SVB Bank is the "first bank killed by climate change." There will be more.
Mar 13, 10 min read
What (Really) Killed Silicon Valley Bank
What Else Implodes on Dying Planets? Financial Systems, And Ours Is Beginning To
Image Credit: CNN
In a foxhole, everyone turns into a libertarian. It’s sad, but true. Take the example of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. My Twitter feed filled up — fast — with erstwhile leftists and centrists and whatnot literally screaming that there shouldn’t be a bailout. Fair enough, I guess, if the logic “no safety nets for me means no safety nets for anyone!” really makes sense to you.
And this is…about as far as America’s commentary on the subject’s gone. It’s followed this tedious, predictable process, which ends in “I don’t have much so nobody deserves anything!!” But is that really the lesson to be drawn here? Is it just about…bailouts…and who deserves them?
In fact, there’s a much deeper lesson here, which is that our financial system is completely broken. It is not fit for the future. It is one of the big, big reasons that we are barely surviving the 21st century as democracies and modern societies, and the odds are pretty slim that we eke out even another few decades without hardcore implosion spreading. What do I mean by all that?
Well, let’s think about what’s actually happening in the world. Have you heard of a little thing called “climate change”? Sorry, I don’t mean to be facetious. But you see, note how totally divorced from reality the above discussion really is. Let’s try to reframe it. How are we to deal with climate change — whose mega-scale impacts are
already here?
What really caused the failure of Silicon Valley Bank?
Climate change did.
Silicon Valley Bank — ironically — is the first bank failure to be induced by climate change. And that should give us all pause.
I know, I know, everyone and their mother who are die-hard New York Times fans will be outraged with me for saying that, and it’s tedious, to be honest with you, but more than that, it’s foolish,
for you.
Let me explain to you precisely why. What caused SVB to fail? Well, it did something shocking (I’m being sarcastic) — it invested in long-dated US government bonds. Sarcastic, because, well,
those are the safest assets in the entire economy. Or at least they used to be. Even they turned out to be, well, lethally risky. Why? Because the Fed began to raise interest rates like a maniac. That causes bond prices to fall, at least longer-dated ones, and you don’t need to worry about the
math of why. What’s important to understand is the next part.
Why did the Fed suddenly begin to raise interest rates? Was it…because…suddenly wages and incomes were skyrocketing? Nope, those are
fallingin real terms.
The Fed raised interest rates because priceshave been
rising. Suddenly, in astronomical ways, in huge, huge amounts. And not just for certain things, but all the basics, from
food to
energy to
water to
medicine.
And all that stuff rose in price because of what climate change is doing to our economies already.
No, not solely. There was a complicating factor here — well, not much of one if you know a little bit about monopoly capitalism. As
input prices rose, monopolies jacked up output prices — the prices you pay at the grocery store or shopping mall — even more. Why? Because they
could. This was a golden opportunity to profiteer. Right about now, corporate profits are at their
highest point ever. Because as climate change sends the price of basics through the roof, of course monopolies who still have control over what’s left of a dying planet’s dwindling resources will profiteer like there’s no tomorrow, since, well,
there isn’t. So why bother being fair to anyone, anyways?
Now. The reason that the Fed used to give for the explosive way that prices rose was…wait for it..Covid. But Covid is over — certainly not as a public health emergency, but as one that society even bothers to acknowledge anymore. Covid is done with, in the sense of lockdowns, labour shortages, and other assorted big-league, social-scale economic impacts — and yet prices have kept right on rising. Astronomically. Every month. Every day. How much more do you spend for food every month? Any sort of basics, really? The amount just keeps going up and up and up.
There is a lesson there. Prices didn’t just begin to rise because of Covid. Sure, Covid played a role, but the fact that prices are still skyrocketing, just into oblivion, tells us that Covid
cannot have been the major factor. Instead, this wave of inflation is about climate change. Suddenly, we
began to
hit the
climate’s limits, in very real ways.
Only we’re ignoring it, or at least our power centers are. My entire field, economics? LOL, it barely even
talks about it. Let’s think about it together.
Was it a mere coincidence that, for example, harvests were off by double digits from Europe to California to Africa — and prices rose across the world, for food? Was it a coincidence that rivers began to
run dry, from the Colorado to the Rhone, and prices
began to rise for everything made from, LOL, water, from chemicals to energy? Just another coincidence that megaweather struck, which raised risk premia for everyone from farmers to shippers to people living in suddenly precarious places like shorelines — and hey, look at that, prices rose?
If you think that was a coincidence, congratulations, you’re an honorary member of the Fed. An honorary New York Times columnist. Good job!
To the rest of us, obviously none of this was a coincidence. The sudden arrival of the mega-scale impacts of climate change — from megafires to rivers running dry to worldwide crop failures — and a tsunami of inflation hitting the entire world. There was a causal link here, history will say.
What have I been saying all year? I’ve
been saying,
over and over again, that raising interest rates this far, this fast, was going to have calamitous consequences. Because it doesn’t solve the problem. It only makes it worse. I think I’ve written that
a dozen times or more. How so? Well, if your rivers are running dry and your crops failing, is raising interest rates going to…till a field? Turn the soil back from ash into soil? Is it going to turn cracked earth back into roaring rivers? Well, of course not.
It only makes the problem worse, because now you’ve added a layer of risk that doesn’t need to be there. You’re making people pay even more on the debt they’re taking on, in an accelerating way, because prices are rising far, far faster than incomes. You are making it harder to invest, because now every dollar that could be invested is riskier, in a systemic way. And that systemic risk is going to come due one day.
And it did. In the form of Silicon Valley Bank failing. There’s a lot of noise — a lot — out there about it. It’s hard to decipher, but the story here is actually pretty simple. Silicon Valley Bank invested, again, in long-term government bonds, which are
the safest assets in the economy. Now, sure, we can fault SVB for not “hedging” that bet, but that’s almost besides the point. Risk was multiplying, because interest rates were hammered upwards, again and again, and that risk was going to have to cause something to fail, sometime, soon. If it wasn’t SVB, it would’ve just been someone else.
You know who else is failing because of that risk? You are. How are
your finances doing lately? Because what raising interest rates — in this context, supply shocks, hitting our planet’s limits — does is create even more risk. And now it’s on your shoulders. Now it’s not just prices of basics that are rising, but the price you have to pay for debt, interest. And all that is leaving the average household absolutely wrecked. This is why everyone turns into a libertarian in this particular foxhole, because of course, they need a bailout, too
.
But you know who really needs a bailout? The planet does. How do solve —
really solve — the problem of history’s greatest supply shock? As in, we are now living on a planet that cannot supply us the level of abundance we became accustomed to, and what it can supply will only dwindle, year by year, until, at last, all that’s left is authoritarians and fascists fighting one another over what little is left?
We solve that problem by investment. Like never before.
Investment is the opposite of raising interest rates. Raising interest rates makes interest, well, more expensive. It
reduces investment. In a situation like this? The planet can’t supply us water, food, medicine, energy anymore — or if it can, only in a way that destroys it, and us, even faster?
There’s only one way out of that, and that’s investment, on a scale never before seen in human history. Our GDP as a world is about $90 trillion, give or take. We invest at a rate of 20%. That’s about $20 trillion. We need to invest at a rate of about 50%. That’s $45 trillion. The gap is $25 trillion.
We need to more than double what we invest, or we don’t have a future. Or this is the future, lunatics and fanatics seducing the rest of us with hate, telling us that the way out of this mess is to prevent the grabbing hands of those dirty people from having what we, the pure and true, deserve, because when resources dwindle, do you know what happens?
Always happens? Fascism wins.
Until it burns everything down.
Look around the world. Tell me a place right now where fascism isn’t winning. In America? It’s making startling advances, just
tearing up rights in a blitzkrieg. Britain, LOL, turned so ugly that it’s top sportscaster had to throw
his hands up disgust and walk away. Europe’s confronted with fascist parties in
multiple nations rising to power. India, China, Russia, on and on it goes. Look around the world, and understand that this is not a drill, and it isn’t a game.
We are on our last legs as a civilization.
Now let’s come back to SVB. The irony is the example it became. What is — was — SVB’s role in the economy? Innovation. The bank that was there to support and nurture innovation — and to be fair, it did quite a good job of that for many decades — failed. Why? Because we finally hit a problem that we can’t innovate our way around, at least not in the old way.
Climate change.
You see, when I say we need the greatest wave of investment in human history, that means something institutionally, too. It means we need a very different financial system to do it. Even if our innovation focused banks invest in the safest assets in the economy today — they still fail.
Precisely because this financial system is not fit for the future. Why not? Well, we need one that can invest on generational timescales, not just mayfly ones. We need one that factors in global scale impacts, not just profits to a few “shareholders” who are all dudes calling themselves “hedge fund managers” and gambling with Daddy’s Money. And we need one that can actually push the boundaries of “innovation” beyond just…apps…digital stuff. My dude, the planet is dying. What are you going to eat, the Metaverse?
We need a financial system that can do everything from invest in replacements for things as simple but toxic as plastics, to funding bringing ecosystems back to life, to creating clean energy infrastructure that lasts another millennium, if not century, to manufacturing stuff in clean ways, to agriculture that isn’t causing a mass extinction of life on the planet.
This one isn’t it. Do you really think that a financial system of for-profit “investment banks” is ever going to do any of that, let alone all of it? That system’s job is profit, right now, more of it, at any price, not…the survival of democracy and civilization on a dying planet.
So what does that system look like? Well, the World Bank should be reformed along those lines. So should the IMF. Every nation should have a Public Investment Bank to reinvent its energy grid, choose a position in manufacturing, develop an economy of the future, and create the jobs and industries that we need, instead of the failing ones that go on dwindling year by year. We need “stock markets,” too, in which the only measure of value isn’t just profitability, but purpose, whether or not you actually, I don’t know, planted a goddamned tree, versus just killed off another million beings for a few pennies more today.
This system isn’t going to cut it. We need to reinvent it, from top to bottom. The irony is that Silicon Valley Bank teaches us that lesson — we need to innovate on this level, an institutional, systemic one, or else, well this is the future. SVB is the first bank climate change killed. But it’s going to be far from the last. Every year, more and more will go bust, because, well, you know what else is going to happen as a result of everyone taking on more debt to afford the basics, since real incomes are falling? That’s right, those debts, a whole lot of them, are going to go bad, too — and bang, there goes another bank. And then another one. This isn’t an anomaly, it’s a theme, a beginning, a transformation that isn’t happening, and so…implosion does, instead.
I don’t know if all that makes sense. Honestly? I tire of writing about it some days. Not for you, gentle readers. I know that you are thoughtful and caring people, and sharing these thoughts with you is my reason for writing them at all. But I think, too, about the way my own field — economics and finance — rejects these ideas, these warnings to give, and will, even now. Oh well, I guess they’re right. The planet can totally die, and everything, especially the banking system, will be
just fine.
You know the “don’t worry! We’ll all be super-beings living immortally in computers on Mars” excuse of the techno-geeks? This is the economists version of that:
denial. No, on a dying planet, things aren’t going to be fine. Not democracy,
which becomes fascism, not economies, which becomes impoverished, not society, which tears itself apart, and certainly least of all, banks, which are going to go on crashing and burning, now, more and more, like embers falling from a burning sky. Because what do we all do, in the end, at the end of the world?
Run.
Umair
March 2023
https://eand.co/what-really-killed-silicon-valley-bank-9f271644ef2c