저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
요약 보기
SVB 파산 사태는 2008년 리먼 사태에 준하는 스타트업 생태계 충격이며, 연준·정부의 보증 등 즉각적 유동성 조치가 없으면 대규모 예금 인출과 금융 연쇄 위기로 번질 수 있다는 진단. [사태 경위] SVB가 대규모 예금 인출에 직면해 자산 213억 달러(약 197억 유로)를 매각하며 약 18억 달러 손실을 확정했고, 이것이 시장 공포를 촉발했다. 미 금융당국이 주말 사이 자산을 압류(수용)했으며, 예금보험(FDIC)은 25만 달러 초과분에 적용되지 않아 초과 예금자는 채권자 신분으로 밀렸다. [스타트업·금융 파장] 수천 개 스타트업이 급여 지급 불능 위기에 처했고, 송금 대기 중이던 자금도 동결되었다. 급여·결제 대행 등 SVB를 거래하던 인프라 기업들에도 연쇄 영향이 우려된다. [핵심 원인] 금리 급등으로 2% 미국채 등 장기채 가치가 하락했고, 벤처캐피털의 투자 중단으로 예금이 줄어드는 상황에서 손실 매각이 불가피했다. [대응 방안 주장] 연준이 자산을 떠안아 보증하는 방식(2008년 TARP 유사)이 필요하며, 정부가 신규 인수 은행에 예금 100% 보증을 해야 한다고 주장. 할인 매각(60센트 수준 채권 거래)은 위기 신호로 해석. [리스크] 예금 100% 즉시 지급이 불가능하면 지역은행으로 대규모 뱅크런이 확산될 수 있음. [출연자 전망] 단기적으로 금융 불안이 지속될 것이며, 정책 개입 여부가 향후 위기 규모를 결정한다고 봄.
다듬은 글
the basic problem we have right now is that in the last 36 hours, a key part of Silicon Valley's financial plumbing has basically been turned off. As a result, billions of dollars of deposits have been frozen. People can't pay their bills, can't access their deposits, credit lines could go into default, and payroll can't be met. So we have a potential contagion on our hands. But to understand it properly, I think it's important to explain exactly how this came to pass. So let me hand the ball to Freeberg, and then we can talk about some of the implications, of which there are many.
Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya is warning investors, startups, and entrepreneurs that the fundamentals of the US market are very shaky and unpredictable right now, and that every indicator is pointing toward a massive crisis. In a new All-In podcast episode, Palihapitiya, who called last year's market meltdown, shares his thoughts on the recent Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the numerous bank runs just waiting to happen in its wake. He talks about the origin of this crash, the options available to save some part of it, and the second- and third-order effects of this contagion on every other part of the economy, including the innovators' economy.
US regulators rushed to seize the assets of Silicon Valley Bank, SVB, on Friday after a run on the bank, the largest failure of a financial institution since the height of the financial crisis more than a decade ago. Silicon Valley, the country's 16th-largest bank, failed after depositors, mostly technology workers and venture-capital-backed companies, hurried to withdraw their money this week as anxiety about the bank's situation spread. The bank could no longer cope with the massive withdrawals from its customers, and its last attempts to raise new money did not succeed. As you watch, make sure to hit like, subscribe, and leave your comments. Can you recall a time in our careers when it has felt this acute, or insane, or intense? 2008 and COVID, okay. I think this is right up there, and there could be two, probably three, in terms of the level of panic and concern. The problem is we're in the middle of it. We don't know what's going to happen this weekend, so there's a lot of anxiety and panic right now, and a lot of acute effects, unlike COVID and 2008, that many companies and investors are actively dealing with. It's not just a few thousand companies that are really in distress right now. So from a Silicon Valley perspective, it's potentially worse than 2008 or COVID.
Oh, for sure. This is basically a Lehman-sized event for Silicon Valley. Remember when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008 and started the whole financial crisis? The federal authorities thought the best plan for Lehman was to file for bankruptcy, and they didn't try to save it, and that basically led to a cascade where the whole financial system almost collapsed. I think SVB is a Lehman-sized event for Silicon Valley, and two big things are happening. One is the impact on the startup ecosystem. You're probably seeing thousands of companies that cannot make payroll in the next few weeks because their money is trapped and tied up at Silicon Valley Bank, which is now under receivership. If you wired your money out yesterday, you're fine, and a lot of people managed to do that. But there are a lot of people who had wires in the queue that didn't go through today. They logged into the website and can't log in. The money is just frozen, and we don't know when they'll be able to get it out or how many cents on the dollar they'll get. So the whole startup ecosystem is in peril. Gary Tan called it an extinction-level event.
Yes, exactly, that was a good term. And to make it really clear, this is not big tech at risk. I know a lot of people don't like the idea of bailing out big tech. This is not Google, it's not Amazon. Those companies have plenty of cash and they're fine. This is small companies, companies with 10 to 100 employees, and you're looking at maybe thousands of them being wiped out for no reason. They didn't do anything wrong. This could have a very damaging effect on Main Street and the whole US economy. This is little tech, these are the future companies that will keep the United States competitive against China and the rest of the world.
The other big thing happening in real time is a regional banking crisis. When depositors see that their money was not safe at SVB, which was a top-20 bank that, as far as everyone knows, was in regulatory compliance, and nobody has said that SVB wasn't compliant, and as far as we know it had regulatory approval, and then you find out your money wasn't safe and it's not FDIC-insured above 250,000 dollars, the conversations we're all seeing in our chat groups with leading investors are: why on earth would you keep your money anywhere but JPMorgan or a top-four bank? So unless the Fed steps in over the weekend, we could see a run on the regional banking system, a cascade like we saw in 2008.
US Treasuries were at 102. You get about two percent a year. They bought a bunch of those, and when you think about it, you'd say that's a safe bet. The problem is those are locked up for ten years, and nobody on the Silicon Valley Bank team anticipated the rate hikes would happen so quickly and so violently. Remember, we saw 25, 25, 50, 50, 75, 75, all those increases. Now, what happens to a two-percent US Treasury when interest rates go up? It gets devalued. It's not worth as much. So if you needed to sell them, you'd have to sell at a discount. If you held them to maturity, you'd get the full return. What happened here is they needed to sell these early, they sold them early, and they took a massive loss, billions of dollars. That's what lit the fuse. That's the slide I showed, the price. The audience understands that if they had sold these earlier, or if they hadn't bought them, things would have been different.
But hold on, why in that meeting did they have to decide on an emergency sale?
It's because VCs stopped giving startups money, so startups couldn't deposit more money into the bank, but they kept spending at the same rate, which means deposits went down. In the last eighteen months, not enough people read the memo.
Yes. And the tragedy of that is, let's say you did get the memo and you did make the hard cuts. Let's say you're working on something you care about. For the listeners, let's say it's climate change, or breast cancer research, whatever it is. This had nothing to do with you. Four days ago you had your money in the bank, you did everything you needed to do to figure out product-market fit, to get to market, to sell your product. And all of a sudden, because of some other set of folks and actors who couldn't get their act together, you're on the precipice of bankruptcy in 36 to 48 hours. That's crazy to me.
In the markets, the panic started on Thursday after SVB announced it was seeking to raise capital quickly to cope with its customers' massive withdrawals, without succeeding, after having sold 21 billion dollars, 19.7 billion euros, of financial securities at a loss of 1.8 billion dollars, 1.7 billion euros. The announcement surprised investors and rekindled fears about the soundness of the entire banking sector, especially with the rapid rise in interest rates lowering the value of bonds in their portfolios and raising the cost of credit. California regulators stepped in and everything escalated. The details will come out as the video goes on. The California regulators stepped in and froze everything. Our companies were in the process. We have companies that submitted wires yesterday. By the way, we spent all day yesterday on the phone with our portfolio companies trying to get them out. We had wire requests that went in before the deadline, and for some reason they were stuck in a queue. They didn't get through and they didn't get out. Then this morning the California regulator stepped in and froze everything, and what did they announce? They said you're good for your insured amounts, which is 250,000, and for your uninsured amounts, which is everything above 250,000, you're going to get a certificate. What does that mean? It means you're a creditor in bankruptcy. The money market fund you thought you owned was actually not held in your name. It was in SVB's name at BlackRock. So our companies have been calling BlackRock and Morgan Stanley asking, "Do you have my money market fund?" And they say, "No, sorry, that's SVB's." So they're sitting in a creditor line in bankruptcy. We have to explain this. These were called sweep accounts. What Silicon Valley Bank did with some of these large portfolio holders, let's say a bunch of VCs gave you 30 million dollars, they took your money and said, "Just to be safe, we'll automatically sweep it and distribute it across two other accounts." So you've got BlackRock over here, great. You've got Morgan Stanley over there, great. But you could only reach those through the Silicon Valley Bank interface. It was supposed to protect you, but there's no recourse, and it seems those are frozen too.
So the only logical thing you can do, and I had a mentor thirty years ago when I ran the magazine and we started hitting millions of dollars in revenue, he asked me how much money we had in the bank. I said, "Which bank account?" He had four bank accounts and he load-balanced them, and he did it every Friday. God bless Elliott Cook, he did it every Friday for me, and I've always done that. I've always had multiple bank accounts and load-balanced them. But in this case, Silicon Valley Bank did it all through one interface. I have multiple startups today that did exactly this, and they couldn't even log into Silicon Valley Bank today to see where they stand.
Well, you have two paths. Path one is actually trying to sell these assets. But the problem is, who do you think the buyer is? The buyers are the sharpest sharks on Wall Street, who will purposefully underbid these assets. That leads to path two, which is the only other real solution: the Fed warehouses them and guarantees them. That's an equivalent version of what they had to do during the Great Financial Crisis, the thing called TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was a backstop and a mechanism so that the toxic assets of the time, a bunch of mortgage-backed loans, could be cleared through the system over time, which effectively meant the Fed warehoused that risk. So I think what we need to see now is, for SVB's assets, it could be 50 cents on the dollar, it could be 60 cents. If you want immediate liquidity, a friend in our group chat mentioned that one claimant company with a hundred million dollars inside SVB was offered 60 cents on the dollar today for its claim, from a third party who said, "I'll take you, I'll give you 60 million today in return for that certificate." That's the 250,000 plus the claim, so it's effectively a hundred million, because they're willing to take the risk that they'll get eighty million, and they keep the difference. The point is, if you're seeing that kind of discount today, that's not a good sign. It does speak to the fact that regulators have to step in now.
Here's the other reason I think it's important. I think regulators, and the many people in Washington who listen to this, need to understand that this torches years of US innovation, and we should not let that happen. There are companies working on really important things for the United States and the rest of the world. If a company fails because it can't make the product work, so be it, we take that risk every day. If a company fails because customers don't want to buy it, so be it. If a product fails because a better product comes out, so be it. But it shouldn't fail because we can't get money. Yeah, because you forgot to pay the bill, that's one thing, but that should not be why we torch hundreds of startups and what they're working on. According to a statement from a congressman, it would be a very great loss for Silicon Valley if startups are allowed to fail because their money can't be released to them. He went on to say that most of these startups have a lot to offer the US and the world, and this would be Silicon Valley's greatest loss, since hundreds of startups would be affected. Let's listen to what he has to say.
It's not just about a couple hundred tech bros in Silicon Valley not being able to make payroll. There are important downstream consequences. For example, there are payment processing companies in Silicon Valley that use SVB to store their capital and move money around. There are payroll companies that run payroll for many businesses, not just tech businesses but businesses across the economy, and they store their cash at SVB and process money through it. Today it was announced that Rippling, one of those companies, could not hit its payroll cycle today because it had money tied up at SVB. Fortunately they announced they also have money at JPMorgan and other places, so they should be able to get payroll processed early next week and get everyone back on track. But that's hundreds, potentially thousands, of companies that use payroll software to process and pay their employees. Then there are all the payment processors, and we don't know how much exposure each one has, plus a lot of infrastructure companies that move money in and through SVB. If they start to go down and payroll doesn't reach the air-conditioning company in Arizona using the tool, or Stripe can't process e-commerce payments for a small business owner running a website, you can see how there can be very significant trickle-down effects. And more importantly, as we saw in 2008, perhaps to a different degree but still a significant concern, is the contagion of panic, where people say, "If the things I thought were reliable aren't reliable, I start to have real questions about the soundness of the whole system." That's why it's so important that regulators step in and shore up the problem this weekend. I don't think it's about buying at 50 or 60 cents on the dollar. Every depositor needs to get paid 100 percent of their money, and that cash needs to be available to them by early next week. If that money isn't available within the first 48 to 72 hours after this weekend, we'll have a real crisis on our hands, because then a lot of people will try to move money away from any institution that stores their money in something that isn't 100 percent liquid like cash. That would cause a massive run.
So what has to happen? The only way this can happen is if someone takes over Silicon Valley Bank this weekend, and the federal government, as much as I hate to say it, because I absolutely hate the federal government having a role in this stuff, has to say: we will guarantee 100 percent of those deposits to the company that takes over the bank and this portfolio, and let the asset portfolio run its life and see what you get paid. Whatever the delta is, we'll make it up to you. But we need to make sure there's cash available today for all these depositors.
It's a nail-biting limbo state that many tech startups deeply entrenched in Silicon Valley Bank are now facing in the wake of the bank's implosion, the largest American bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. For decades, tech startups have relied heavily on the bank, based in Santa Clara, California, and this has set off a crisis that could lead to mass layoffs or the collapse of hundreds of startups, according to industry insiders. While critics oppose the idea of the government rescuing the bank as a bailout for the tech and venture capital world, such a move would protect depositors, many of whom are small businesses in the tech sector. What do you think about the breakdown and the cause and effect of the Silicon Valley Bank crash? Let us know in the comments below. And remember to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications for future videos. Thanks for watching.
Comments 0