Henry has been working on reports on the recent collapse of several banks, starting with the shutdown of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday. Now I'm not certain how many swell listeners actually knew of Silicon Valley Bank before last week, but this is the second biggest collapse in American history, of course, the first one being Washington Mutual and it was the 16th largest bank in the nation
Henry Mulak
@HMulak · 2:53
The interest rate is important here because it's no longer as easy to borrow money as it once was. That changes the investment landscape very rapidly. So the bank saw the business model change while their depositors needed to rely on the money in their accounts. So they were taking out increasing amounts of cash. The experts we talked to are saying the bank's management was just bad at being bankers. The big thing about business, of course, is knowing your customer
phil spade
@Phil · 2:36
Were the regulations in place to prevent this and it was the regulators not doing their job, or did we need more regulations in place? I think before we get to that answer and I know what politicians are going to do and what I think is next is going to be a knee jerk reaction to show the world, hey, we're doing something without really getting to the crux of what exactly was in place and where did it go wrong?
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Henry Mulak
@HMulak · 4:16
As far as the regulations go, we're just going to have to wait and see what did allow this to happen. What we have here, though is an issue with cheap money. The previous decade was a decade of cheap money. As you know, if interest rates are at only around 2%, money cheap. I mean, you could get a loan from a bank as that bank would hope you would make money and easily pay it back while depositing your profits and everybody's happy
Henry Mulak
@HMulak · 2:27
And signature banks collapse earlier this month here in the States. Still there's. The question of First Republic Bank, also based here in the Bay Area. The San Francisco bank stock dropped by nearly 33% on Friday. We're hearing that unnamed banks had seen large withdrawals of uninsured deposits. You remember the government helped facilitate a deal to pump some $30 billion into First Republic in a rescue. Investors Friday seemed to shake that bail off that bail out off by selling more stock
Henry Mulak
@HMulak · 1:58
And ugg, these there's talk of government backing now that the funding arrangement from the private banks for First Republic Bank has played out. And I guess it's kind of played out in a mediocre way, right? Or they wouldn't be talking about it, right? What do you think?
Hi Henry. Yes, you are right. This is far from over yet and let's see how the First Republic thing plays out tomorrow in the next couple of days. And this has definitely been the most interesting sector and especially from a Silicon Valley perspective, I think kind of this whole Silicon Valley bank the way it played out and to me it still feels like completely unnecessary crisis
phil spade
@Phil · 2:19
I'm not as concerned about the stock price as I am the deposits. And they had a net outflow, I believe, of about 70 billion, which is about half of their deposits in the last week. So that's where I think we have that crisis of confidence. And I would have thought that this big bank infusion would have alleviated that, especially because that's uninsured. But it didn't
Henry Mulak
@HMulak · 2:02
You okay? Gotten some clarity here on the banks. The crisis in confidence appears to have waned. Things look to be calming down. Good news. First Republic Bank stock went up 10% during trading. That's a huge deal. True, the bank stock ended the day off by 6%, but the fact the stock price went up for much of the trading is, is a really good sign. Last time I chimed in, I wanted to see what the Fed was doing with interest rates