(NEW YORK) — An Ohio public pension fund for teachers revealed it lost millions by holding more than $27 million in Silicon Valley Bank shares before the bank’s collapse.
The State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) of Ohio stated that the shares represented a minuscule portion of its overall holdings –.03% of the total fund — which held over $88.8 billion in assets as of June 2022. The statement confirmed that the bank had no shares of Signature or Silvergate banks, which collapsed in the past weeks.
STRS is a pension fund for over 500,000 current and former public educators in Ohio.
“The collective actions taken by the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure and backstop deposits have helped to mitigate the situation facing the banking industry,” STRS wrote in their statement. “STRS Ohio continues to monitor and assess the impact of these developments.”
The multi-million dollar loss comes as another repercussion of the ongoing financial crisis. Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the U.S., collapsed one week ago, followed by the collapse of Signature Bank. Silvergate Bank, which specialized in providing services to cryptocurrency users, also liquidated its assets earlier in March.
The financial crisis has impacted other pension funds, including North Carolina’s state pension fund and California’s public employee retirement fund.
In a statement to ABC News’ Raleigh station WTVD, North Carolina Treasurer Dale Folwell said the state’s pension fund held about $9.9 million in Silicon Valley Bank and $7.8 million in Signature Bank stock. Similar to STRS, the limited exposure to North Carolina amounted to only .01% of the total value of the impacted portfolios.
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which covers 1.5 million people, also revealed it had roughly $67 million in exposure to Silicon Valley Bank and $11 million in exposure to Signature Bank at a board meeting this week. The nation’s largest public pension fund with over $422 billion, CalPERS suffered a relatively small impact from the financial crisis.
The losses in California, Ohio and North Carolina represent a fraction of the losses suffered by a Swedish pension fund representing over 2.6 million people that invested over $1.1 billion in Signature and Silicon Valley Bank. Magnus Billing, the CEO of Alecta, told Bloomberg that the investments were a “big failure” and that the fund would likely write off their holdings as a loss.
(NEW YORK) — The CEO behind the company that created ChatGPT believes artificial intelligence technology will reshape society as we know it. He believes it comes with real dangers, but can also be “the greatest technology humanity has yet developed” to drastically improve our lives.
“We’ve got to be careful here,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.”
Altman sat down for an exclusive interview with ABC News’ chief business, technology and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis to talk about the rollout of GPT-4 — the latest iteration of the AI language model.
In his interview, Altman was emphatic that OpenAI needs both regulators and society to be as involved as possible with the rollout of ChatGPT — insisting that feedback will help deter the potential negative consequences the technology could have on humanity. He added that he is in “regular contact” with government officials.
ChatGPT is an AI language model, the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
Released only a few months ago, it is already considered the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The app hit 100 million monthly active users in just a few months. In comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach that many users and Instagram took nearly three years, according to a UBS study.
Watch the exclusive interview with Sam Altman on “World News Tonight with David Muir” at 6:30 p.m. ET on ABC.
Though “not perfect,” per Altman, GPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam. It also scored a near-perfect score on the SAT Math test, and it can now proficiently write computer code in most programming languages.
GPT-4 is just one step toward OpenAI’s goal to eventually build Artificial General Intelligence, which is when AI crosses a powerful threshold which could be described as AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.
Though he celebrates the success of his product, Altman acknowledged the possible dangerous implementations of AI that keep him up at night.
“I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation,” Altman said. “Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, [they] could be used for offensive cyberattacks.”
A common sci-fi fear that Altman doesn’t share: AI models that don’t need humans, that make their own decisions and plot world domination.
“It waits for someone to give it an input,” Altman said. “This is a tool that is very much in human control.”
However, he said he does fear which humans could be in control. “There will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on,” he added. “Society, I think, has a limited amount of time to figure out how to react to that, how to regulate that, how to handle it.”
President Vladimir Putin is quoted telling Russian students on their first day of school in 2017 that whoever leads the AI race would likely “rule the world.”
“So that’s a chilling statement for sure,” Altman said. “What I hope, instead, is that we successively develop more and more powerful systems that we can all use in different ways that integrate it into our daily lives, into the economy, and become an amplifier of human will.”
Concerns about misinformation
According to OpenAI, GPT-4 has massive improvements from the previous iteration, including the ability to understand images as input. Demos show GTP-4 describing what’s in someone’s fridge, solving puzzles, and even articulating the meaning behind an internet meme.
This feature is currently only accessible to a small set of users, including a group of visually impaired users who are part of its beta testing.
But a consistent issue with AI language models like ChatGPT, according to Altman, is misinformation: The program can give users factually inaccurate information.
“The thing that I try to caution people the most is what we call the ‘hallucinations problem,'” Altman said. “The model will confidently state things as if they were facts that are entirely made up.”
The model has this issue, in part, because it uses deductive reasoning rather than memorization, according to OpenAI.
“One of the biggest differences that we saw from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 was this emergent ability to reason better,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer, told ABC News.
“The goal is to predict the next word – and with that, we’re seeing that there is this understanding of language,” Murati said. “We want these models to see and understand the world more like we do.”
“The right way to think of the models that we create is a reasoning engine, not a fact database,” Altman said. “They can also act as a fact database, but that’s not really what’s special about them – what we want them to do is something closer to the ability to reason, not to memorize.”
Altman and his team hope “the model will become this reasoning engine over time,” he said, eventually being able to use the internet and its own deductive reasoning to separate fact from fiction. GPT-4 is 40% more likely to produce accurate information than its previous version, according to OpenAI. Still, Altman said relying on the system as a primary source of accurate information “is something you should not use it for,” and encourages users to double-check the program’s results.
Precautions against bad actors
The type of information ChatGPT and other AI language models contain has also been a point of concern. For instance, whether or not ChatGPT could tell a user how to make a bomb. The answer is no, per Altman, because of the safety measures coded into ChatGPT.
“A thing that I do worry about is … we’re not going to be the only creator of this technology,” Altman said. “There will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on it.”
There are a few solutions and safeguards to all of these potential hazards with AI, per Altman. One of them: Let society toy with ChatGPT while the stakes are low, and learn from how people use it.
Right now, ChatGPT is available to the public primarily because “we’re gathering a lot of feedback,” according to Murati.
As the public continues to test OpenAI’s applications, Murati says it becomes easier to identify where safeguards are needed.
“What are people using them for, but also what are the issues with it, what are the downfalls, and being able to step in [and] make improvements to the technology,” says Murati. Altman says it’s important that the public gets to interact with each version of ChatGPT.
“If we just developed this in secret — in our little lab here — and made GPT-7 and then dropped it on the world all at once … That, I think, is a situation with a lot more downside,” Altman said. “People need time to update, to react, to get used to this technology [and] to understand where the downsides are and what the mitigations can be.”
Regarding illegal or morally objectionable content, Altman said they have a team of policymakers at OpenAI who decide what information goes into ChatGPT, and what ChatGPT is allowed to share with users.
“[We’re] talking to various policy and safety experts, getting audits of the system to try to address these issues and put something out that we think is safe and good,” Altman added. “And again, we won’t get it perfect the first time, but it’s so important to learn the lessons and find the edges while the stakes are relatively low.”
Will AI replace jobs?
Among the concerns of the destructive capabilities of this technology is the replacement of jobs. Altman says this will likely replace some jobs in the near future, and worries how quickly that could happen.
“I think over a couple of generations, humanity has proven that it can adapt wonderfully to major technological shifts,” said Altman. “But if this happens, you know, in a single digit number of years, some of these shifts, that is the part I worry about the most.
But he encourages people to look at ChatGPT as more of a tool, not as a replacement. He added that “human creativity is limitless, and we find new jobs. We find new things to do.”
“I think over a couple of generations, humanity has proven that it can adapt wonderfully to major technological shifts,” Altman said. “But if this happens in a single-digit number of years, some of these shifts … That is the part I worry about the most.”
The ways ChatGPT can be used as tools for humanity outweigh the risks, according to Altman.
“We can all have an incredible educator in our pocket that’s customized for us, that helps us learn,” Altman said. “We can have medical advice for everybody that is beyond what we can get today.”
ChatGPT as ‘co-pilot’
In education, ChatGPT has become controversial, as some students have used it to cheat on assignments. Educators are torn on whether this could be used as an extension of themselves, or if it deters students’ motivation to learn for themselves.
“Education is going to have to change, but it’s happened many other times with technology,” said Altman, adding that students will be able to have a sort of teacher that goes beyond the classroom. “One of the ones that I’m most excited about is the ability to provide individual learning — great individual learning for each student.”
In any field, Altman and his team want users to think of ChatGPT as a “co-pilot,” someone who could help you write extensive computer code or problem solve.
“We can have that for every profession, and we can have a much higher quality of life, like standard of living,” Altman said. “But we can also have new things we can’t even imagine today — so that’s the promise.”
(NEW YORK) — Ford announced this week that it is recalling more than 1.2 million of its vehicles over a serious issue with its brake fluid hoses.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Ford Fusions and Lincoln MKXs sold between 2013 and 2018 have an issue where the front brake hoses may rupture and leak brake fluid.
“A brake fluid leak will increase brake pedal travel and extend the distance needed to stop the vehicle, increasing the risk of [a] crash,” the NHTSA said.
Owners will be notified about the recall in letters, the agency said. Dealers will replace the front brake hoses, free of charge, according to the NHTSA.
Owners can contact Ford at 1-866-436-7332, and ask about recall 23S12, or contact the NHTSA at 1-888-327-4236.
(WASHINGTON) — A ban on TikTok in the United States or a sale of the app by its Chinese owner, ByteDance, will not resolve national security concerns or fears TikTok could be used to siphon Americans’ data, according to a new cybersecurity report obtained by ABC News.
The report, from the cybersecurity company Feroot, said the app still has your data even if you’ve never used TikTok. And it’s collecting and transferring that data whether or not the app is deleted, according to the report.
“TikTok can be present on a website in pretty much any sector in the form of TikTok pixels/trackers,” the report said. “In many cases, the pixels/trackers immediately start executing and have little to nothing to do with the immediate business of the website owner.”
Webpages associated with everything from airlines and e-commerce sites to technology companies and state and federal governments are riddled with TikTok’s trackers called pixels, which are part of the code that loads into your browser from various websites, according to Feroot. They immediately link to data harvesting platforms that pick off usernames and passwords, credit card and banking information and details about users’ personal health.
Sites that require logins and authentications may think they’re adding a layer of security, but TikTok’s pixels just collect those names, passwords and authentication codes along with other data, according to Feroot.
The pixels transfer the data to locations around the globe, including China and Russia, often before users have a chance to accept cookies or otherwise grant consent, the Feroot report said.
TikTok is not the only company that uses its pixels throughout the internet. The report found Google, Meta and Microsoft, among others, use these trackers.
The company told ABC News on Thursday that since June, all new U.S. user data has been routed to the Oracle cloud, and since October, access to that secure environment has been limited to employees of TikTok U.S. Data Security; Today, those employees manage all access to U.S. user data.
A TikTok spokesperson told ABC News this week amid the Biden administration’s call for ByteDance to divest from the app, “The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting and verification, which we are already implementing.”
TikTok said it will continue to move forward with a plan called “Project Texas” to safeguard U.S. user data as it evaluates the administration’s position.
ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress on Thursday the U.S. “banking system is sound” after two bank failures stirred economic fears.
Yellen, testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, began her remarks by addressing the abrupt collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York.
“I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system remains sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them,” she said. “This week’s actions demonstrate our resolute commitment to ensure that depositors’ savings remain safe.”
Yellen faced a grilling from lawmakers on the government’s response and whether regulators missed warning signs that Silicon Valley Bank, the country’s 16th largest bank, was in jeopardy. Investigations are underway at the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Silicon Valley Bank’s demise.
Yellen told lawmakers in her opening remarks that the government took “decisive and forceful actions to strengthen public confidence in our banking system” in the wake of the failures.
That included guaranteeing the protection of all Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank deposits, which many Republicans have slammed as a prioritization of the rich.
Yellen also highlighted the Federal Reserve’s plan to establish a new lending facility to give additional support to banks to meet the needs of all depositors.
“Nerves are certainly frayed at this moment,” committee chair Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said as he began the hearing.
Sen, Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, pressed Yellen on whether there was a liquidity risk at Silicon Valley Bank. Yellen attributed the bank’s downfall to a run that led to liquidity problems.
“There will be a careful look at what happened in the bank and what initiated this problem, but clearly the downfall of the bank, the reason it had to be closed, was that it could not meet depositors’ withdrawal requests,” she told the senator.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — The word “bailout” is sure to make anyone who remembers the 2008 financial crisis nostalgic in all the worst ways. At the time, the government used taxpayer money to keep some of the country’s largest financial institutions afloat.
Two regional banks recently collapsed. As depositors of those banks feared for the money in their accounts, the Fed stepped in to replenish any of the money depositors would have lost.
The U.S. government and even the banks struggle to call it a bailout in any way that relates to what happened in 2008, with the government refusing to call it a bailout at all, and there’s a couple of reasons for all of this.
What happened?
When Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank were seized and shut down by regulators last weekend, depositors of those banks feared for their money. The FDIC insures depositors’ money up to at least $250,000 – meaning if you had more than that amount in one of those banks, you may be out of luck.
However, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC announced they would make sure all depositors with accounts at SVB and Signature Bank would have access to their funds by the next day — beyond just the $250,000 guaranteed by the FDIC.
The Fed announced a few other actions as well — like making funds available for other financial institutions in the form of one-year loans. This is all to instill confidence in other banks after SVB’s collapse, and to avoid any run on the banks.
The money is going to customers, not the institutions.
“In 2008, we were actually bailing out companies,” said Art Hogan, a chief market strategist with B. Riley Wealth and Art’s with over 30 years experience working in the U.S. equity markets. “Banks that were seen as too big to fail.”
But now, as Hogan puts it, the government is not coming to save SVB or Signature Bank — noting that all the money is going towards depositors, not the banks.
“But [the government] is not going to let the depositors get hurt,” says Hogan. “They’re actually rescuing depositors in banks that made some bad decisions over the course of the last year or so.”
That means investors, employees or others who were making money from these institutions are out of luck and should not be able to touch any of the money the government will be using to make depositors whole.
“What happened during the financial crisis: shareholders and bondholders of many of our biggest banks were bailed out by the government,” said Gerard Cassidy managing director with RBC Capital Markets. Cassidy has been with and provided RBC with investment research on the U.S. banking industry for more than 30 years.
“The shareholders and bondholders of the two respected banks that failed — Silicon Valley and Signature, were completely wiped out; And so, from that standpoint, I would say this is not a bailout,” he said.
SVB is not in complete shambles. HSBC on Monday announced a deal to buy the U.K. subsidiary of Silicon Valley Bank, which has a new name: SVB Bridge Bank.
But back to the word “bailout” — which has no traditional definition. Some still consider the actions taken by the government over the last week a bailout. The difference, per some experts, between now and 2008 is simply who is being bailed out: the depositors.
“Bailout,” yelled senior economics fellow at Brookings Institution, Aaron Klein, during a phone interview with ABC News. “That’s what it is — plain and simple.”
Klein spent over a decade working in government, including his time as chief economist of the Senate Banking. During that time, he worked on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) — a $700 billion government bailout authorized by Congress in October of 2008.
Klein’s point is that the depositors being made whole beyond the original $250,000 guarantee are, in essence, getting bailed out. Everyone who had less than that in their accounts was already guaranteed their money back by the Fed, he noted.
“If you lined up 20 Americans in a room, the 19th richest person will have – based on the average – about $69,000 in their bank account,” noted Klein. “Very few Americans have more than $250,000 in a single bank.”
Per the bank’s own description, SVB catered its services to venture capitalists (VCs), start-up and leaders in the tech industry — many of whom could be considered financially “well-off”.
“VCs should say thank you,” wrote New York Times’ and CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Twitter.
“It is a bailout,” he wrote. “Not like 2008. But it is a bailout of the venture capital community + their portfolio companies (their investments). That’s the depositor base of SVB.”
If the government is stepping in to guarantee these bank customers their money beyond the $250,000 guarantee, many are left wondering where that money is coming from and how this is not considered a bailout.
No taxpayer money will be used, says the Fed.
The White House, the Treasury and the FDIC have been blunt about one talking point: the money for these depositors at SVB and Signature Bank will not come from taxpayers.
“For the banks that were put into receivership, the FDIC will use funds from the Deposit Insurance Fund to ensure that all of its depositors are made whole,” said a senior Treasury Department official Sunday.
The Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) is a program run by the FDIC mainly funded through quarterly assessments on insured banks, paid by the banks — as well as interest on funds invested in government bonds. This is how that $250,000 gets guaranteed, but now the government is going beyond that guarantee to ensure confidence.
The DIF currently has over $100 billion in it, which should be a “sufficient” amount to make SVB and Signature Bank whole, officials said Monday.
The funds offered in the form of one-year-loans to other banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions — all of whom will have to put up qualifying assets as collateral — will come from a new Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP).
This is more of a failsafe. The BTFP is aimed at safeguarding banks who may have lost depositors’ confidence after the SVB and Signature Bank collapse.
“This action will bolster the capacity of the banking system to safeguard deposits and ensure the ongoing provision of money and credit to the economy,” the Fed said in a statement. “The Federal Reserve is prepared to address any liquidity pressures that may arise.”
If needed, the BTFP will be partially funded by up to $25 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). The ESF is an emergency reserve fund normally used for foreign exchange intervention.
The Fed says it “does not anticipate that it will be necessary to draw on these backstop funds.”
It’s unclear how much harm the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank did to depositors’ confidence — earlier this week, stocks of more than two dozen regional banks tumbled.
Banks varying in size from around the country, including San Francisco-based First Republic Bank and Salt Lake City-based Zions Bank, find themselves in market turmoil as some customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors dumped bank stocks fearing a run on those banks.
The turmoil in regional U.S. banks spread to Europe Wednesday. The stock of Credit Suisse, a long troubled Swiss bank, plunged 24% on Wednesday. While American banks stocks had another down day. Analysts say the rapid interest raise increases by the federal reserve are shaking confidence in the entire sector.
Nevertheless, the Fed says it’s prepared to make depositors whole should any other bank suffer the same fate as SVB and Signature Bank.
It’s worth noting that most experts agree that the collapse of these two banks was caused by poor management and misguided financial decisions, and should be considered exceptional circumstances.
“This was a poorly managed bank that ran into a couple of different issues at the very same time,” said Cassidy regarding SVB. “It looks like everyone’s money will be insured even beyond $250,000 – so the idea is not to panic, this will settle down…we’ll get through this.”
(NEW YORK) — The failure of Silicon Valley Bank, the second-biggest bank collapse in U.S. history, called into doubt the fate of roughly $175 billion in customer deposits.
Days later, the U.S. government guaranteed the protection of all Silicon Valley Bank deposits but the turmoil left Americans with a lingering question: Is my money safe in the bank?
Robust insurance protections for bank deposits and the infrequency of bank failures afford security for account holders, making deposits safe even as the industry undergoes turmoil, experts told ABC News.
“It’s absolutely 100% safe,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News. “All depositors in banks and credit unions can be entirely confident that their money is safe.”
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, which safeguards the stability of the financial system, protects depositors at all FDIC-insured banks for up to $250,000 in funds for each different type of account held.
Nearly every bank is FDIC insured, and the vast majority of accounts fall below the $250,000 threshold.
In other words, bank account holders with $250,000 or less can rest assured that their money enjoys full protection from the U.S. government in the event of a bank failure.
A joint account between two individuals qualifies for FDIC insurance of up to $500,000.
Similarly, credit unions are insured by the National Credit Union Administration, a government agency.
In an effort to tamp down financial panic and prevent a wider crisis, the U.S. government dramatically expanded FDIC insurance protections to cover accounts at failed banks Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank that exceed the $250,000 threshold.
If other financial institutions collapse as a result of the fallout, the government will likely extend that full protection to depositors at the affected banks, Zandi said.
“There is no way at this point, given all the angst, that the government is going to allow a depositor to lose a penny,” he said.
In normal market conditions, however, depositors with funds that exceed $250,000 stand to lose part or all of the money if a bank goes belly up. Individuals or institutions with holdings that exceed that threshold can divide their money between multiple different account types or banks to keep each one below the threshold, Zandi said.
When an FDIC-insured bank collapses, a government agency typically takes control of the bank and soon afterward makes funds available to customers.
“In many cases, regulators go in and seize the banking operations and determine what deposits are owed and do their best to get those paid out within the next day or two,” Jeff Jones a finance professor at Missouri State University, told ABC News.
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Depositors can find solace not only in the robust insurance protections but also in the knowledge that U.S. bank failures are very rare, experts said.
Not a single bank failure took place last year or the year before, according to research firm Bankrate. In 2010, at the height of the Great Recession, 157 banks failed.
For context, there are 4,706 commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the FDIC, the agency said last month.
“You can calculate the probability,” Zandi said. “It’s pretty small.”
Despite the collapse of two of the nation’s 30-largest banks in recent days, the possibility of widespread bank failures remains highly unlikely, the experts said, noting extraordinary government intervention that helped contain the damage to the financial system.
“I feel confident that the financial system is on very solid footing,” Zandi said. “The government intervention here was extremely aggressive.”
Besides raising awareness about how to protect one’s funds in the bank, the downfall of Silicon Valley Bank also offers lessons for how to invest money elsewhere, the experts said.
Silicon Valley Bank had loaded up on investments into long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage bonds, which typically deliver small but reliable returns amid low interest rates.
As the Federal Reserve aggressively hiked interest rates over the past year, however, those holdings lost significant value.
The takeaway for individuals is the importance of diversification, the experts said, defining that principle as the placement of funds into a range of investments.
“As long as you’re well-diversified, any kind of issue you have will likely be very small and contained,” Jones said.
(NEW YORK) — In the wake of last year’s collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the collapse this week of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — representing the second and third largest bank failures in U.S. history — has renewed lingering questions about what role cryptocurrency is playing in financial sector failures.
Signature Bank, which is known for dealing in cryptocurrency, came under fire last year during the collapse of FTX and crypto hedge fund Alameda Research. At Silicon Valley Bank, which is known for serving the tech and startup industries since its founding 40 years ago, the withdrawal of large cryptocurrency deposits added to the fear fueling the bank run that ended in the bank’s collapse Friday.
However, experts told ABC News that cryptocurrency did not play a leading role in the banks’ failures — although the collapses will have ramifications in the cryptocurrency sector.
“I don’t think crypto has much of a role,” said David Yermack, professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “Crypto is more or less a bystander in all of this, just like all the other companies who had deposited money.”
Yermack, who teaches a course on cryptocurrency and blockchains, said that while the situation remains fluid, two main factors appear to have contributed to the failures: The banks that failed were too concentrated in one industry, and the deregulation of banking over the last five or six years has weakened regulations.
“In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, [the concentration] would be the West Coast technology industry,” Yermack told ABC News. “And if you’ve got a group of customers who can’t pay back their loans, and they’re all correlated with each other, suddenly they all can’t pay you back together — that makes those loans a lot less valuable.”
Boston College law professor Patricia McCoy said the bank’s collapse was hastened by its large holdings of the cryptocurrency USDC, which is managed by the financial technology company Circle Internet Financial.
“At Silicon Valley Bank, really, the only role that the crypto industry played was this big deposit by Circle, which was very prone to run risk,” McCoy said. “When Circle became nervous that Silicon Valley Bank was in trouble, its natural response would be to immediately withdraw that entire very large deposit.”
“Silicon Valley Bank did not have the money — the cash — to pay all the withdrawal requests,” said McCoy. “So, the fact that Circle had such a large deposit, and it was a type of client that was prone to panic, intensified the bank run at Silicon Valley Bank.”
On the recent deregulation of banking, Yermack pointed to the banks’ investment of large amounts of capital into Treasury bonds, which are typically very safe. However, said Yermack, “because interest rates changed a lot in the last year or so, those bonds lost value — and under the accounting rules, the banks could still count them at 100 cents on the dollar.”
Simply put, Yermack said, the banks did not have to account for the depreciation in the value of the bonds, which made them look much safer than they really were.
“This gets right to the heart of the issue about how banks are supervised and regulated — that they really should have had to write those bonds down to value in real time, and make the problems more apparent much earlier,” he said.
“As somebody who deals with financial data every day, I think everything should be marked to market value,” said Yermack. “And to the extent it’s not, you run the risk of misleading people, and it seems in this case it was the banking regulators who were misled, and they just said, ‘Oh, those are government bonds. Those are the safest assets.'”
“But government bonds can lose value just like anything else,” Yermack said. “And I think … the regulators were sort of caught off guard and unawares by this.”
(NEW YORK) — Bank stocks in the U.S. and Europe tumbled on Wednesday as the global financial system continued to reckon with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, the largest bank failure since 2008.
Shares of Credit Suisse fell more than 26% in early trading after a top backer said he would not be able to provide any more cash to support the Swiss bank.
The pressure on the banking industry appeared to strain some of the largest U.S. banks, too.
Citi fell nearly 5% on Wednesday morning while J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo each dropped nearly 4%.
The downward trend hammered the major stock indexes. The Dow Industrial Average fell more than 500 points, which amounts to a 1.3% decline; the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each fell about 1.5%.
The banking sector’s struggles mark the latest sign of fallout from the fall on Friday of Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th-largest bank in the U.S. Two days later, Signature Bank, the nation’s 29th-largest bank, closed its doors, suggesting the financial panic had spread.
Many bank stocks plummeted at the outset of this week but rallied on Tuesday, regaining much of their losses. The broad decline in early trading on Wednesday renewed fears of damage to the wider financial system.
The turn downward follows news on Tuesday that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing the fall of Silicon Valley Bank.
The Federal Reserve Board, the governing body of the Fed, announced a day earlier that it would launch a review of the “supervision and regulation of Silicon Valley Bank, in light of its failure.”
The second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history triggered a major government intervention to protect the financial system.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protects the stability of the financial system, took over Silicon Valley Bank on Friday in an effort to protect depositors.
Fearing a wider spread of the crisis after the collapse of Signature Bank, the FDIC, the Treasury Department and the Fed took further action on Sunday, telling depositors in both fallen banks that the FDIC would protect all of their funds, including those that exceed its $250,000 limit.
Later that day, the Fed announced an emergency lending program to cover the deposits at issue and restore wider confidence in the financial system.
Still, the worldwide fallout in the banking sector appears ongoing.
France’s two largest international banks, Societe Generale SA and BNP Paribas SA, fell more than 10% on Wednesday. Deutsche Bank AG, a top German lender, plummeted 8%.
Some financial institutions were spared, however. Schwab, the eighth-largest U.S. bank, ticked up almost 3%.
(NEW YORK) — The closures of two of the nation’s largest banks over the past week have put many consumers on edge.
Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th largest bank, struggled as the sharp rise in interest rates led to a decline in the value of the bank’s Treasuries and mortgage bonds. When the bank’s value dropped, its customers, who are mostly in the tech industry, pulled their money from the institution in a so-called bank run that forced Silicon Valley Bank to close for good.
Days later, New York-based Signature Bank, the 29th-largest bank in the U.S., was ordered to close.
After the banks’ closures, even people who didn’t have money invested in Silicon Valley Bank or Signature Bank were left wondering what it might mean for them and their money.
ABC News’ Good Morning America spoke with financial expert Farnoosh Torabi, host of the “So Money” podcast, to break down what consumers need to know.
Are other banks still safe to keep money in?
Yes, according to Torabi.
“Silicon Valley Bank is making the news because it is an anomaly. It is an anomaly event in the financial world,” Torabi said. “It’s our human nature to see events like these and think this is what happens all of the time, or this is going to happen tomorrow at my bank, but it’s really important to put this in the perspective of history. Very few banks actually go completely out of business.”
The banks’ closings have prompted some people on social media to post about taking their money out of banks and storing it at home, which Torabi said would be one of the worst decisions to make at this moment.
“I can assure you that that is a not safe thing to do,” she said. “It is far worse to put your money at home, in a lockbox, under your mattress than at a bank in the United States.”
What do I need to ask my bank to make sure it is secure?
The one step Torabi says every person should take is to make sure their bank has a partnership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, better known as the FDIC.
The FDIC is an independent government agency tasked with keeping the nation’s banking system running.
Consumers can go to the FDIC website to see if their bank is insured, or ask their bank directly.
Torabi said it’s more important than ever, given the number of tech-driven, digital banks on the market, to know who is behind the bank and whether or not they are FDIC-insured.
“There are more choices as consumers, so we have to do our due diligence,” she said. “It’s very important that you do your homework, your background check, on that bank.”
What does FDIC insurance do?
If a bank is FDIC-insured, its depositors are guaranteed protection of up to $250,000 in funds for each different type of account held.
In other words, if a customer has $200,000 in checking and savings accounts at an FDIC-insured bank and that bank goes under, the FDIC will step in and pay the customer $200,000 so they do not lose the money.
Torabi said the FDIC website is, again, a great resource for people to figure out how their accounts are insured and up to what limit. In some cases, for example, a couple that has both individual and joint accounts at one bank may be insured past the $250,000 limit.
In extreme, larger cases, as with Silicon Valley Bank, the FDIC will also step in to cover beyond the $250,000 limit.
The FDIC, the Treasury Department and the Fed have told depositors in Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank that the FDIC would protect all of their funds, including those that exceed the $250,000 limit.
It is important to note that the FDIC does not insure risky investments like stocks, bonds or crypto.
Do I need to spread my money across multiple different banks?
Torabi said this time is a good reminder of the “importance of diversification” when it comes to our money.
“We should always be diversifying not only where we invest, but when it comes to saving, too,” Torabi said. “If you have more than $250,000 in a bank, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not protected, because we know FDIC limits work in different ways, but it’s important to check. It’s important to know.”
She continued, “Maybe what you do is you put some of that money at a different institution, or you take some of it and put it in a joint account.”
Will the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank impact interest rates?
Over the last several months, Americans have been hit hard by both elevated inflation and aggressive interest rate hikes.
One interesting impact of the collapse of the two banks is that it could lead to slight relief for consumers.
While the Federal Reserve is expected to hike interest rates again next week to keep combating inflation, Wall Street analysts do not expect the hike to be as aggressive now because higher interest rates put even more pressure on banks, according to Rebecca Jarvis, ABC News chief business, technology and economics correspondent.
If my money wasn’t in the impacted banks, what should my biggest concern be?
According to Torabi, the economic concern she is most focused on at the moment is layoffs and making sure consumers are prepared for that worst-case scenario.
On Tuesday, for example, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs and will cancel 5,000 open positions.
Torabi said she encourages people to start thinking now about what they would need financially if they were laid off, so they can prepare.
“Doing this sort of pre-emptive crisis management now can allow you to then see, when times are still good, where the holes are in your financial life and start to fill them,” she said, adding that people should keep their resumes and networking up-to-date and ask themselves questions like, “What if I got laid off today? What would I do? Do I know how to collect unemployment? Do I have enough in savings? What would I cut out of my budget?”
Torabi said that same kind of action-oriented thinking can also apply to looking at the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
“As a consumer, as a depositor at a bank that didn’t have any relationship with SVB [Silicon Valley Bank], I think it’s not worth your time obsessing over this,” she said. “Just make sure to dot your i’s, cross your t’s, make sure your money is FDIC-insured and if you have questions, talk to your lender, talk to your bank. They would know better than anybody.”
