Elizabeth Lopatto
Fun new NFT use case just dropped!
That’s right, you can use them to serve complaints now. Congratulations to the lawyers!
Elizabeth Lopatto
Senior Reporter
Senior Reporter
More From Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Loans to insiders at SVB “more than tripled” to $219 million in the last three months of 2022.
The loans increased as the bank began looking weaker, Bloomberg reports.
In its most-recent proxy statement, SVB Financial Group, the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank before its collapse, said it made loans last year to related parties including “companies in which certain of our directors or their affiliated venture funds are beneficial owners of 10% or more of the equity securities of such companies.”
Elizabeth Lopatto
Is the Fed even functioning?
The Fed was focusing on monetary policy when it was raising interest rates, says Peter Conti-Brown, a Wharton School expert on the Federal Reserve. But was it supervising places like Silicon Valley Bank to see what the outcome of that policy was?
Elizabeth Lopatto
How Apple’s avoiding layoffs: delaying bonus payments, pausing hiring, cutting travel budgets.
Sure, Apple didn’t go on the “hiring binges” during the pandemic that some of its rivals did. But it also understands something its rivals don’t: layoffs are a strong signal that the c-suite screwed up.
Elizabeth Lopatto
How are Masayoshi Son’s margin loans doing?
About a third of Son’s shares of Softbank are collateral for margin loans, which are being used to invest in Softbank Vision Fund. The Vision Fund invests in startups, exactly the kind that are vulnerable to the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown.
What happens if there’s a margin call on those loans? Great question, can’t wait to find out.
Checking in on SoftBank
[FinancialTimes]
Elizabeth Lopatto
Credit rating firms fell down on the job, again.
Hey, remember the phrase “structured by cows” from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? I think about it once a week, no reason.
Anyway! When Signature and Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, they were both highly-rated by credit ratings agencies.
Elizabeth Lopatto
The Effective Altruism movement was warned about SBF in 2018.
They just didn’t want to listen:
Some of the warnings were serious: sources say that MacAskill and Beckstead were repeatedly told that Bankman-Fried was untrustworthy, had inappropriate sexual relationships with subordinates, refused to implement standard business practices, and had been caught lying during his first months running Alameda, a crypto firm that was seeded by EA investors, staffed by EAs, and dedicating to making money that could be donated to EA causes.
Elizabeth Lopatto
When it came to Silicon Valley Bank, Fed monitors fell down on the job.
A year before the collapse, a senior team of Fed examiners started telling SVB about its problems, Bloomberg reports. But by then it was already late in the game. It had been the fastest-growing bank in the nation for five years, but apparently this didn’t ring alarm bells.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto