In 2008 the problem was the bursting of the bubble of subprime mortgages, through which the entities, when packaging and selling the mortgage risk, forgot about risk control and placed loans for the purchase of homes to groups for which some authors such as the retired professor Leopoldo Abadía, coined the term ‘ninjas’ from the other side of the Atlantic: ‘no income’, ‘no jobs’, ‘no assets’ (without income, without employment, without assets). The risk rating agencies, encouraged by commissions that were more voluminous the more packages of assets were valued, endorsed assets with a toxic charge.
Now the problem has been the SVB strategy, a little diversified and very niche bank (specialized in the technological sector and ‘startups’), to allocate the deposits of its clients to the purchase of long-term public debt –mainly US Treasury bonds–, whose value has plummeted since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates. And it is that the relationship between price and profitability in fixed income is inverse, that is, if interest rates rise, the price falls and vice versa. As they have been acquired at higher prices, with the price drop, the bonds that this and other entities have on their balance sheets lose value. But those losses do not materialize if they are not realized. And this is what happened to the SVB, which had to get rid of these titles to try to stop the massive withdrawal of deposits from its clients due to reputational problems. Rumors spread by venture capital firms that the SVB’s balance sheet did not reflect reality sparked the stampede that has swept away the entity. In the end, the regulators opted to close the bank and cover customer deposits, mostly linked to the technology sector. The authorities, with the Fed ahead, analyze what has gone wrong and guarantee the deposits, since more than 90% were not. Experts affirm that the debacle is a consequence of the regulatory laxity for medium-sized and regional banks under the presidency of Donald Triump, which has prevented detecting the problems of SVB and the also intervened Signature Bank in advance. The objective now is to stop a general contagion that, for the moment, affects medium-sized entities in the US.