What’s Going on With Silicon Valley Bank?

How did we get here?

SVB Financial is the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, which counts many startups and venture-capital firms as clients. During the pandemic, those clients generated a ton of cash that led to a surge in deposits. SVB ended the first quarter of 2020 with just over $60 billion in total deposits. That skyrocketed to just shy of $200 billion by the end of the first quarter of 2022.

What did the bank do?

SVB Financial bought tens of billions of dollars of seemingly safe assets, primarily longer-term U.S. Treasurys and government-backed mortgage securities. SVB’s securities portfolio rose from about $27 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to around $128 billion by the end of 2021.

Why is that a problem?

These securities are at virtually no risk of defaulting. But they pay fixed interest rates for many years. That isn’t necessarily a problem, unless the bank suddenly needs to sell the securities. Because market interest rates have moved so much higher, those securities are suddenly worth less on the open market than they are valued at on the bank’s books. As a result, they could only be sold at a loss.

SVB’s unrealized losses on its securities portfolio at the end of 2022—or the gap between the cost of the investments and their fair value—jumped to more than $17 billion.

What else went wrong?

At the same time, SVB’s deposit inflows turned to outflows as its clients burned cash and stopped getting new funds from public offerings or fundraisings. Attracting new deposits also became far more expensive, with the rates demanded by savers increasing along with the Fed’s hikes. Deposits fell from nearly $200 billion at the end of March 2022 to $173 billion at year-end 2022.

And that is accelerating this year: As of Jan. 19, SVB was forecasting its deposits would decline by a midsingle-digit percentage in 2023. But their expectation as of March 8 was for a low-double-digit percentage decline.

How did this come to a head?

On Wednesday SVB said it had sold a large chunk of its securities, worth $21 billion at the time of sale, at a loss of about $1.8 billion after tax. The bank’s aim was to help it reset its interest earnings at today’s higher yields, and provide it with the balance-sheet flexibility to meet potential outflows and still fund new lending. It also set out to raise about $2.25 billion in capital.

Why didn’t it work?

Following that announcement on Wednesday evening, things seemed to get even worse for the bank. The share-sale announcement led the stock to crater in price, making it harder to raise capital and leading the bank to scuttle its share-sale plans, The Wall Street Journal has reported. And venture-capital firms reportedly began advising their portfolio companies to withdraw deposits from SVB.

On Thursday, customers tried to withdraw $42 billion of deposits—about a quarter of the bank’s total—according to a filing by California regulators. It ran out of cash.

What will happen to customer deposits?

Many of the bank’s deposits are sizable enough that they don’t carry Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. protection. SVB said it estimates that at the end of 2022 the amount of deposits in its U.S. offices that exceed the FDIC insurance limit was $151.5 billion.

The FDIC said in a statement on Friday that customers will have full access to their insured deposits no later than Monday morning. The FDIC said it hadn’t yet determined the current amount of uninsured deposits. But it said that uninsured depositors will get an advance dividend within the next week. For the remaining amounts of uninsured funds, those depositors will get something called a “receivership certificate,” and as the FDIC sells off the assets of SVB, they may get future dividend payments.

Why are other bank stocks getting hit?

Already rattled by the failure of

Silvergate Capital,

whose own problems started with crypto but also reflected a portfolio of government debt whose value was depressed by higher rates, investors are selling bank stocks across the board. Stocks of other midsize lenders such as

First Republic Bank

and Signature Bank were halted on Friday morning.

The impact of higher rates on banks’ securities isn’t limited to SVB. Across all FDIC banks, there were about $620 billion worth of unrealized losses in securities portfolios as of the fourth quarter.

Why is the Circle stablecoin USDC getting hit?

Circle Internet Financial Ltd., which issues the USD Coin stablecoin, said Friday it had $3.3 billion stuck in Silicon Valley Bank. USDC is supposed to mimic a dollar, but its price fell below 87 cents Saturday morning. Stablecoins such as USDC hold their $1 value by assuring coin holders that the coin’s issuer has $1 in real dollars or other assets for every coin in circulation—and that users can always swap their coins for $1.

Like a bank, a stablecoin is subject to a run: If holders are worried that they might not get their $1 back, they’ll race to get rid of their coins however they can—including by selling them. Buyers on Friday and Saturday, though, were evidently only willing to take them at a discount to $1.

What have we learned?

One of the big questions coming out of this will be which banks misjudged the match between the cost and lifespan of their deposits and the yield and duration of their assets. This is very different from the questions about bad lending that haunted the 2008 financial crisis.

As money flowed into banks during the pandemic, buying the shortest-term Treasurys or keeping the money in cash would have insulated them from the risk of rising interest rates. But it also would have depressed their income. Banks’ reach for “safe” yield may be what haunts them this time around.

Write to Telis Demos at Telis.Demos@wsj.com