrant founder of multiple tech companies like Kinley, a financial services business aiming to help Black Americans build generational wealth. Following SVB’s collapse, Bradley said she joined a WhatsApp group of more than 1,000 immigrant business founders. Members of the group quickly mobilized to support one another, she said.

    Immigrant founders often don’t have Social Security numbers nor permanent addresses in the United States, Bradley said, and it was crucial to brainstorm different ways to find funding in a system that doesn’t recognize them.

    “The community was really special because a lot of these folks then were sharing different things that they had done to achieve success in terms of getting accounts in different places. They also were able to share different regional banks that have stood up and been like, ‘Hey, if you have accounts at SVB, we can help you guys,’” Bradley said.

    Many women, people of color and immigrants opt for community or regional banks like SVB, Bradley says, because they are often rejected from the “top four banks” — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.

    In her case, Bradley said her gender might have been an issue when she could only open a business account at one of the “top four banks” when her brother co-signed for her.

    “The top four don’t want our business. The top four are rejecting us consistently. The top four do not give us the service that we deserve. And that’s why we’ve gone to community banks and regional banks such as SVB,” Bradley said.

    None of the top four banks provided a comment to CNN. The Financial Services Forum, an organization representing the eight largest financial institutions in the United States has said the banks have committed millions of dollars since 2020 to address economic and racial inequality.

    Last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNN’s Poppy Harlow that his bank has 30% of its branches in lower-income neighborhoods as part of a $30 billion commitment to Black and Brown communities across the country.

    Wells Fargo specifically pointed to its 2022 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report, which discusses the bank’s recent initiatives to reach underserved communities.

    The bank partnered last year with the Black Economic Alliance to initiate the Black Entrepreneur Fund — a $50 million seed, startup, and early-stage capital fund for businesses founded or led by Black and African American entrepreneurs. And since May 2021, Wells Fargo has invested in 13 Minority Depository Institutions, fulfilling its $50 million pledge to support Black-owned banks.

    Black-owned banks work to close the lending gap and foster economic empowerment in these traditionally excluded communities, but their numbers have been dwindling over the years, and they have far fewer assets at their disposal than the top banks.

    OneUnited Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the United States, manages a little over $650 million in assets. By comparison, JPMorgan Chase manages $3.7 trillion in assets.

    Because of these disparities, entrepreneurs also seek funding from venture capitalists. In the early 2010s, Hamilton intended to start her own tech company — but as she searched for investors, she saw that White men control nearly all venture capital dollars. That experience led her to establish Backstage Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in new companies led by underrepresented founders.

    “I said, ‘Well, instead of trying to raise money for one company, let me try to raise for a venture fund that will invest in underrepresented — and now we call them underestimated — founders who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ specifically,’ because I am all three,” Hamilton told CNN.

    Since then, Backstage Capital has amassed a portfolio of nearly 150 different companies and has made over 120 diversity investments, according to data from Crunchbase.

    But Bradley, who is also an ‘angel investor’ of minority-owned businesses, said she remains “really hopeful” that community banks, regional banks and fintechs “will all stand up and say, ‘Hey, we are not going to let the good work of SVB go to waste.’”

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  • IMF: Banking crisis boosts risks and dims outlook for world economy | CNN Business

    IMF: Banking crisis boosts risks and dims outlook for world economy | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    At the start of the year, economists and corporate leaders expressed optimism that global economic growth might not slow down as much as they had feared. Positive developments included China’s reopening, signs of resilience in Europe and falling energy prices.

    But a crisis in the banking sector that emerged last month has changed the calculus. The International Monetary Fund downgraded its forecasts for the global economy Tuesday, noting “the recent increase in financial market volatility.”

    The IMF now expects economic growth to slow from 3.4% in 2022 to 2.8% in 2023. Its estimate in January had been for 2.9% growth this year.

    “Uncertainty is high, and the balance of risks has shifted firmly to the downside so long as the financial sector remains unsettled,” the organization said in its latest report.

    Fears about the economic outlook have increased following the failures in March of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, two regional US lenders, and the loss of confidence in the much-larger Credit Suisse

    (CS)    , which was sold to rival UBS in a government-backed rescue deal.

    Already, the global economy was grappling with the consequences of high and persistent inflation, the rapid rise in interest rates to fight it, elevated debt levels and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    Now, concerns about the health of the banking industry join the list.

    “These forces are now overlaid by, and interacting with, new financial stability concerns,” the IMF said, noting that policymakers trying to tame inflation while averting a “hard landing,” or a painful recession, “may face difficult trade-offs.”

    Global inflation, which the IMF said was proving “much stickier than anticipated,” is expected to fall from 8.7% in 2022 to 7% this year and to 4.9% in 2024.

    Investors are looking for additional pockets of vulnerability in the financial sector. Meanwhile, lenders may turn more conservative to preserve cash they may need to deal with an unpredictable environment.

    That would make it harder for businesses and households to access loans, weighing on economic output over time.

    “Financial conditions have tightened, which is likely to entail lower lending and activity if they persist,” said the IMF, which hosts its spring meeting alongside the World Bank this week.

    If another shock to the world’s financial system results in a “sharp” deterioration in financial conditions, global growth could slow to 1% this year, the IMF warned. That would mean “near-stagnant income per capita.” The group put the probably of this happening at about 15%.

    The IMF acknowledged forecasting was difficult in this climate. The “fog around the world economic outlook has thickened,” it said.

    And it warned that weak growth would likely persist for years. Looking ahead to 2028, global growth is estimated at 3%, the lowest medium-term forecast since 1990.

    The IMF said this sluggishness was attributable in part to scarring from the pandemic, aging workforces and geopolitical fragmentation, pointing to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, economic tensions between the United States and China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Interest rates in advanced economies are likely to revert to their pre-pandemic levels once the current spell of high inflation has passed, the IMF also said.

    The body’s forecast for global growth this year is now closer to that of the World Bank. David Malpass, the outgoing World Bank president, told reporters Monday that the group now saw a 2% expansion in output in 2023, up from 1.7% predicted in January, Reuters has reported.

    In a separate report published Tuesday, the IMF said that while the rapid increase in interest rates was straining banks and other financial firms, there were fundamental differences from the 2008 global financial crisis.

    Banks now have much more capital to be able to withstand shocks. They also have curbed risky lending due to stricter regulations.

    Instead, the IMF pointed to similarities between the latest banking turmoil and the US savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, when trouble at smaller institutions hurt confidence in the broader financial system.

    So far, investors are “pricing a fairly optimistic scenario,” the IMF noted in a blog based on the report, adding that access to credit was actually greater now than it had been in October.

    “While market participants see recession probabilities as high, they also expect the depth of the recession to be modest,” the IMF said.

    Yet those expectations could be quickly upended. If inflation rises further, for example, investors could judge that interest rates will stay higher for longer, the group wrote in the blog.

    “Stresses could then reemerge in the financial system,” it noted.

    That bolsters the need for decisive action by policymakers, the IMF said. It called for gaps in supervision and regulation to “be addressed at once,” citing the need in many countries for stronger plans to wind down failed banks and for improvements to deposit insurance programs.

    — Olesya Dmitracova contributed to this report.

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  • Who will end up paying for the banking crisis: You | CNN Business

    Who will end up paying for the banking crisis: You | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    It cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation about $23 billion to clean up the mess that Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank left in the wake of their collapses earlier this month.

    Now, as the dust clears and the US banking system steadies, the FDIC needs to figure out where to send its invoice. While regional and mid-sized banks are behind the recent turmoil, it appears that large banks may be footing the bill.

    Ultimately, that means higher fees for bank customers and lower rates on their savings accounts.

    What’s happening: The FDIC maintains a $128 billion deposit insurance fund to insure bank deposits and protect depositors. That fund is typically supplied by quarterly payments from insured banks in the United States. But when a big, expensive event happens — like the FDIC making uninsured customers whole at Silicon Valley Bank — the agency is able to assess a special charge on the banking industry to recover the cost.

    The law also gives the FDIC the authority to decide which banks shoulder the brunt of that assessment fee. FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said this week that he plans to make the details of the latest assessment public in May. He has also hinted that he would protect community banks from having to shell out too much money.

    The fees that the FDIC assesses on banks tend to vary. Historically, they were fixed, but 2010’s Dodd-Frank act required that the agency needed to consider the size of a bank when setting rates. It also takes into consideration the “economic conditions, the effects on the industry, and such other factors as the FDIC deems appropriate and relevant,” according to Gruenberg.

    On Tuesday and Wednesday, members of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee grilled Gruenberg about his plans to charge banks for the damage done by SVB and others, and repeatedly implored him to leave small banks alone.

    Gruenberg appeared receptive.

    “Will you commit to using your authority…to establish separate risk-based assessment systems for large and small members of the Deposit Insurance Fund so that these well-managed banks don’t have to bail out Silicon Valley Bank?” asked the US Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican who represents of Kentucky’s 6th district.

    “I’m certainly willing to consider that,” replied Gruenberg.

    “if smaller community banks in Texas will be left responsible for bailing out the failed banks in California and New York?” asked US Rep. Roger Williams, a Republican who represents Texas’ 25th district.

    “Let me just say, without forecasting what our board is going to vote, we’re going to be keenly sensitive to the impact on community banks,” replied Gruenberg.

    Representatives Frank Lucas, John Rose, Ayanna Pressley, Dan Meuser, Nikema Williams, Zach Nunn and Andy Ogles all asked similar questions and received similar responses. As did US Sens. Sherrod Brown and Cynthia Lummis.

    “I don’t doubt he’s still fielding a lot of phone calls,” from politicians pressuring him to place the burden on large banks, former FDIC chairman Bill Isaac told CNN.

    Smaller banks are saying that they’re unable to pick up this tab and didn’t have anything to do with the failure of “these two wild and crazy banks,” said Isaac. “They’re arguing to put the assessment on larger banks and as I understand it, the FDIC is thinking seriously about it,” he added.

    A spokesperson from the FDIC told CNN that the agency “will issue in May 2023 a proposed rulemaking for the special assessment for public comment.” In regard to Greunberg’s testimony they added that “when the boss says something, we defer to the boss.”

    Big banks: “We need to think hard about liquidity risk and concentrations of uninsured deposits and how that’s evaluated in terms of deposit insurance assessments,” said Gruenberg to the Senate Banking Committee, indicating that smaller banks that are operating carefully could be asked to bear less of the assessment.

    A larger assessment on big banks would add to what will already be a multi-billion dollar payment from the nation’s largest banks like JPMorgan Chase

    (JPM)    , Citigroup

    (C)    , Bank of America

    (BAC)     and Wells Fargo

    (WFC)    .

    The argument is that the largest US banks will be able to shoulder extra payments without collapsing under it. Those large banks also benefited greatly from the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank as wary customers sought safety by moving billions of dollars worth of money to big banks. 

    Passing it on: Regardless of who’s charged, the fees will eventually get passed on to bank customers in the end, said Isaac. “It’s going to be passed on to all customers. I have no doubts that banks will make up for these extra costs in their pricing — higher fees for services, higher prices for loans and less compensation for deposits.”

    It’s hard out there for a Wall Street banker. Or harder than it was.

    The average annual Wall Street bonus fell to $176,700 last year, a 26% drop from the previous year’s average of $240,400, according to estimates released Thursday by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

    While that’s a big decrease, the 2022 bonus figure is still more than twice the median annual income for US households, reports CNN’s Jeanne Sahadi.

    All in, Wall Street firms had a $33.7 billion bonus pool for 2022, which is 21% smaller than the previous year’s record of $42.7 billion — and the largest drop since the Great Recession.

    For New York City and New York State coffers, bonus season means a welcome infusion of revenue, since employees in the securities industry make up 5% of private sector employees in NYC and their pay accounts for 22% of the city’s private sector wages. In 2021, Wall Street was estimated to be responsible for 16% of all economic activity in the city.

    DiNapoli’s office projects the lower bonuses will bring in $457 million less in state income tax revenue and $208 million less for the city compared to the year before.

    Beleaguered retailed Bed Bath & Beyond will attempt to $300 million of its stock to repay creditors and fund its business as it struggles to avoid bankruptcy, reports CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn.

    If it’s not able to raise sufficient money from the offering, the home furnishings giant said Thursday it expects to “likely file for bankruptcy.”

    Bed Bath & Beyond was able to initially avoid bankruptcy in February by completing a complex stock offering that gave it both an immediate injection of cash and a pledge for more funding in the future to pay down its debt. That offering was backed by private equity group Hudson Bay Capital.

    But on Thursday, Bed Bath & Beyond said it was terminating the deal with Hudson Bay Capital for future funding and is turning to the public market.

    Shares of Bed Bath & Beyond dropped more than 26% Thursday. The stock was trading around 60 cents a share.

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  • Too big for Switzerland? Credit Suisse rescue creates bank twice the size of the economy | CNN Business

    Too big for Switzerland? Credit Suisse rescue creates bank twice the size of the economy | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    The last-minute rescue of Credit Suisse may have prevented the current banking crisis from exploding, but it’s a raw deal for Switzerland.

    Worries that Credit Suisse’s downfall would spark a broader banking meltdown left Swiss regulators with few good options. A tie-up with its larger rival, UBS

    (UBS)    , offered the best chance of restoring stability in the banking sector globally and in Switzerland, and protecting the Swiss economy in the near term.

    But it leaves Switzerland exposed to a single massive financial institution, even as there is still huge uncertainty over how successful the mega merger will prove to be.

    “One of the most established facts in academic research is that bank mergers hardly ever work,” said Arturo Bris, a professor of finance at Swiss business school IMD.

    There are also concerns that the deal will lead to huge job losses in Switzerland and weaken competition in the country’s vital financial sector, which overall employs more than 5% of the national workforce, or nearly 212,000 people.

    Taxpayers, meanwhile, are now on the hook for up to 9 billions Swiss francs ($9.8 billion) of future potential losses at UBS arising from certain Credit Suisse assets, provided those losses exceed 5 billion francs ($5.4 billion). The state has also explicitly guaranteed a 100 billion Swiss franc ($109 billion) lifeline to UBS, should it need it, although that would be repayable.

    Switzerland’s Social Democratic party has already called for an investigation into what went wrong at Credit Suisse, arguing that the newly created “super-megabank” increases risks for the Swiss economy.

    The demise of one of Switzerland’s oldest institutions has come as a shock to many of its citizens. Credit Suisse is “part of Switzerland’s identity,” said Hans Gersbach, a professor of macroeconomics at ETH university in Zurich. The bank “has been instrumental in the development of modern Switzerland.”

    Its collapse has also tainted Switzerland’s reputation as a safe and stable global financial center, particularly after the government effectively stripped shareholders of voting rights to get the deal done.

    Swiss authorities also wiped out some bondholders ahead of shareholders, upending the traditional hierarchy of losses in a bank failure and dealing another blow to the country’s reputation among investors.

    “The repercussions for Switzerland are terrible,” said Bris of IMD. “For a start, the reputation of Switzerland has been damaged forever.”

    That will benefit other wealth management centers, including Singapore, he told CNN. Singaporeans are “celebrating… because there is going to be a huge inflow of funds into other wealth management jurisdictions.”

    At roughly $1.7 trillion, the combined assets of the new entity amount to double the size of Switzerland’s annual economic output. By deposits and loans to Swiss customers, UBS will now be bigger than the next two local banks combined.

    With a roughly 30% market share in Swiss banking, “we see too much concentration risk and market share control,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note last week before the deal was done. They suggested that the combined entity would need to exit or IPO some businesses.

    The problem with having one single large bank in a small economy is that if it faces a bank run or needs a bailout — which UBS did during the 2008 crisis — the government’s financial firepower may be insufficient.

    At 333 billion francs ($363 billion), local deposits in the new entity equal 45% of GDP — an enormous amount even for a country with healthy public finances and low levels of debt.

    On the other hand, UBS is in a much stronger financial position than it was during the 2008 crisis and it will be required to build up an even bigger financial buffer as a result of the deal. The Swiss financial regulator, FINMA, has said it will “very closely monitor the transaction and compliance with all requirements under supervisory law.”

    UBS chairman Colm Kelleher underscored the health of UBS’s balance sheet Sunday at a press conference on the deal. “Having been chief financial officer [at Morgan Stanley] during the last global financial crisis, I’m well aware of the importance of a solid balance sheet. UBS will remain rock-solid,” he said.

    Kelleher added that UBS would trim Credit Suisse’s investment bank “and align it with our conservative risk culture.”

    Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics, said “the question of market concentration in Switzerland is something to address in future.” “30% [market share] is higher than you might ideally want but not so high that it’s a major problem.”

    The deal has “surgically removed the most worrying part of [Switzerland’s] banking system,” leaving it stronger, Kenningham added.

    The deal will have an adverse affect on jobs, though, likely adding to the 9,000 cuts that Credit Suisse already announced as part of an earlier turnaround plan.

    For Switzerland, the threat is acute. The two banks collectively employ more than 37,000 people in the country, about 18% of the financial sector’s workforce, and there is bound to be overlap.

    “The Credit Suisse branch in the city where I live is right in front of UBS’s, meaning one of the two will certainly close,” Bris of IMD wrote in a note Monday.

    In a call with analysts Sunday night, UBS CEO Ralph Hamers said the bank would try to remove 8 billion francs ($8.9 billion) of costs a year by 2027, 6 billion francs ($6.5 billion) of which would come from reducing staff numbers.

    “We are clearly cognizant of Swiss societal and economic factors. We will be considerate employers, but we need to do this in a rational way,” Kelleher told reporters.

    The Credit Suisse headquarters in Zurich

    Not only does the deal, done in a hurry, fail to protect jobs in Switzerland, but it contains no special provisions on competition issues.

    UBS now has “quasi-monopoly power,” which could increase the cost of banking services in the country, according to Bris.

    Although Switzerland has dozens of smaller regional and savings banks, including 24 cantonal banks, UBS is now an even more dominant player. “Everything they do… will influence the market,” said Gersbach of ETH.

    Credit Suisse’s Swiss banking arm, arguably its crown jewel, could have been subject to a future sale as part of the terms of the deal, he added.

    A spinoff of the domestic bank now looks unlikely, however, after UBS made clear that it intended to hold onto it. “The Credit Suisse Swiss bank is a fine asset that we are very determined to keep,” Kelleher said Sunday.

    At $3.25 billion, UBS got Credit Suisse for 60% less than the bank was worth when markets closed two days prior. Whether that ultimately turns out to be a steal remains to be seen. Large mergers are notoriously fraught with risk and often don’t deliver the promised returns to shareholders.

    UBS argues that by expanding its global wealth and asset management franchise, the deal will drive long-term shareholder value. “UBS’s strength and our familiarity with Credit Suisse’s business puts us in a unique position to execute this integration efficiently and effectively,” Kelleher said. UBS expects the deal to increase its profit by 2027.

    The transaction is expected to close in the coming months, but fully integrating the two institutions will take three to five years, according to Phillip Straley, the president of data analytics company FNA. “There’s a huge amount of integration risk,” he said.

    Moody’s on Tuesday affirmed its credit ratings on UBS but changed the outlook on some of its debt from stable to negative, judging that the “complexity, extent and duration of the integration” posed risks to the bank.

    It pointed to challenges retaining key Credit Suisse staff, minimizing the loss of overlapping clients in Switzerland and unifying the cultures of “two somewhat different organizations.”

    According to Kenningham of Capital Economics, the “track record of shotgun marriages in the banking sector is mixed.”

    “Some, such as the 1995 purchase of Barings by ING, have proved long-lasting. But others, including several during the global financial crisis, soon brought into question the viability of the acquiring bank, while others have proven very difficult to implement.”

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  • Biden White House closely watching Federal Reserve following bank failures | CNN Politics

    Biden White House closely watching Federal Reserve following bank failures | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    All eyes are trained on the Federal Reserve as it prepares to announce another potential interest rate hike Wednesday afternoon – exactly 10 days after the Biden administration stepped in with dramatic emergency actions to contain the fallout from two bank failures.

    Biden White House officials will be closely watching the highly anticipated rate decision – and monitoring every word of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s public comments – for any telling clues on how the central bank is processing what has emerged one of the most urgent economic crises of Joe Biden’s presidency.

    The moment creates a complex, if carefully observed, dynamic for the administration’s top economic officials who have spent much of the last two weeks engaged in regular discussions and consultations with Powell and Fed officials as they’ve navigated rapid and acute risks to the banking system.

    The Fed’s central role in not only supervising US banks and the stability of the financial system, but also in serving as a liquidity backstop in moments of systemic risk, has once again thrust the central bank back to center stage in the government’s effort to stabilize rattled markets.

    But Biden has made the central bank’s independence on monetary policy an unequivocal commitment – and has repeatedly underscored that he has confidence in the Fed’s central role in navigating inflation that has weighed on the US economy for more than a year and remained stubbornly persistent.

    Even as some congressional Democrats have directed fire at Powell for the rapid increase in interest rates and the risks the effort poses to a robust post-pandemic economic recovery, White House officials have taken pains not to shed light on their views publicly.

    Officials stress nothing in the last week has changed that mandate from Biden – and note that the widespread uncertainty about what action the Fed will take on rates only serves to underscore that reality.

    It’s a reality that comes at a uniquely inopportune time for a banking system that has shown clear signs of stabilizing in the last several days, but is still facing a level of anxiety among market participants and depositors about the durability of that shift.

    “I do believe we have a very strong and resilient banking system and all of us need to shore up the confidence of depositors that that’s the case,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said during remarks Tuesday in Washington.

    Yellen said a new emergency lending facility launched by the Fed, along with its existing discount window, are “working as intended to provide liquidity to the banking system.”

    But prior to the closures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, analysts had widely predicted that the Fed would unveil a half-point rate hike. But after the sudden collapse of the two banks that sent shockwaves across the global economy, there has been a growing belief among Wall Street analysts that the central bank will pull back, and only raise rates by a quarter-point – in part to try to alleviate concerns that the Fed’s historically aggressive rate hikes over the past year were precisely to blame for this month’s financial turmoil.

    But there are also concerns that a dramatic pullback, like choosing to forgo any rate increases altogether until a later meeting, would bring its own risks of signaling to the market that there are deeper systemic problems.

    It’s a conundrum top Fed officials started grappling with in the first of their two-day Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Tuesday. How they choose to navigate the path ahead will remain behind closed doors until their policy statement is released Wednesday afternoon.

    Powell is scheduled to speak to reporters shortly after.

    For officials inside the Biden White House, Wednesday is poised to offer critical insight into how the central bank is grappling with its urgent priority of bringing down inflation, while at the same time, minimizing the risk of additional dominoes falling in the US banking sector.

    Those two imperatives – bringing prices down and maintaining stability across the US financial sector – are urgent priorities for the Biden White House, particularly as the president moves closer to a widely expected reelection announcement and the health of the economy remains the top issue for voters.

    Yet the Fed’s decision will come at a moment of accelerating political pressure on the Fed itself – and Powell specifically.

    Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, slammed Powell, saying he has failed at two of his main jobs, citing raising interest rates and his support of bank deregulation.

    “I opposed Chair Powell for his initial nomination, but his re-nomination. I opposed him because of his views on regulation and what he was doing to weaken regulation, but I think he’s failing in both jobs, both as oversight manager of these big banks which is his job and also what he’s doing with inflation,” Warren said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

    White House officials have made clear – with no hesitation – that Biden’s long-stated confidence in Powell is unchanged. Powell, who was confirmed for his second four-year term as Fed chair last year, announced last week that the Fed would launch a review into the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

    Treasury and Fed officials, along with counterparts at other federal regulators and their international counterparts, have continued regular discussions this week as they’ve monitored the system in the wake of the weekend collapse, and eventual sale, of European banking giant Credit Suisse.

    US officials viewed the Credit Suisse collapse as unrelated to the crisis that took down the US banks a weekend prior, although they acknowledged it posed broader risks tied to confidence, or the potential lack thereof, in the system.

    In recent days, White House officials have begun to cautiously suggest that they see signs of the US economy stabilizing, following the turbulent aftermath of the closures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Biden, for his part, has credited the sweeping steps his administration announced – namely, the backstopping of all depositors’ funds held at the two institutions and the creation of an emergency lending program by the Federal Reserve – as having prevented a broader financial meltdown.

    He has also called on US regulators and lawmakers to strengthen financial regulations, though it is not yet clear what specific actions the president may ultimately throw his weight behind.

    Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment Tuesday afternoon at the White House press briefing on how she and other officials were watching the Fed’s upcoming decision.

    “The Fed is indeed independent. We want to give them the space to make those monetary decisions and I don’t want to get ahead of that,” Jean-Pierre said. “I don’t even want to give any thoughts to what Jerome Powell might say tomorrow.”

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  • What are AT1 bonds and why are Credit Suisse’s now worthless? | CNN Business

    What are AT1 bonds and why are Credit Suisse’s now worthless? | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Investors in a riskier type of Credit Suisse’s bonds had the value of their holdings slashed to zero Sunday after Swiss authorities brokered an emergency takeover of the bank by rival UBS.

    On Sunday, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced that UBS would buy Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.25 billion) — or about 60% less than the bank was worth when markets closed on Friday. Credit Suisse shareholders will be largely wiped out, receiving the equivalent of just 0.76 Swiss francs in UBS shares for stock that was worth 1.86 Swiss francs on Friday.

    But it is the owners of Credit Suisse’s $17 billion worth of “additional tier one” (AT1) bonds who have been left fully in the cold. Swiss authorities said those bondholders would receive absolutely nothing. The move is at odds with the usual hierarchy of losses when a bank fails, with shareholders typically the last in line for any kind of payout.

    “The extraordinary government support will trigger a complete write-down of the nominal value of all AT1 shares of Credit Suisse in the amount of around 16 billion [Swiss francs],” the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority said in a statement Sunday.

    David Benamou, chief investment officer at Axiom Alternative Investments, a French wealth management firm with exposure to AT1 bonds, called the decision “quite surprising, not to say … shocking.”

    The European market for such bonds is worth about $250 billion, according to the Financial Times. It could now go into a deep freeze.

    AT1 bonds are also known as “contingent convertibles,” or “CoCos”. They were created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as a way for failing banks to absorb losses, making a taxpayer-funded bailout less likely.

    They are a risky bet — if a lender gets into trouble, this class of bonds can be quickly converted into equity, or written down completely.

    Because they are higher-risk, AT1s offer a higher yield than most other bonds issued by borrowers with similar credit ratings, making them popular with institutional investors.

    It is not the write-down of Credit Suisse’s AT1 bonds that has rocked investors, but the fact that the bank’s shareholders will receive some compensation when bondholders will not.

    Ordinarily, bondholders are higher up the pecking order than shareholders when a banks fails. But because Credit Suisse’s demise has not followed a traditional bankruptcy, analysts told CNN, the same rules don’t apply.

    “The hierarchy of claims remains applicable in the EU… there is no way that shareholders can be paid and AT1 holders [are] paid zero,” Benamou said. “The decision taken by the Swiss authorities is really very strange.”

    Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, told CNN: “It appears that in this case, because it was not a bankruptcy situation it was considered that AT1 bondholders and shareholders would both feel the pain.”

    EU banking regulators and the Bank of England moved Monday to reassure AT1 investors more broadly that they would take priority over shareholders in the event of future bank crises.

    “Common equity instruments [stocks] are the first ones to absorb losses, and only after their full use would additional tier one be required to be written down,” the EU regulators said in a statement. “This approach has been consistently applied in past cases.”

    Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said in a speech Monday that banks in the eurozone had “a very limited exposure” to Credit Suisse, particularly in relation to AT1 bonds.

    “We’re not talking billions, we’re talking millions,” she said.

    The Bank of England said that “holders of [AT1s] should expect to be exposed to losses” when a bank fails according to their usual ranking in the capital hierarchy.

    The legal basis for the Credit Suisse losses may be contested. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a litigation firm headquartered in Los Angeles, said Monday that it had assembled a team of lawyers who were discussing options with Credit Suisse’s AT1 bondholders.

    The surprise move by the SNB has rattled Europe’s AT1 bond market, with investors now questioning whether their holdings could be obliterated if another bank collapses.

    Joost de Graaf, co-head of European credit at Van Lanschot Kempen, a Dutch wealth management firm, told CNN that his fund did not invest in AT1s because he was “afraid [of] something like this,” where regulators could decide that a bank was no longer viable and write down the bonds’ value.

    “For the coming few years, [the AT1] market is going [to go] into some kind of a hibernation probably, where new AT1s will be very hard to place for issuers at acceptable levels,” de Graaf said.

    The impact will likely spill over into the wider bond market, he added, with investors demanding higher yields for bonds now seen as riskier.

    “For the foreseeable future, [banks’] funding [through bonds] will be more expensive,” de Graaf said.

    There are signs that shift may already be happening.

    Invesco’s AT1 Capital Bond exchange-traded fund, which tracks AT1 debt, is currently trading down 5.5% compared with last Friday’s close. WisdomTree, another AT1 ETF listed on the London Stock Exchange, fell 7.4% in afternoon trade.

    But the real damage is the precedent the write-down may have set, said Benamou of Axiom Alternative Investments.

    “No financial analyst had ever believed that AT1 bonds would be brought to zero… given the level of solvency of Credit Suisse… [and] pretty high level of regulatory capital,” he said.

    — Mark Thompson contributed reporting.

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  • Silicon Valley Bank left a void that won’t easily be filled | CNN Business

    Silicon Valley Bank left a void that won’t easily be filled | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    It’s difficult to overstate the influence that Silicon Valley Bank had over the startup world and the ripple effect its collapse this month had on the global tech sector and banking system.

    While SVB was largely known as a regional bank to those outside of the tight-knit venture capital sphere, within certain circles it had become an integral part of the community – a bank that managed the idiosyncrasies of the tech world and helped pave the way for the Silicon Valley-based boom that has consumed much of the economy over the past three decades.

    SVB’s collapse was the largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis: It was the 16th largest bank in the country, holding about $342 billion in client funds and $74 billion in loans.

    At the time of its collapse, about half of all US venture-backed technology and life science firms were banking with SVB. In total, it was the bank for about 2,500 venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Insight Partners.

    But the influence of SVB went beyond lending and banking – former CEO Gregory Becker sat on the boards of numerous tech advocacy groups in the Bay Area. He chaired the TechNet trade association and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and served on the United States Department of Commerce’s Digital Economy Board of Advisors.

    There’s no doubt that the failure of Silicon Valley Bank left a large void in tech. The question is how that gap will be filled.

    To find out, Before the Bell spoke with Ahmad Thomas, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. The influential advocacy group is working to convene its hundreds of member companies – including Amazon, Bank of America, BlackRock, Google, Microsoft and Meta – to discuss what happens next.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Before the Bell: What’s the feeling on the ground with tech and VC leadership in Silicon Valley?

    Ahmad Thomas: Silicon Valley Bank has been a key part of our fabric here for four decades. SVB was truly a pillar of the community and the innovation economy. The absence of SVB – that void – and coalescing leaders to fill that void is where my energy is focused and that is not a small task.

    I would say there was a fairly high level of unease a few days ago, and I believe the swift steps taken by leaders in Washington have helped quell a fair amount of that unease, but looking at Credit Suisse and First Republic just over the last couple of days, clearly we are in a situation that is going to continue to develop in the weeks and months ahead.

    So how do you fill it?

    We’re working to be a voice around stability, particularly about the fundamentals of the innovation economy. We can acknowledge the void given the absence of Silicon Valley Bank, but I do think we need voices out there to be very clear in highlighting that the fundamentals and the innovation infrastructure remains robust here in Silicon Valley.

    This is a moment where I think people need to take a step back, let cooler heads prevail, and understand that there are opportunities both from an investment standpoint, a community engagement standpoint and corporate citizenship standpoint for new leaders in Silicon Valley to step up.

    Are you working to advocate for more permanent regulation in DC?

    It’s far too early for that. But if there are opportunities to enhance access to capital to entrepreneurs to founders of color or in marginalized communities and if there are opportunities to try and drive innovation and economic growth, we will always be at the table for those conversations.

    Do you have any ideas about how long this crisis will continue for? What’s your outlook?

    The problem is twofold: A crisis of confidence and the set of economic conditions on the ground. The economic conditions remain volatile for a variety of reasons: The softening economy, inflationary pressures and the interest rate environment. But I think right now we need to focus on stabilizing confidence in the investor community, in our business executive community and in the broader set of stakeholders around the strength of the innovation economy. That is something we need to shore up near term.

    From CNN’s Mark Thompson

    Switzerland’s biggest bank, UBS, has agreed to buy its ailing rival Credit Suisse (CS) in an emergency rescue deal aimed at stemming financial market panic unleashed by the failure of two American banks earlier this month.

    “UBS today announced the takeover of Credit Suisse,” the Swiss National Bank said in a statement. It said the rescue would “secure financial stability and protect the Swiss economy.”

    UBS is paying 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.25 billion) for Credit Suisse, about 60% less than the bank was worth when markets closed on Friday. Credit Suisse shareholders will be largely wiped out, receiving the equivalent of just 0.76 Swiss francs in UBS shares for stock that was worth 1.86 Swiss francs on Friday.

    Extraordinarily, the deal will not need the approval of shareholders after the Swiss government agreed to change the law to remove any uncertainty about the deal.

    Credit Suisse had been losing the trust of investors and customers for years. In 2022, it recorded its worst loss since the global financial crisis. But confidence collapsed last week after it acknowledged “material weakness” in its bookkeeping and as the demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank spread fear about weaker institutions at a time when soaring interest rates have undermined the value of some financial assets.

    Read more here.

    From CNN’s David Goldman

    A week after Signature Bank failed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said it has sold most of its deposits to Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of New York Community Bank.

    On Monday, Signature Bank’s 40 branches will begin operating as Flagstar Bank. Signature customers won’t need to make any changes to do their banking Monday.

    New York Community Bank bought substantially all of Signature’s deposits and a total of $38.4 billion worth of the company’s assets. That includes $12.9 billion of Signature’s loans, which New York Community Bank purchased at a steep discount -— it paid just $2.7 billion for them. New York Community Bank also paid the FDIC stock that could be worth up to $300 million.

    At the end of last year, Signature had more than $110 billion worth of assets, including $88.6 billion of deposits, showing how the run against the bank two weeks ago led to a massive decline in deposits.

    Not included in the transaction is about $60 billion in other assets, which will remain in the FDIC’s receivership. It also doesn’t include $4 billion in deposits from Signature’s digital bank business.

    Read more here.

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  • FDIC sells most of failed Signature Bank to Flagstar | CNN Business

    FDIC sells most of failed Signature Bank to Flagstar | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A week after Signature Bank failed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said it has sold most of its deposits to Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of New York Community Bank.

    On Monday, Signature Bank’s 40 branches will begin operating as Flagstar Bank. Signature customers won’t need to make any changes to do their banking Monday.

    New York Community Bank bought substantially all of Signature’s deposits and a total of $38.4 billion worth of the company’s assets. That includes $12.9 billion of Signature’s loans, which New York Community Bank purchased at a steep discount -— it paid just $2.7 billion for them. New York Community Bank also paid the FDIC stock that could be worth up to $300 million.

    At the end of last year, Signature had more than $110 billion worth of assets, including $88.6 billion of deposits, showing how the run against the bank two weeks ago led to a massive decline in deposits.

    Not included in the transaction is about $60 billion in other assets, which will remain in the FDIC’s receivership. It also doesn’t include $4 billion in deposits from Signature’s digital bank business.

    As the banking crisis spreads, banks have grown increasingly wary of taking on risk. That’s likely why New York Community Bank was unwilling to take on all Signature’s assets.

    “We are unsurprised the FDIC retained loans as we would expect banks to be cautious on quickly buying loans without liability and loss protections,” said Jaret Seiberg, analyst at TD Cowan. “More broadly, we see it as positive for consumer confidence for the branches to be opening Monday as NYCB branches.”

    The FDIC said Sunday it expects to sell off those assets over time, and the total cost to the government will ultimately be about $2.5 billion.

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  • Opinion: The SVB collapse doesn’t have to be the first in a chain of many | CNN

    Opinion: The SVB collapse doesn’t have to be the first in a chain of many | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Lanhee J. Chen is a regular contributor to CNN Opinion and the David and Diane Steffy fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution. He was a candidate for California state controller in 2022. He has played senior roles in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations and has been an adviser to four presidential campaigns, including as policy director of 2012 Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan campaign. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed this month, analysts and policymakers quickly began considering how to prevent similar failures from happening in the future. While there are changes that lawmakers should consider, when it comes to financial regulation, history shows us that politicians are usually reacting to the last crisis and one step behind the next one.

    The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to passage of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, which closed insolvent financial institutions, created new regulatory agencies and implemented restrictions on how savings and loan (or thrift) institutions could invest deposited funds.

    The 2007-2008 financial crisis led to passage of the sweeping Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, which revamped federal regulation of the financial services sector and placed restrictions on how banks do business. Amid criticism that Dodd-Frank had gone too far in regulating banks, a bipartisan coalition in Congress passed, and then-President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018, some rollbacks of Dodd-Frank’s requirements pertaining to small and midsize financial institutions.

    Democrats have largely blamed this rollback of regulations for SVB’s demise. Many Republicans, for their part, have focused their aim on whether the bank’s leadership spent too much time pursuing “woke” policies on diversity and sustainability rather than ensuring depositors were protected.

    The fact that there is so little overlap between Republican and Democrat critiques in the wake of SVB’s collapse illuminates the challenging road ahead for bipartisan policy solutions to avert a future similar failure. If the two sides can’t even agree on the principal cause of the bank’s failure, it’s unlikely there will be consensus on the policies needed to shore up the financial system for the future.

    But they should. While Democrats generally favor more aggressive oversight of the financial system and Republicans largely argue that the current regulatory scheme is sufficient, the right answer looking ahead is somewhere in between.

    In the wake of SVB’s failure, some regulatory interventions have come into focus and could form the basis of policy discussions in the coming weeks and months as Congress considers how to respond to the current banking crisis.

    First, SVB’s demise came when a lack of liquidity (or a shortfall of cash on hand) left it unable to pay out depositors when they came looking for their money. The bank had invested a disproportionate amount of assets in long-term debt that was purchased at a time when interest rates were much lower than they are today. When the bank attempted to liquidate this debt over the last few weeks, it was forced to do so at a significant loss. SVB failed to hedge against risk by diversifying its investments.

    When depositors tried to withdraw $42 billion in cash from the bank on a single day, SVB’s cash shortfall generated a panic among those who had deposits at the bank and raised concerns about the health of the US banking system more broadly.

    Just as individual investors are often advised to diversify their investment strategies to minimize risk, so too might politicians look to requirements that banks ensure that they have proper diversification in how they are investing their assets.

    Further, some Republicans and many Democrats are also calling for expanded deposit insurance so that bank deposits over the current federal cap of $250,000 are also insured. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a vocal supporter of increased financial sector regulation, has called for increased deposit insurance that would be paid for by banks. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California is expected soon to introduce legislation that raises or removes the insurance cap entirely, such that deposits of all amounts will be protected.

    Some Republicans have joined them in addressing the insurance cap. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, for example, has argued that lifting the cap (for example, by ensuring the cap keeps up with inflation) would equalize the playing field between large banks and smaller local and regional ones. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah has suggested that larger depositors might be insured up to the entire amount of their deposits in exchange for a small fee.

    If Congress moves toward increasing or eliminating the deposit insurance cap entirely, it should do so carefully. Depending on how the policy is constructed, such changes could disproportionately benefit wealthier institutional depositors or encourage bad behavior by banks if they know an open-ended bailout is waiting on the other end of risky investment decisions.

    Finally, some changes will undoubtedly come through the Federal Reserve, rather than Congress. This is probably a good thing, as these policymakers have some insulation from the political forces that directly affect lawmakers.

    The Federal Reserve, for example, will likely examine the extent of both capital and liquidity requirements at banks based on their total assets. A bank’s capital is the difference between its assets and liabilities or, put another way, the resources a bank has to ultimately absorb losses. Liquidity, by comparison, is a measure of the cash and assets a bank has immediately on hand to pay obligations (such as money that depositors might ask for).

    America’s central bank may also look at the content of “stress tests” created by the Dodd-Frank Act and designed to regularly assess the health of large financial institutions across the country. For nearly a decade, tests have been benchmarked to a low-interest rate environment, which is not reflective of recent conditions.

    But ultimately, the Federal Reserve is not blameless in the collapse of SVB as it created a fertile environment for the bank’s failure by keeping interest rates as low as they were for as long as they were. Lawmakers should do their part to make sure people understand that monetary policy has far-reaching impacts.

    While the best way to prevent the next SVB is likely to be viewed by policymakers through partisan-tinted glasses, there are avenues for Democrats and Republicans to work together. But the window to do so is narrow and closing. This time next year, we’ll be in the throes of presidential primary elections, and neither party will be particularly interested in compromise — even if that’s what our financial system needs.

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  • Confused about the bank meltdown? Here’s how to speak Wall Street | CNN Business

    Confused about the bank meltdown? Here’s how to speak Wall Street | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Wall Street can seem bewildering, given its sheer amount of jargon, banking terms, and acronyms.

    But headlines this week, from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to Credit Suisse’s need for a lifeline to instability at First Republic, have made the business of finance a national concern.

    So when you hear the FDIC is taking over, a Treasury portfolio is sinking or a bank was backstopped and bailed out, what exactly does that mean?

    Here’s a guide to all the key terms you’ve been hearing.

    It’s an acronym for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, an independent government agency that protects depositors in banks. It’s one of the main names as banking failures play out because it can step in and make sure the institutions are operating properly.

    When a bank fails, the standard insurance amount is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category.

    Providing financial support to an institution that would otherwise collapse. Bailouts are associated with government intervention, as it so famously did during the 2008 financial crisis.

    It’s important to note that though a government dispatched a rescue mission for SVB and First Republic, they were not bailed out by it.

    How easily a company or bank can turn an asset to cash without losing a ton of its value. Liquidity can be used to gauge the ability to pay off short-term loans or other bills. People feel comfortable in liquid markets because it’s generally fast and easy to buy and sell.

    The most “liquid” asset, as you can probably guess, is cash.

    Deposits are cash you put into your bank account, and withdrawals are money that’s taken out. A bank run is when a rush of clients withdraw money all at once, often due to rumor or panic.

    If a bank has a ratio above 100% (like First Republic), then it loans out more money than it has deposits. That’s not a good situation to be in.

    Investments backed by the US government – and known to be one of the safest ones out there. They include Treasury Bills, Treasury Bonds and Treasury Notes. However, Treasuries are sensitive to broader economic conditions like inflation and changing interest rates.

    The value of SVB’s Treasuries portfolio sank as interest rates rose.

    Anything that could be used to generate cash flow. That could be tangible assets like stocks and buildings, or intangible assets like brand recognition.

    Inflow is the money going into a business – think from product sales and from smart investments. Outflow is cash leaving the business.

    Technically, it’s alternative steps a business takes to meet its goals. That could include strategies like diversifying and product development.

    But what does it really mean? The company might be thinking about putting itself up for sale.

    A rapid and mass selling of a stock based on an upcoming fear – like rumors of a bank collapse.

    Cash or other rewards companies gift to their shareholders.

    An action that lets a company keep surviving. For example, Credit Suisse just got a $54 billion lifeline from the Swiss central bank, though that hasn’t entirely quelled investor fears yet. Another bank that benefited from a lifeline is First Republic, when 11 banks deposited $30 billion.

    This term is used widely in the financial sector to describe a last-resort financial protection, almost like an insurance policy. It’s a secondary source of funds through either credit support or guaranteed payment for unsubscribed shares.

    A system used by the FDIC that lets it take action on a bank crisis that could drag down the entire sector with it. Though it’s pretty rare to enact it, the FDIC used this exception to take over SVB and Signature Bank last week.

    This is the Fed’s main way to directly lend money to banks and provide them more liquidity and stability. The loans last up to 90 days. Many banks are utilizing this tool right now because the Fed made it easier to borrow from the discount window in the wake of SVB to avoid further bank runs.

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  • SVB collapse was driven by ‘the first Twitter-fueled bank run’ | CNN Business

    SVB collapse was driven by ‘the first Twitter-fueled bank run’ | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The massive amount of customer withdrawals that led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank had all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned bank run, but with a new twist befitting the primary industry the bank served: much of it unfolded online.

    Customers withdrew $42 billion in a single day last week from Silicon Valley Bank, leaving the bank with $1 billion in negative cash balance, the company said in a regulatory filing. The staggering withdrawals unfolded at a speed enabled by digital banking and were likely fueled in part by viral panic spreading on social media platforms and, reportedly, in private chat groups.

    In the day leading up to the bank’s collapse, multiple prominent venture capitalists took to Twitter in particular, and used their large platforms to raise alarms about the situation, sometimes typing in all caps. Some investors urged startups to rethink where they kept their cash. Founders and CEOs then shared tweets about the concerning situation at the bank in private Slack channels, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    On the other side of a screen, startup leaders raced to withdraw funds online – so many, in fact, that some told CNN the online system appeared to go down. Still, the end result was a modern race to withdraw funds, which House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry later described in a statement as ” the first Twitter-fueled bank run.”

    “Even back in the ancient days, way before we had any form of modern communication, this stuff tended to be rumors that moved really fast. The reason it would happen is people would walk down the street and observe people standing outside of banks,” Andrew Metrick, Janet L. Yellen Professor of Finance and Management at the Yale School of Management, told CNN. “Now we don’t have that, but we have Twitter.”

    The experience of the bank run was also far removed from prior eras when a large number of customers would physically show up at a bank to withdraw funds (though some did line up outside Silicon Valley Bank locations, too.) Now, many could do so online or through mobile devices.

    “What made the Silicon Valley Bank run unique was (1) the ease with which its customers could execute withdrawals and (2) the speed with which news of Silicon Valley Bank’s impending demise spread,” Ben Thompson, an analyst who tracks the tech industry, wrote in a post on Monday. “It was the speed, fueled by zero distribution costs for both rumors and withdrawals, that was so destabilizing.”

    Silicon Valley Bank was arguably uniquely susceptible to those factors given its tech-focused customer base. Moreover, its clients, many of whom were venture-backed businesses, were far more likely than the average consumer to keep more than the standard maximum FDIC insured amount of $250,000 in their accounts.

    “The FDIC covers 250K, but am I going to recover my whole 8 figures?” one startup founder told CNN last week, after the bank had collapsed. Other large tech companies kept even larger sums with the bank. That likely made the bank’s customers even more susceptible to the panic spreading online.

    Some prominent tech figures, including Mark Suster, a partner at venture capital firm Upfront Ventures, urged those in the VC community to “speak out publicly to quell the panic” around Silicon Valley Bank last week and cautioned against creating “mass hysteria.”

    “Classic ‘runs on the bank’ hurt our entire system,” he wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread on Thursday. “People are making public jokes about this. It’s not a joke, this is serious stuff. Please treat it as such.”

    His calls for calm weren’t enough. The next day, the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stepped in and took control of the bank, which only added to the viral panic on Twitter.

    “YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW,” Jason Calacanis, a tech investor, wrote on Twitter Sunday. “THAT IS THE PROPER REACTION.”

    Hours later, the Biden administration stepped in and guaranteed the bank’s customers would have access to all their money starting Monday.

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  • First Republic secures $30 billion rescue from large banks | CNN Business

    First Republic secures $30 billion rescue from large banks | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    First Republic Bank, facing a crisis of confidence from investors and customers, is set to receive a $30 billion lifeline from a group of America’s largest banks.

    “This show of support by a group of large banks is most welcome, and demonstrates the resilience of the banking system,” the Treasury Department said in a statement Thursday.

    The major banks include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Truist.

    The $30 billion infusion will give the struggling San Francisco lender much-needed cash to meet customer withdrawals and buttress confidence in the US banking system during a tumultuous moment for lenders.

    A First Republic spokesman declined to comment.

    In a statement, the banks said their action “reflects their confidence in First Republic and in banks of all sizes,” adding that “regional, midsize and small banks are critical to the health and functioning of our financial system.”

    First Republic’s shares, which were halted several times for volatility Thursday, ended the day up more than 10%.

    The bank’s problems underscored continued worries about the banking system in the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

    Both Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings downgraded First Republic Bank’s credit rating on Wednesday over concerns that depositors could pull their cash.

    Many regional banks, including First Republic, have large amounts of uninsured deposits above the $250,000 FDIC limit. Although not close to SVB’s massive percentage of uninsured deposits (94% of its total), First Republic has a sizable 68% of total deposits that are uninsured, according to S&P Global.

    That led many customers to exit the bank and put their money elsewhere, creating a problem for First Republic: It has to borrow money or sell assets to pay customers their deposits in cash.

    To make money, banks use a portion of customers’ deposits to give out loans to other customers. But First Republic has an unusually large 111% liability-to-deposit ratio, S&P Global says. That means the bank has lent out more money than it has in deposits from customers, making it a particularly risky bet for investors.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday met privately in Washington with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon before 11 banks agreed to deposit $30 billion in First Republic Bank to stabilize the teetering lender, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    The meeting served as a culmination of what had been a series of conversations over the last two days between Yellen and other US officials and leaders from some of the country’s largest banks as they sought a private sector lifeline for the battered California bank.

    Yellen had driven the effort from the government side, while Dimon led the effort to organize the bank executives that would eventually get behind the dramatic infusion of deposits.

    Yellen first conceived of the idea of the largest US banks coming together to direct deposits toward First Republic, according to a separate source familiar with the matter. The move was seen as critical to stabilizing the bank’s deposit base – but also a critical signal to financial markets about both the bank and the US financial system.

    The Federal Reserve created a loan system designed to prevent regional banks from failing after SVB collapsed. The facility will allow banks to give the Fed their Treasury bonds as collateral for one-year loans. In return, the Fed will give banks the value that the banks paid for the Treasuries, which have plunged in the past year as the Fed has hiked interest rates.

    That extraordinary federal intervention appears to have been insufficient to keep investors satisfied.

    First Republic on Sunday announced a deal with JPMorgan to gain fast access to cash if needed, and the bank then said it had $70 billion in unused assets that it could quickly use to pay customers’ withdrawals if needed.

    – CNN’s Phil Mattingly contributed to this report

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  • The tech industry avoided an ‘extinction-level event,’ but it’s not unscathed | CNN Business

    The tech industry avoided an ‘extinction-level event,’ but it’s not unscathed | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    For much of the weekend, Silicon Valley scrambled to find a way through what one prominent tech investor described as an “extinction-level event for startups” after the collapse of a top lender in the industry.

    Startups raced to line up loans from venture funds and fintech firms to make payroll. Venture-backed retailers hosted last-minute sales to boost their cash reserves. And at least one prominent startup accelerator convinced thousands of CEOs and founders to sign an “urgent” petition calling for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others to offer “relief.”

    Then, late Sunday, federal officials stepped in to guarantee that all customers of the failed Silicon Valley Bank would have access to their full deposits on Monday. The sense of relief was palpable throughout the tech sector.

    “Obviously, I’m quite relieved,” said Stefan Kalb, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based startup Shelf Engine, who told CNN that his company would have had to shut down by the end of the week without the government intervention. “It was a very stressful weekend and I’m quite relieved with the news.”

    Parker Conrad, the CEO of HR platform Rippling, who had previously said some customers’ payrolls were being delayed by the bank failure, tweeted Sunday: “Anyone else breathing a sigh of relief and looking forward to a good night’s sleep tonight?”

    And Garry Tan, the CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator who authored the petition to Yellen, praised the federal government for “decisive action.” Tan, the investor who had previously warned of “an *extinction level event* for startups” that would “set startups and innovation back by 10 years or more,” added his appreciation on Sunday for “everyone who helped us through a very very intense time.”

    But even as the tech industry enjoys a respite from a fearful weekend, unknowns remain. “You can feel the collective *sigh*,” Ryan Hoover, a tech founder and investor wrote on Twitter Sunday. “I’m still nervous,” he added. “Hard to predict the collateral effects.”

    It’s unclear how the aftershocks of the bank’s collapse will add to the startup industry’s growing challenges accessing capital. SVB’s collapse also risks changing how the world, and prospective recruits, think of Silicon Valley.

    For years, the term itself conjured an image of an enclave of bright, contrarian, libertarian engineers and thinkers who could see around corners and make big bets on the future. Now, that same industry is relying on the federal government to survive after failing to see the risk, or worse, contributing to it through a shared hysteria.

    In the chaotic days leading up to the bank’s collapse on Friday, some venture firms reportedly urged their portfolio companies to withdraw their money, which may have contributed to the bank failing.

    Then, over the weekend, many venture capitalists and tech founders banded together to try and lobby government and public goodwill towards saving the companies impacted by Silicon Valley Bank’s sudden collapse.

    While some VCs appeared to embrace fear-mongering on Twitter, much of the public messaging focused on the small businesses with exposure to Silicon Valley Bank that might be not be able to continue operating after losing access to the money in their bank account.

    “We are not asking for a bailout for the bank equity holders or its management; we are asking you to save innovation in the American economy,” the Y Combinator petition stated. “We ask for relief and attention to an immediate critical impact on small businesses, startups, and their employees who are depositors at the bank.”

    A separate coalition of more than a dozen venture capital firms, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Upfront Ventures, released a joint statement late Friday supporting Silicon Valley Bank, given its unique and vital role in the startup economy. The bank worked with nearly half of all venture-backed tech and healthcare companies in the United States.

    “For forty years, it has been an important platform that played a pivotal role in serving the startup community and supporting the innovation economy in the US,” the statement read. “In the event that SVB were to be purchased and appropriately capitalized, we would be strongly supportive and encourage our portfolio companies to resume their banking relationship with them.”

    Even before the bank’s collapse, the startup industry was in a tough moment. Venture capital funding had dwindled amid rising interest rates and broader macroeconomic uncertainty; tech companies were cutting staff and ambitious projects; and some of the biggest private companies were reportedly slashing their valuations.

    The instability at a top tech lender, and the lingering questions about its impact on other regional banks and the broader financial system, risk making it even harder for money-losing startups to access the capital they need to survive.

    President Joe Biden emphasized in remarks Monday that “no losses will be borne by the taxpayers” related to the government’s intervention for Silicon Valley Bank. But some are already skeptical of that statement, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who wrote in an op-ed Monday morning, “We’ll see if that’s true.”

    More immediately, there’s uncertainty around how long it will take for companies to get their money out of the bank.

    As of Monday, Kalb said the money in his Silicon Valley Bank account has not been transferred yet to the new JPMorgan Chase account he set up for Shelf Engine on Thursday. “I’ve been obsessively checking my email,” he said. “Hopefully the money will be able to be transferred shortly.”

    Ben Kaufman, the co-founder of venture-backed toy store and online retailer Camp, told CNN’s Poppy Harlow in an interview Monday morning that he and his team spent the weekend trying to “fight for survival,” including holding a last-minute 40% off sale, using the code “BANKRUN,” to raise capital over the weekend.

    “We did not know how long it was going to take for us to get our cash out … we still kind of don’t, they say today, we’ll see what happens,” he said, noting the bank held 85% of his company’s assets. “We hope we can, and we’re so grateful that the Fed stepped in, and the way they did.”

    When asked if the past week’s events would change how and where he stores his money, Kaufman said that is “going to have to be a consideration moving forward.”

    “I don’t want to do this again,” he said.

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  • Wall Street pummels regional banks, despite Biden’s assurances | CNN Business

    Wall Street pummels regional banks, despite Biden’s assurances | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Wall Street’s confidence in regional banks remained shaky Monday, despite emergency measures from the Biden administration to protect customer deposits.

    First Republic shares fell more than 60% and were briefly halted for volatility. Western Alliance Bancorp’s stock also fell 60%, and PacWest Bancorp fell more than 34%.

    The SPDR S&P Regional Banking exchange-traded fund fell 11%.

    Monday’s turmoil for bank stocks stems from the collapse Friday of Silicon Valley Bank, which came unglued last week as customers panicked and yanked their deposits.

    Rather than bailing out the bank, the Biden administration and federal regulators on Sunday night said they would to backstop customers’ deposits — even those that weren’t insured. The same protections would be in place for customers of Signature, a New York regional lender that folded when depositors were apparently spooked by SVB’s demise.

    By guaranteeing all deposits — even the uninsured money that customers kept with the failed banks — the government aimed to prevent more bank runs and to help companies that deposited large sums with the banks to continue to make payroll and fund their operations.

    The Fed will also make additional funding available for eligible financial institutions to prevent runs on similar banks in the future.

    Despite those emergency measures to avoid a 2008-style crisis, investors sold off shares of regional banks that are seen as having similar risk potential.

    “It’s a good thing that we have the backstop, and it’s a good thing that the depositors were protected,” said Mike O’Rourke, chief market strategist at Jones Trading. “But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s still problems — you’re just basically buying time to sort the problems out in a better way.”

    The intervention from the Biden administration and the Fed does not amount to a 2008-style bailout, meaning investors in the banks’ stock and bonds will not be protected.

    O’Rourke said he’s not concerned about the health of the banking system.

    “It’s a confidence-crisis risk,” he said. “If we get through the next 24, 48 hours without the regulators having to close anymore banks, we should be fine.”

    First Republic lists $213 billion in assets. The lender reached out to customers over the weekend in a bid to reassure them.

    “In light of recent industry events, the last few days have caused uncertainty in the financial markets,” First Republic senior executives said in an email to clients viewed by CNN. “We want to take a moment to reinforce the safety and stability of First Republic, reflected in the continued strength of our capital, liquidity and operations.”

    —CNN’s Matt Egan contributed reporting.

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  • Why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and what it could mean | CNN Business

    Why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and what it could mean | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Silicon Valley Bank collapsed with astounding speed on Friday. Investors are now on edge about whether its demise could spark a broader banking meltdown.

    The US federal government has stepped in to guarantee customer deposits, but SVB’s downfall continues to reverberate across global financial markets. The government has also shut down Signature Bank, a regional bank that was teetering on the brink of collapse, and guaranteed its deposits.

    In a sign of how seriously officials are taking the SVB failure, US President Joe Biden told Americans Monday that they “can rest assured that our banking system is safe,” adding: “We will do whatever is needed on top of all this.”

    Here’s what you need to know about the biggest US bank failure since the global financial crisis.

    Established in 1983, Silicon Valley Bank was, just before collapsing, America’s 16th largest commercial bank. It provided banking services to nearly half of all US venture-backed technology and life science companies.

    It also has operations in Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

    SVB benefited hugely from the tech sector’s explosive growth in recent years, fueled by ultra-low borrowing costs and a pandemic-induced boom in demand for digital services.

    The bank’s assets, which include loans, more than tripled from $71 billion at the end of 2019 to a peak of $220 billion at the end of March 2022, according to financial statements. Deposits ballooned from $62 billion to $198 billion over that period, as thousands of tech startups parked their cash at the lender. Its global headcount more than doubled.

    SVB’s collapse came suddenly, following a frenetic 48 hours during which customers yanked deposits from the lender in a classic run on the bank.

    But the root of its demise goes back several years. Like many other banks, SVB ploughed billions into US government bonds during the era of near-zero interest rates.

    What seemed like a safe bet quickly came unstuck, as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates aggressively to tame inflation.

    When interest rates rise, bond prices fall, so the jump in rates eroded the value of SVB’s bond portfolio. The portfolio was yielding an average 1.79% return last week, far below the 10-year Treasury yield of around 3.9%, Reuters reported.

    At the same time, the Fed’s hiking spree sent borrowing costs higher, meaning tech startups had to channel more cash towards repaying debt. At the same time, they were struggling to raise new venture capital funding.

    That forced companies to draw down on deposits held by SVB to fund their operations and growth.

    While SVB’s problems can be traced back to its earlier investment decisions, the run on the bank was triggered Wednesday when the lender announced that it had sold a bunch of securities at a loss and would sell $2.25 billion in new shares to plug the hole in its finances.

    That set off panic among customers, who withdrew their money in large numbers.

    The bank’s stock plummeted 60% Thursday and dragged other bank shares down with it as investors began to fear a repeat of the global financial crisis a decade and a half ago.

    By Friday morning, trading in SVB shares was halted and it had abandoned efforts to raise capital or find a buyer. California regulators intervened, shutting the bank down and placing it in receivership under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which typically means liquidating the bank’s assets to pay back depositors and creditors.

    US regulators said Sunday that they would guarantee all SVB customers’ deposits. The move is aimed at preventing more bank runs and helping tech companies to continue paying staff and funding their operations.

    The intervention does not amount to a 2008-style bailout, however, which means investors in the company’s stock and bonds will not be protected.

    “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 mean that we’re not going to do that again,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CBS in an interview Sunday.

    “But we are concerned about depositors and are focused on trying to meet their needs.”

    There are already some signs of stress at other banks. Trading in First Republic Bank

    (FRC)     and PacWest Bancorp

    (PACW)     was temporarily halted Monday after the shares plunged 65% and 52% respectively. Charles Schwab

    (SCHW)     stock was down 7% at 11.30 a.m. ET Monday.

    In Europe, the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 Banks index, which tracks 42 big EU and UK banks, fell 5.6% in morning trade — notching its biggest fall since last March. Shares in embattled Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse were down 9%.

    SVB isn’t the only financial institution whose investments into government bonds and other assets have fallen dramatically in value.

    At the end of 2022, US banks were sitting on $620 billion in unrealized losses — assets that have decreased in price but haven’t been sold yet, according to the FDIC.

    In a sign that regulators have concerns about wider financial chaos, the Fed said Sunday that it would make additional funding available for eligible financial institutions to prevent the next SVB from collapsing.

    Most analysts point out that US and European banks have much stronger financial buffers now than during the global financial crisis. They also highlight that SVB had very heavy exposure to the tech sector, which has been particularly hard hit by rising interest rates.

    “While SVB is a major failure, [it] and other niche players like Signature are quite unique in the broader banking world,” research analysts David Covey, Adrian Cighi and Jaimin Shah at M&G Investments commented in a blog post on Monday. “So unique, in our view, that it is unlikely to create material problems for any of the large diversified banks in the US or Europe from a credit point of view.”

    HSBC stepped in Monday to buy SVB UK for £1 ($1.2), securing the deposits of thousands of British tech companies that hold money at the lender.

    Had a buyer not been found, SVB UK would have been placed into insolvency by the Bank of England, leaving customers with only deposits worth up to £85,000 ($100,000) — or £170,000 ($200,000) for joint accounts — guaranteed.

    The HSBC rescue is “fantastic news” for the UK startup ecosystem, said Piotr Pisarz, the CEO of Uncapped, a financial tech startup that lends to other startups. “I think we can all relax a bit today,” he told CNN.

    In a statement, HSBC CEO Noel Quinn said the acquisition “strengthens our commercial banking franchise and enhances our ability to serve innovative and fast-growing firms, including in the technology and life science sectors, in the UK and internationally.”

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  • From Wile E. Coyote to edibles: Recession forecasts are getting weird | CNN Business

    From Wile E. Coyote to edibles: Recession forecasts are getting weird | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Understanding the economy is a complicated task, and even the experts are struggling to answer seemingly simple questions like “Are we on the brink of a recession?” or “Why isn’t inflation falling faster?”

    Many have resorted to the use of metaphor to convey the current complexity of the economy.

    It’s a communications tactic that some Federal Reserve officials have long favored. In the early 1980s, Nancy Teeters, the first woman appointed to the Federal Reserve Board, came up with an apt metaphor to explain why she disagreed with steep rate hikes implemented by then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

    Her colleagues were “pulling the financial fabric of this country so tight that it’s going to rip,” she said. “Once you tear a piece of fabric, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to put it back together again,” she added, before remarking that “none of these guys has ever sewn anything in his life.”

    These days, economists and analysts are turning to increasingly outlandish metaphors to help translate their thoughts.

    Here are some of the most interesting descriptors used recently and what they mean:

    Wile E. Coyote

    If you think back to Saturday morning cartoons, you may remember the never-ending, and mostly futile, chase between Wile E. Coyote and his nemesis, Road Runner. That pursuit often ended with Wile E. running off a cliff and into mid-air.

    The toons were fun sources of entertainment in our salad years, but former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says they now double as a case study for the Fed and the economy.

    “The [Federal Reserve’s] process of bringing down inflation will bring on a recession at some stage, as it almost always has in the past,” Summers told CNN last week.

    And for the US economy, it could likely mean a “Wile E. Coyote moment,” Summers said — if we run off the cliff, gravity will eventually win out.

    “The economy could hit an air pocket in a few months,” he said.

    Antibiotics

    When describing the state of the economy, Summers doesn’t just rely on Looney Tunes. He also borrows from the medical community.

    While describing why the Fed can’t end its rate hike regimen when inflation shows signs of showing, Summers has compared higher interest rates to medicine for a country sick with high inflation. The entire dose must be taken for the treatment to fully work, he says.

    “We’ve all had the experience of taking a course of drugs and giving up, stopping the drugs, before the course was exhausted, simply because we felt better. And then, whatever infection we had came back and it was harder to fight the second time,” Summers told Boston’s NPR news station WBUR in February.

    For what it’s worth, Before the Bell is also guilty of using this one.

    Fog report

    We may be driving in the fog, landing a plane in the fog or even just walking in it.

    What’s important in this oft-used scenario is that it’s hard to see and we’re doing something that typically requires clear visibility.

    Clients “facing the fog of uncertainty in financial markets, economic growth and geopolitics,” should “avoid unnecessary lane changes,” and “allow extra time to reach your destination,” advised Goldman Sachs analysts earlier this year.

    It’s essentially a fancy way of saying that no one really knows what’s going on in this economy. Instead of attempting to find a way out of the chaos, investors should slow down, stay the course and wait for recovery.

    Edibles

    Late last year, investment analyst Peter Boockvar used a semi-illicit metaphor to explain why he thought the Fed might be over-tightening the economy into recession. He compared the Fed to an inexperienced consumer of weed gummies, which can take a long time to kick in.

    During that waiting period, an eager consumer may think the drugs aren’t working and eat more before the effects of the first dose even set in. They then inevitably find themselves way too stoned and feeling not-so-great.

    Boockvar was careful to note that he himself does not indulge in this practice, by the way.

    Storm chasing

    JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon should receive an honorary degree in meteorology for his recessionary weather predictions.

    The Big Bank exec has repeatedly referred to economic recession as a storm gathering on the horizon — occasionally he’ll update the public on how far away and how bad that storm is.

    Last summer Dimon spooked markets when he compared a possible upcoming recession to a “hurricane.” In November, he downgraded it to a “storm.”

    By January, his forecast was simply “storm clouds,” adding that he probably should never have used the term “hurricane.”

    Polyurethane

    Rick Rieder, BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer of Global Fixed Income, has likened the economy to a bendable piece of plastic. Much like the economy, he wrote, polyurethane, “displays flexibility and adaptability, but also durability and strength.”

    He added that “the material’s ability to be stretched, bent, stressed and flexed without breaking, while in fact returning to its original condition, is what makes it so chemically unique. In recent years the US economy has displayed a remarkable resilience to stresses and an extraordinary ability to adapt to changing conditions.”

    Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell about American job losses being potential casualties of the central bank’s battle against high inflation.

    Warren, a frequent critic of the Fed’s leader, noted that an additional 2 million people would have to lose their jobs if the unemployment rate rises from its current 3.6% rate to reach the Fed’s projections of 4.6% by the end of the year.

    “If you could speak directly to the two million hardworking people who have decent jobs today, who you’re planning to get fired over the next year, what would you say to them?” Warren asked.

    Powell argued that all Americans, not just two million, are suffering under high inflation.

    “Will working people be better off if we just walk away from our jobs and inflation remains 5% or 6%?” Powell replied.

    Warren cautioned Powell that he was “gambling with people’s lives.”

    The discussion was part of a larger cost-benefit conversation that keeps popping up around the jobs market: Which is worse — widespread job loss or elevated inflation?

    CNN spoke with two top economic analysts with different perspectives to gain a deeper understanding of the debate.

    Below is our interview with Johns Hopkins economist Laurence Ball.

    Yesterday we published our interview with Roosevelt Institute director Michael Konczal, you can read that here.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Before the Bell: Is it necessary to increase the unemployment rate to successfully fight inflation?

    Laurence Ball: There’s a trade off between inflation and unemployment. When the economy is very strong and unemployment is pushed down, inflation tends to be higher. Right now there are almost two job openings per unemployed worker, the supply of workers looking for jobs and the demand for firms to hire is out of whack. That’s leading to faster wage increases, which sounds good except that gets passed through to faster price increases and more inflation. So somehow the labor market has to be brought back towards a normal balance of workers and jobs and that means slowing down the economy, and that probably means raising unemployment.

    Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis of two million jobs lost to get down to 2% inflation?

    If we assume we have to get inflation down to 2%, then it’s just an unhappy fact of life that that’s going to require higher unemployment. But a lot of people, including me, think that if the Fed gets it down to 4% or 3%, that’s the time to declare victory or say, ‘close enough for government work.’

    It gets more and more expensive in terms of how much unemployment it costs to go from 3% to 2% inflation. Those last few points will have disproportionately large costs, and it’s very dubious if that’s really worth it.

    Now, the Fed has the political problem that they’ve been insisting on a 2% target rate for years. If they say right at this moment that 3% or 4% is okay that would be seen as surrendering or moving the goalposts. I think a likely outcome is that inflation gets down to 3% or 4% and the Fed continues to say their target is a 2% inflation rate but never does what has to be done to get it there.

    If you examine Fed history you see that 5% appears to be a magic number. When inflation is above 5% it becomes this big political issue. When it goes below 5% it disappears from the headlines.

    What do you think is important for our readers to know about this back-and-forth between Powell and Warren?

    Behind all of this, in a market economy there’s sort of a basic glitch. We have this thing called unemployment, we sort of chronically have not enough jobs for everybody and that’s a big problem. The problem can be reduced somewhat in the short run if you get the economy going very fast. But then that leads to inflation. Accepting that unemployment has to go back up is just recognizing that there’s this glitch in the market economy or capitalism. It’s not clear how we can get around that.

    CNN Business’ David Goldman reports: 

    In an extraordinary action to restore confidence in America’s banking system, the Biden administration on Sunday guaranteed that customers of the failed Silicon Valley Bank will have access to all their money starting Monday.

    In a related action, the government shut down Signature Bank, a regional bank that was teetering on the brink of collapse in recent days. Signature’s customers will receive a similar deal, ensuring that even uninsured deposits will be returned to them Monday.

    SVB collapse: live updates

    In a joint statement Sunday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg said the FDIC will make SVB and Signature’s customers whole. By guaranteeing all deposits — even the uninsured money that customers kept with the failed banks — the government aimed to prevent more bank runs and to help companies that deposited large sums with the banks to continue to make payroll and fund their operations.

    The Fed will also make additional funding available for eligible financial institutions to prevent runs on similar banks in the future.

    Wall Street investors were relieved that the government intervened as stock futures rebounded on Sunday evening, although the rally is fading Monday morning. Markets had tumbled more than 3% Thursday and Friday as investors feared more bank failures and systemic risk for the tech sector.

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  • SVB employees to receive 45 days of employment at 1.5 times pay, reports say | CNN Business

    SVB employees to receive 45 days of employment at 1.5 times pay, reports say | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation offered Silicon Valley Bank employees 45 days of employment and 1.5 times their salary, reports say.

    An FDIC official did not comment on the details to CNN, but said it is standard practice and one of the first steps the independent government agency takes after being named receiver.

    US workers also received their annual bonuses on Friday, just hours before FDIC took over the collapsed lender, Axios reported.

    SVB collapsed Friday morning after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and a capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history.

    California regulators shuttered the tech lender and put it under the control of the FDIC.

    The FDIC is acting as a receiver, which typically means it will liquidate the bank’s assets to pay back its customers, including depositors and creditors.

    Employees, except essential and branch workers, were told to keep working remotely, Reuters reported. The bank had more than 8,500 employees at the end of 2022.

    The FDIC said the main office and all 17 branches of SVB, located in California and Massachusetts, will reopen Monday.

    The FDIC, an independent government agency that insures bank deposits and oversees financial institutions, said all insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits by no later than Monday morning. It said it would pay uninsured depositors an “advance dividend within the next week.”

    The FDIC took over in the midmorning Friday; usually it waits until markets close.

    “SVB’s condition deteriorated so quickly that it couldn’t last just five more hours,” wrote Better Markets CEO Dennis M. Kelleher. “That’s because its depositors were withdrawing their money so fast that the bank was insolvent, and an intraday closure was unavoidable due to a classic bank run.”

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  • CFPB: What it does and why its future is in question | CNN Business

    CFPB: What it does and why its future is in question | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The US Supreme Court decided this week to hear a case that will consider the constitutionality of funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and, in doing so, test the constraints of US regulators’ power. The case would be heard in the fall, with a decision likely by summer 2024.

    But what is the CFPB? How does its work affect your wallet? And why is its future potentially at risk?

    The agency was created after the 2008 financial meltdown, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That law was passed in the wake of the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession that followed.

    The broad purpose of the CFPB is to protect consumers from financial abuses and to serve as the central agency for consumer financial protection authorities.

    Prior to its creation, as the agency notes on its site, “[c]onsumer financial protection had not been the primary focus of any federal agency, and no agency had effective tools to set the rules for and oversee the whole market.”

    The CFPB has regulatory authority over providers of many types of financial products and services, including credit cards, banking accounts, loan servicing, credit reporting and consumer debt collection.

    It is charged with implementing and enforcing consumer protection laws, making rules and issuing guidance for consumer financial institutions. And it is the place consumers can go to lodge complaints about financial products and services.

    Importantly, Dodd-Frank also gave the agency new authority to determine whether any given consumer financial product or service is unfair, deceptive or abusive and therefore unlawful.

    While there are critics of the agency’s current structure and funding, it has saved consumers money, made it easier for them to seek redress and to get better clarity and more tailored responses from companies when they have a problem with their accounts, loans or credit reports.

    “It has completely changed the consumer financial marketplace. Overall it has had a tremendous impact on making it more fair and transparent,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center.

    For instance, the CFPB has taken action against bank overdraft policies. “Arguably, the focus on overdraft practices has led some banks to eliminate or reduce their overdraft fees,” said Christine Hines, legislative director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

    And it has gone after institutions for saddling consumers with pointless products, excessive fees and punitive terms.

    Both Hines and Saunders made a special note of CFPB’s actions against Wells Fargo, after the agency found the bank had been engaging in multiple abusive and unlawful consumer practices across several financial products between 2011 and 2022 — from auto loans to mortgage loans to bank accounts.

    Last month, the agency required the bank to pay more than $2 billion to customers who were harmed by such practices, plus a $1.7 billion fine that will go into a relief fund for victims.

    “More than 16 million accounts at Wells Fargo were subject to their illegal practices, including misapplied payments, wrongful foreclosures, and incorrect fees and interest charges,” the agency said in a blog post.

    In the area of mortgages, “CFPB has written rules to implement new protections so that mortgage lenders don’t make loans with tricks and traps that lead people to lose their homes,” Saunders said.

    It also has created other safeguards, including rules on how service providers should communicate with borrowers who want to find alternatives to foreclosure, Hines noted.

    Currently, the agency is in the midst of an effort to curb excessive or “junk” fees on a range of consumer financial products, such as credit card late fees.

    Critics of the CFPB have been trying for years to limit its power and independence, attacking the way the agency is structured and funded. Like federal banking regulators, its funding is not determined by lawmakers in Congress as part of the annual appropriations process. Rather, it gets its money from the Federal Reserve System’s earnings.

    “This nontraditional funding source limits congressional oversight of the agency and is the subject of legal challenges,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

    The latest challenge — arising from a federal appeals court ruling that CFPB’s funding violates the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause and separation of powers — is what the Supreme Court will take up in its October term.

    While it’s impossible to predict how the justices will rule, should they decide to uphold the appeals court ruling, that will put in doubt how the agency will be funded going forward, and whether it can continue to function effectively.

    It’s also unclear whether the agency’s actions and rule-making over the past 11 years would be invalidated, nor what impact it would have on banks and other financial institutions that have set up systems to be in compliance with CFPB rules and safe harbors.

    “The agency would be unable to do anything if the funding is invalidated. And prior rules could be challenged as the agency did not have a legal funding source that it could use to write those rules,” Cowen Washington Research Group analyst Jaret Seiberg said in a note to clients.

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