How the Silicon Valley Bank collapse could affect Australia

The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank in the US has echoes of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and is likely to affect Australia, financial experts say.

SVB, a Californian bank formed in 1983, was forced to close this week after its badly-timed investments in longer-dated government bonds left it with heavy losses.

Robert Kiyosaki, author of bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad, who predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 which helped trigger the GFC, warned Credit Suisse could be next to crumble.

The US bond market in ‘serious trouble’ after SVB went under on Friday followed by Signature Bank on Sunday .

In 2008, similar collapses of over-extended US banks and the subsequent massive taxpayer-funded bailouts precipitated the GFC which had profound effects worldwide, including on Australia.

The SVB collapse – and the vulnerability of other small American banks following days of panic share selling – has aroused fears about 2008 repeating. 

‘The problem is the bond market, and my prediction, I called Lehman Brothers years ago, is I think the next bank to go is Credit Suisse, because the bond market is crashing,’ Kiyosaki told Fox News.

Credit Suisse, one of the ten largest investment banks in the world, reported losses of nearly US$8billion in 2022.

The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank in the US has echoes of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and is likely to badly affect Australia, a banking veteran says (pictured is a queue outside a Santa Clara branch in California)

 The bestselling author if ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ Robert Kiyosaki (pictured left with wife Kim) said Credit Suisse could be next to collapse following Silicon Valley Bank

Closer to home the futures market is now expecting the Reserve Bank of Australia to stop raising interest rates in 2023, fearing uncertainty in the United States. 

Digital Finance Analytics principal Martin North, who has worked in banking in the UK and Australia, said the effects of the SVB collapse were likely to be felt in Australia.

‘We are not isolated from this,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.

‘It’s too soon, in my mind, to really determine whether this is just a little splash and nothing else or whether it is effectively the early tremors of something more significant.

‘We are at the very early stages of this rather than actually at the end of a mini crisis. 

‘We are joined at the hip with the U.S. because a lot of our funding comes from international markets, particularly the U.S. and of course, our exchange rate is also very strongly linked to what happens in the the U.S.’

Then there are the Australian companies that had borrowed from SVB and opened accounts with them as a condition of obtaining venture capital. 

SVB had specialised in lending to start-ups and tech firms like Australian graphic design group Canva, Sydney-based online hotel booking group SiteMinder, employment site Freelancer and software company Xero. 

‘There’s quite a litany of local organisations that potentially have some exposure,’ Mr North said.

The Australian Securities Exchange’s benchmark S&P/ASX200 dived by more than 2 per cent on Tuesday but finished the session 1.5 per cent weaker.

SVB’s woes stemmed from its tech customers ploughing money into the bank’s deposit accounts, which tripled from $US62billion in 2019 to $US191billion by the end of 2021 as pandemic lockdowns buoyed technology companies.

Silicon Valley Bank invested this money in longer-dated US government bonds, with maturity dates 15 years or more into the future, during an era when economists were focused on deflation, amid concerns about weak economic growth in coming years.

The non-traditional bank, which didn’t focus on home lending, saw the value of its bond assets plummet, however, as an inflation spike saw the US Federal Reserve’s key interest rate – known as the federal funds rate – surge from zero to 0.25 per cent in March 2022 to 4.5 to 4.75 per cent now, via eight increases.

American inflation hit a four-decade high of 9.1 per cent by the middle of 2022, after Russia’s Ukraine invasion caused a spike in crude oil prices. 

An  SVB capital raising in March 2023, where a company seeks additional money from its shareholders, went badly and led to tech company customers scrambling to withdraw money from their deposit accounts – producing a chain reaction that led to the bank’s collapse.

University of New South Wales Business School economics professor Richard Holden said it was too early to rule out bigger American banks being exposed as a result of SVB’s badly-timed government bond investments.

‘It remains to be seen whether there are other banks that are larger and seen to be sounder than SVB that are going to be wind up in the same sort of trouble,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr North said this month’s collapses of SVB and New York-based Signature Bank, which was heavily tied to cryptocurrency investments, represented a failure of  credit ratings agencies to flag banks’ risky strategies to investors.

SVB had specialised in lending to start-ups and tech firms like Australian graphic design group Canva (billionire co-founders Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins, pictured) and Sydney-based online hotel booking group SiteMinder

That too echoed 2008 when the likes of collapsed 158-year American financial services giant Lehman Brothers had received investment grade ratings from Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s shortly before its demise.

This was despite the bank’s heavy exposure to dubious sub-prime mortgage lending, where borrowers with no jobs or income could get home loans. 

‘There are parallels in terms of making bad decisions, the bankers basically assumed the market would go the way they want – they went the other way,’ Mr North said.

‘In the week before SVB failed, the credit ratings agencies gave it an investment grade – the question is why the credit ratings agencies didn’t pick this up.’ 

Like 2008, the U.S. government is also involved, although nothing yet like the $US475billion Troubled Asset Relief Program where the American taxpayers bailed out the banks by buying junk corporate bonds to inject liquidity into the financial system. 

But Mr North said bailouts from the US Federal Reserve simply encouraged banks to continue making risky investment decisions, safe in the knowledge that if their gambles failed the taxpayer would simply pick up the tab.

‘We won’t know for some time what the true exposure is here,’ he said. 

‘This is another classic example of where the Federal Reserve is looking after the banking system but is it the right thing to do?’

Mr North said SVB’s collapse suggested other American banks, particularly in regional areas, could have made the same bad decision to invest in longer-dated bonds in the belief interest rates would remain low.

As interest rates rise quickly to combat runaway inflation, those bonds could not be traded as easily, before the maturity date, because investors would be demanding higher yields as compensation for not getting better returns elsewhere.

The higher the bond yield, the lower the market value, known as the futures contract price. 

‘If there are other banks that have similar issues, that could be a problem,’ Mr North said.

The Australian Securities Exchange’s benchmark S&P/ASX200 dived by more than 2 per cent on Tuesday but finished the session 1.5 per cent weaker (pictured is the ASX in SydneyZ)Z

‘They assumed, for a long, long time that interest rates were going to stay low and therefore the bond market was a really good bet, the trouble is that wasn’t true.

‘You’ve got a generation of bankers, quite frankly, who’ve only ever been in a decreasing interest rate environment and my feeling is some of the young guns in some of these regional banks won’t have had any experience of the alternative which is rates rise and therefore they are significantly out of position.’ 

While US bonds are considered a safe, long-term investment, the inflation curse across most western economies in the post-Covid era had made American Treasuries worth less than holding cash, until maturity, because bank accounts pay higher interest rates.

‘They got caught with that,’ Prof. Holden said.

‘It’s a standard mismatch maturity in banking – you borrow short and lend long and when interest rates go up, what you have to pay to borrow short goes up and the value of what you lent long goes down.’

Professor Holden said the FDIC’s intervention to guarantee the deposits of individuals and businesses with these failed banks could stem another financial crisis for now.

‘The response so far over the weekend has been very good, which has wiped out the equity holders but basically bailed out the depositors – that puts paid to any material concerns about contagion, in itself triggering another financial crisis,’ he said.

Before the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, the likes of collapsed 158-year American financial services giant Lehman Brothers had received investment grade ratings from Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s (pictured is a former building in New York)

Professor Holden said the US Fed, which directly regulates banks, was more culpable in 2023 rather credit ratings agencies when it came to how American banks invested their money.

‘There are questions to be asked about how well their oversight role has been performed given they didn’t see this coming,’ he said.

Silicon Valley Bank, with $US209 billion in assets and $US175.4 billion in deposits, is the biggest bank failure since Washington Mutual collapsed in September 2008 with assets of $US307 billion.

During the GFC, Australia’s unemployment rate climbed from 4 per cent in August 2008 to 5.9 per cent by June 2009.

That was despite 4.25 percentage points of Reserve Bank rate cuts that saw the cash rate fall to 3 per cent by April 2009, down sharply from 7.25 per cent in September 2008 as financial market turmoil forced an easing of monetary policy.

KPMG chief economist Brendan Rynne said the RBA was likely to raise interest rates one more time in April or May to an 11-year high of 3.85 per cent, making it the 11th consecutive rate rise since May 2022.

‘It will probably stay at this level for most of this year and then start to cycle down as inflation comes off at the end of the year,’ he told Daily Mail Australia. 

The ASX 30-day interbank futures market is now expecting the Reserve Bank to stop raising rates and leave them on hold at 3.6 per cent before cutting them in late 2023 or early 2024

The lag effect of rate rises would see the jobless rate climb from 3.7 per cent in January to 4.5 per cent by the end of 2023.

‘The economic environment that we’re in at the moment is unusual,’ Dr Rynne said.

‘We’re slowing the economy down to reduce aggregate demand to bring inflation down and the expectation is we’ll have done that at a cost of lifting the unemployment rate up to four-and-a-half per cent which is arguably is the full employment rate.’ 

As inflation fell from an existing 32-year high of 7.8 per cent, the RBA would embark on rate cuts from 2024, taking the cash rate back to a neutral rate of 2.5 per cent. 

‘Ultimately, you’ve got to bring the cash rate down to the neutral rate of two-and-a-half per cent as the economy normalises,’ Dr Rynne said. 

The ASX 30-day interbank futures market is now expecting the Reserve Bank to stop raising rates and leave them on hold at 3.6 per cent before cutting them in late 2023 or early 2024.

‘It’s moved dramatically over the last two weeks,’ Dr Rynne said. 

‘Two weeks ago, they were already baking in three interest rate rises.’ 

Wall Street expert who foretold the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 predicts Credit Suisse to be next major bank failure and warns of ‘serious trouble’ for U.S. bond market after SVB collapse

The expert who predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 today warned that Credit Suisse could be the next to go under after the failure of two Wall Street banks left the US bond market in ‘serious trouble’.

Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, delivered the gloomy prediction as markets crashed following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last Friday and Signature Bank on Sunday.

Experts believe that the tremors will not trigger a new global banking crisis like the disastrous one in 2008 – but predict it will cause a new credit crunch, making it harder and more expensive for consumers and businesses to borrow cash as banks try to limits risks.

Speaking on Fox News‘ Cavuto: Coast to Coast, Mr Kiyosaki said: ‘The problem is the bond market, and my prediction, I called Lehman Brothers years ago, and I think the next bank to go is Credit Suisse, because the bond market is crashing.’ 

He made the prediction yesterday, just hours before Credit Suisse itself admitted it has a ‘material weakness’ as the cost of insuring its bonds from defaulting reached the highest level since the bank’s creation in 1856. 

But the bank vehemently denied the claims it is under threat, with CEO Ulrich Koerner declaring today: ‘Our SVB credit exposure is not material’, while insiders insisted the world’s seventh largest investment bank, headquartered in Zurich, is held to higher regulations in Switzerland compared to SVB and other US banks.  ‘We are conservatively positioned against any interest rate risks’, the senior source said.

The FTSE 100 is down again this morning after more than £50 billion was wiped off the UK’s biggest stock market on Monday after the second and third biggest bank failures in US history spooked investors across the globe. On Wall Street major US banks lost around $90billion in stock market value on Monday.

Wall Street expert Robert Kiyosaki told Fix News yesterday that he fears that Credit Suisse could be under threat due to the soaring bond markets. The bank denies this

Bank customers wait outside a branch of Silicon Valley Bank in Wellesley, Massachusetts, yesterday after its collapse last Friday

The UK’s FTSE 100 tanked after SVB collapsed, with banking stocks taking a huge £50billion hit 

The collapse of SVB is the biggest banking failure since 2008’s banking crisis. On Sunday another lender, New York’s Signature Bank, also collapsed. It has shocked global markets and sparked panic with investors who has been dumping bank stocks, even though the US Government stepped in to protect customers and HSBC rescued the UK arm after buying it for £1. 

There is also panic because trading forecasts have been torn up over night with interest rates now predicted to be frozen, or even cut, in the US and the UK. 

Until SVB’s collapse, the Bank of England was expected to impose a 0.5% rise, but traders in New York and London are now betting that central banks in New York and London will leave rates unchanged to steady the markets. But as a result, Government bond prices soared – raising the price of borrowing.

Wall Street giants slid, with Citi off 7.5pc and Wells Fargo down 7.1pc. But it was the regional banks which saw the biggest falls, with San Francisco-based First Republic losing as much as 78pc, as trading was repeatedly halted because of the volatility – before partly recovering.

That was despite the bank’s boss saying it had been able to meet withdrawal demands, after being helped by additional funding from JP Morgan. While not having the scale of the bigger New York lenders, it still has a significant presence, with assets of £174bn and deposits of £145bn at the end of last year.

Gary Greenwood, banking analyst at Shore Capital, said while it was a specific set of problems that had led to SVB’s collapse, there was a ‘general nervousness in the market’ – even if no specific concerns were being highlighted.

‘Even if the collapse of several mid-tier banks doesn’t develop into a full-blown systemic crisis, it will more than likely trigger a credit crunch,’ said Paul Ashworth, Chief North America Economist at Capital Economics. 

Credit Suisse, which is headquartered in Zurich (pictured), may be the next to fold according to one expert

On Tuesday the bank said ‘outflows (had) stabilised to much lower levels but had not yet reversed’. This chart shows how the cost of insuring against Credit Suisse default (CDS price) hit a record yesterday amid the SVB fallout

Kiyosaki (right) pictured with Donald Trump in 2006

The deal did not prevent further falls in banking shares with Barclays down 6 per cent, HSBC off by 4 per cent, and Natwest and Lloyds down 5 per cent – wiping £50billion off the combined value of the FTSE 100 firms. 

In London, shares in Virgin Money – a relatively small lender – fell 9pc, or 14.75p, to 149.75p, Barclays slid 6.3pc, or 9.94p, to 147.48p. In Europe, Credit Suisse – which recently posted a record loss – dived 3pc and Italy’s Unicredit fell 9pc. 

President Biden yesterday promised Americans ‘the banking system is safe’ – as fears of contagion after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank prompted another Wall Street bloodbath.

Shares in a number of America’s regional lenders suffered eye-watering sell-offs even after authorities put in place a backstop guaranteeing all of the nation’s deposits.

In Britain, HSBC’s emergency rescue of SVB’s British arm was welcomed by the tech firms who had feared collapse if they could not access their funds by yesterday morning. The lender – Europe’s largest – will reportedly inject £2bn into the business.

But banking shares in London and across Europe slumped amid nervousness about the wider health of the sector – dragging the FTSE 100 2.6pc lower, wiping more than £50bn off the value of its constituent companies. The turmoil came after government officials and central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic scrambled over the weekend to contain the immediate fallout from California-based SVB’s collapse on Friday.

It was the biggest banking failure since 2008’s banking crisis. On Sunday another lender, New York’s Signature Bank, also collapsed.

In a televised address, the US president said: ‘Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them.’

Biden said those responsible for the crisis must be held to account and said the managers of failed lenders taken over by federal authorities should be fired.

He pressed for tougher regulation for the sector and pledged that taxpayers would not bear the losses of any failures.

Biden also made clear that investors in the bank ‘will not be protected’. He added: ‘They knowingly took a risk and when the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money. That’s how capitalism works.’

Silicon Valley Bank collapse: Everything you need to know

The collapse of tech-focused Silicon Valley Bank sparked fears across Wall Street that the banking system was being crippled by a relentless cycle of interest rate rises

Why did Silicon Valley Bank fail? 

Silicon Valley Bank had already been hit hard by a rough patch for technology companies in recent months and the Federal Reserve’s aggressive plan to increase interest rates to combat inflation compounded its problems. 

The bank held billions of dollars worth of Treasuries and other bonds, which is typical for most banks as they are considered safe investments. 

However, the value of previously issued bonds has begun to fall because they pay lower interest rates than comparable bonds issued in today’s higher interest rate environment. 

Such bonds are not sold for a loss unless there is an emergency and the bank needs cash. Silicon Valley, the bank that collapsed on Friday, had an emergency. 

Its customers were largely start-ups and other tech-centric companies that needed more cash over the past year, so they began withdrawing their deposits. 

That forced the bank to sell a chunk of its bonds at a steep loss, and the pace of those withdrawals accelerated as word spread, effectively rendering Silicon Valley Bank insolvent. 

What did the government do on Sunday? 

The Federal Reserve, the US Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) decided to guarantee all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, as well as at New York’s Signature Bank, which was seized on Sunday. 

Critically, they agreed to guarantee all deposits, above and beyond the limit on insured deposits of 250,000 dollars (£205,000). 

Many of Silicon Valley’s start-up tech customers and venture capitalists had far more than 250,000 dollars at the bank. 

As a result, as much as 90% of Silicon Valley’s deposits were uninsured. Without the government’s decision to backstop them all, many companies would have lost funds needed to meet payroll, pay bills, and keep the lights on. 

The goal of the expanded guarantees is to avert bank runs – where customers rush to remove their money – by establishing the Fed’s commitment to protecting the deposits of businesses and individuals and calming nerves after a harrowing few days. 

Also late on Sunday, the Federal Reserve initiated a broad emergency lending programme intended to shore up confidence in the nation’s financial system. 

Banks will be allowed to borrow money straight from the Fed in order to cover any potential rush of customer withdrawals without being forced into the type of money-losing bond sales that would threaten their financial stability. 

Such fire sales are what caused Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. If all works as planned, the emergency lending programme may not actually have to lend much money. 

Rather, it will reassure the public that the Fed will cover their deposits and that it is willing to lend big to do so. There is no cap on the amount that banks can borrow, other than their ability to provide collateral.

How is the programme intended to work? 

Unlike its more byzantine efforts to rescue the banking system during the financial crisis of 2007-08, the Fed’s approach this time is relatively straightforward. It has set up a new lending facility with the bureaucratic moniker Bank Term Funding Programme. 

The programme will provide loans to banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions for up to a year. The banks are being asked to post Treasuries and other government-backed bonds as collateral. 

The Fed is being generous in its terms: It will charge a relatively low interest rate – just 0.1 percentage points higher than market rates – and it will lend against the face value of the bonds, rather than the market value. 

Lending against the face value of bonds is a key provision that will allow banks to borrow more money because the value of those bonds, at least on paper, has fallen as interest rates have moved higher. 

As of the end of last year US banks held Treasuries and other securities with about 620 billion dollars (£509 billion) of unrealised losses, according to the FDIC. That means they would take huge losses if forced to sell those securities to cover a rush of withdrawals. 

How did the banks end up with such big losses? 

Ironically, a big chunk of that 620 billion dollars in unrealised losses can be tied to the Federal Reserve’s own interest rate policies over the past year. 

In its fight to cool the economy and bring down inflation, the Fed has rapidly pushed up its benchmark interest rate from nearly zero to about 4.6%. 

That has indirectly lifted the yield, or interest paid, on a range of government bonds, particularly two-year Treasuries, which topped 5% until the end of last week. 

When new bonds arrive with higher interest rates, it makes existing bonds with lower yields much less valuable if they must be sold. 

Banks are not forced to recognise such losses on their books until they sell those assets, which Silicon Valley was forced to do. –

How important are the government guarantees? 

They are very important. Legally, the FDIC is required to pursue the cheapest route when winding down a bank. 

In the case of Silicon Valley or Signature, that would have meant sticking to rules on the books, meaning that only the first 250,000 dollars in depositors’ accounts would be covered. 

Going beyond the 250,000 dollar cap required a decision that the failure of the two banks posed a ‘systemic risk’. 

The Fed’s six-member board unanimously reached that conclusion. The FDIC and the Treasury Secretary went along with the decision as well.

Will these programmes spend taxpayer dollars? 

The US says that guaranteeing the deposits will not require any taxpayer funds. Instead, any losses from the FDIC’s insurance fund would be replenished by levying an additional fee on banks. 

Yet Krishna Guha, an analyst with the investment bank Evercore ISI, said that political opponents will argue that the higher FDIC fees will ‘ultimately fall on small banks and Main Street business’. 

That, in theory, could cost consumers and businesses in the long run. 

Will it all work? 

Mr Guha and other analysts say that the government’s response is expansive and should stabilise the banking system, though share prices for medium-sized banks, similar to Silicon Valley and Signature, plunged on Monday. 

Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, said the Fed’s lending programme means banks should be able to ‘ride out the storm’.