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bank run

Et Tu Brute

May 4, 2023

In Shakespeare’s famous play “Julius Caesar”, a group of conspirators gather in the Roman Senate to assassinate the emperor.

Brutus was one of Caesar’s most trusted confidants.

He and the other murderers pull their swords and stabbed him to death on the Senate floor.

With his dying breath, Caesar looks on in shock and betrayal and utters the words “Et tu Brute”.

Across the country today, regional bank CEOs must feel the same betrayal.

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve raised rates an additional 0.25%.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to be the banking system’s most adamant supporter.

After all, their primary job is “financial stability”, and they are considered the “lender of last resort”.

Yet, they inexplicably betrayed the entire banking system with another unnecessary rate hike.

In the midst of an obvious banking crisis, Chairman Powell referred to the banking system as “secure and resilient”. In the past month, we’ve had 3 of the 4 largest bank failures in history. Ah yes, the epitome of strength and resilience for sure.

The primary problem in the banking system right now are deposit rates versus safe alternatives.

This banking crisis is NOT over by any means.

In fact, risks right now are higher than we’ve ever seen them.

Let’s look at the Fed, Regional Banks and the Commercial Real Estate market to assess risks.

The Fed’s Last Hike

In their meeting yesterday, the Fed left the door open to additional interest rate hikes.

Let’s be clear. We believe there is NO REASON for the Fed to hike again.  Whether they will or not is anyone’s guess.

They have yet to explicitly acknowledge it, but inflation is no longer the problem.

They are fighting a banking crisis that it nowhere close to being over.

Instead of pausing, Chairman Powell felt he had to project confidence in the financial system.

He was faced with a difficult choice:

  • Don’t raise rates, and risk markets interpreting that as fear over the health of the banking sector;
  • Raise rates, but risk making the banking crisis worse.

Powell woke up and chose violence.

In the world of instant public relations campaigns, not raising rates would have been an admission that the financial system has major problems.

Even if the system is weak, they can’t let the market perceive that they think the system is weak.

But if they raise rates (like they did), they all but guarantee more stress on the banking system by boosting rates on money markets, increasing the risk of deposit flight.

And if banks try to raise rates to slow the deposit outflow, they destroy any profitability they had.

In the end, the Fed decided to roll the dice and increase rates again.

Unfortunately, this will likely prove to be an incredibly poor decision.

In fact, markets are now pricing in a 15% likelihood that the Fed will CUT rates at their meeting in June. Not next year, but next month.

The chart below shows the implied Fed Funds rate through January of 2024.

The blue line (and left side of the chart) is the expected interest rate on the date along the x-axis. The orange bars (along the right side of the chart) is the number of expected cuts by next January.

Fed Funds implied interest rate for the remainder of 2023. Number of rate cuts and projected interest rate decreases.

Markets expect 4.5 interest rate cuts this year, and the rate to go from 5.25% down to 3.9%.

This is quite extraordinary given that the Fed raised rates YESTERDAY.

It firmly implies that markets think the Fed made a huge mistake with this recent hike and that the economy is about to be very bad.

Let’s turn our attention to the regional banks next.

Regional Banks

Regional bank stocks are suffering massively.

3 of the 4 largest bank failures in history have occurred in the past month, and there are more to come, likely this weekend with Pac-West Bank. It won’t be the last.

The next chart shows the ticker KRE, which is an ETF comprised of regional banks.

Regional bank stocks are down almost 60% since their highs last year.

They have also have given up ten years of gains. This is simply astonishing.

What this tells us is that the market thinks the banking crisis is much more urgent and important than inflation.

We agree.

Commercial Real Estate

Economic data is weakening. Fast.

Bank lending is one of the biggest contributions to economic growth. We live in a time where loans are the backbone of the US economic engine.

There has been more than $2 trillion of outflows from smaller banks over the past month.

If you are a bank CEO, do you think you would be aggressively handing out loans right now?

No.

You’re keeping all the reserves you can, hoping your customer base is loyal.

Lending standards were tightening before the banking crisis began. Now that it is accelerating, the problems will begin to spread.

The biggest area of concern for us is in commercial real estate.

Let’s look at some stats:

  • 67% of all commercial real estate loans were made by smaller banks.
  • 83% of all CRE loans are balloon notes. This means they mature and the owner is forced to do something (refinance or sell the property).

In the next two years, over $300 billion of CRE loans mature, as shown in the chart below from CRED IQ.

We must keep in mind that commercial real estate is a diverse market, and not all properties are created equal.

There are some areas of strength:

  • Manufacturing facilities are moving back to the U.S. from overseas, creating support for industrial space.
  • Grocery-anchored shopping centers (with an HEB for example) are doing quite well.
  • Senior-housing facilities are poised to benefit from aging demographics.

But these are relatively small areas in the CRE market.

Currently, these smaller and mid-size banks are dealing with a liquidity crisis.

They may start to face problems with their balance sheet. This would be an entirely different ballgame.

Bottom Line

Risks are incredibly high right now.

Despite that, markets have been relatively calm.

The next few months are perhaps the most important months of the past decade.

If we can get through them with relatively little damage from an economic and earnings standpoint, there is a chance that we avoid some very bad scenarios.

Until then, it is appropriate to err on the side of caution.

IronBridge clients continue to be extremely below their target risk, with elevated holdings in cash equivalents and various short-term high-quality fixed income holdings.

We anticipate that will continue, but as always we will continue to monitor markets for signals to add risk where appropriate.

Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Invest wisely!

Filed Under: IronBridge Insights Tagged With: bank run, banking crisis, commercial real estate, fed funds rate, federal reserve, interest rates, jerome powell, markets, volatility

Bank Run: Silicon Valley Bank Goes Under

March 10, 2023

D315TT It's a wonderful life. Image shot 1946. Exact date unknown.

Today, Silicon Valley Bank became the second largest bank failure in US history. What happened and what does it mean going forward?

Who is Silicon Valley Bank?

  • Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, was the 16th largest bank in the US.
  • This was the second largest bank failure in US history.
  • Based in Santa Clara, California, they focused on startups, founders and private equity investors.
  • Frankly, this was a great bank with fantastic employees, seemingly well capitalized, that went under incredibly quickly. So what happened?

How did SVB get into this Situation?

In order to fully understand the events that transpired this week, we first need to look at the past few years.

The roots of their collapse started in 2021. Their deposit base jumped from $61 billion at the end of 2019 to $189 billion at the end of 2021.

When banks bring in deposits, they have to do something with them.

Like all banks, the goal is to lend the money out, and earn profits by charging higher interest rates on loans than what they pay on deposits. This difference is called “Net Interest Margin”, or NIM. Banks charge you 6% on a loan, and they pay you 0.5% on your cash. Voila, they earn 5.5% in NIM.

Because their deposit base grew so quickly, they couldn’t underwrite enough loans to put that money to work. In order for them to earn a higher yield on their customers’ deposits, they purchased over $80 billion worth of Mortgage Backed Securities, or MBS. These are financial instruments similar to bonds that are made of up of many different mortgages.

97% of the MBS they purchased had maturities of longer than 10 years. These were purchased before interest rates began to increase last year. (This is important.)

Why did they Go Under?

When banks buy securities with customer deposits, they have to put them in one of two buckets: 1) Available-for-Sale, or 2) Hold-to-Maturity.

Available-for-Sale assets must be “marked-to-market”. This simply means they report the current market value of each investment they hold, just like you see on your investment statements each month.

Hold-to-Maturity securities, on the other hand, don’t have to be reported that way. If you bought your house for a million dollars, and the value fell, you could still report the value as a million dollars.

The $80 billion of MBS were held in the Hold-to-Maturity bucket.

Last year, when interest rates rose so dramatically, the value of these securities fell. A lot. They lost billions of dollars. And because SVB had longer-maturity securities, they fell more that shorter-duration ones would have.

This week, they had to sell at least $21 billion of assets to meet withdrawal requests after depositors essentially made a run on the bank.

Once Hold-to-Maturity assets are sold, any gains or losses must be disclosed and reported. The sells they had to make this week resulted in a nearly $2 billion loss.

Between the MBS losses and continued customer withdrawals, the bank was forced into receivership by the FDIC.

What Does it Mean for You?

First, recognize what a bank deposit really is. Banks do not have a safe where they keep your money.

The following clip from “It’s a Wonderful Life” perfectly exemplifies what really happens when depositors want to withdraw money from a bank. (Fast forward to 3:50 in the clip to view the most relevant part.)

Banks don’t keep your funds. They lend them out, and invest it, and do other things to make themselves a profit.

As George Bailey says, “You’re money is not here.”

Why do you think the new account agreement is so big when you open a new checking or savings account?

You are not an account owner of a bank account. You are a bank creditor.

You lend the bank your money.

They do with it what they want.

Now that people can earn a decent yield on short-term cash funds and US Treasuries, there is competition for those deposits.

This is a good reminder to pay attention to your deposits, especially now that there are good alternatives.

Is there Risk of Contagion?

Quite frankly, yes there is.

That doesn’t mean that other banks will definitely go under, but it is absolutely possible.

Smaller and regional banks are most at risk right now, but there is also risk to the broader markets.

We have long been saying that risks are incredibly elevated right now. This is a good example of what can happen when risks are high. Banks don’t tend to fail in bull markets.

In our opinion, the full effects of higher interest rates have not been felt yet.

This is a major example of the unintended consequences that can happen in a complex system like financial markets.

Portfolio Implications

IronBridge clients continue to be very underweight risk exposure right now.

We believe that risks will remain elevated at least through this summer, and you should position your portfolio for continued volatility.

We discussed the two most likely scenarios in our recent video from last week.

We further reduced risk this week for clients, and view any rallies attempts in markets as good opportunities to de-risk even further.

It is much better to not participate in short-term rallies than to participate in long-term declines.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

Invest wisely!


Filed Under: IronBridge Insights Tagged With: bank run, federal reserve, interest rates, markets, risk, risk management, silicon valley bank, volatility

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