I’m no expert in US markets, but I don’t think that’s true. For instance, if you try to get a repo w them, you’ll probably need a larger hair-cut than w gov bonds.
I suspect it is true that they’re haircut less generously, but I do not believe that any part of SVB’s trouble looked like “well, if only we could haircut our Agency MBS like our Treasurys, we’d be fine...”
The relevant fact about them for the SVB story is that their credit is insured (by the government, except with extra steps), so ultimately they’re like a slightly-weirder interest-rate play, which was exactly the firearm which SVB needed to shoot its own foot. The weirdnesses don’t add much to the story.
if people had learned to read bank reports, I’d expect to read more comments on this, instead of the last three pieces I read that basically just said SVB had too much gov bonds.
[E: People just say “SVB had too much gov bonds”] is evidence consistent with [H1: people haven’t read the reports closely enough to know the actual holdings] and [H2: people have decided that Agency MBS is adequately described in the category “gov bonds”]. The update that I make, on seeing the evidence that Agency MBS dimension not much discussed, doesn’t re-weight my ratio belief between H1 and H2, and I continue mostly believing H2 for the reasons I believed it before.
It turns that the truth is more bizarre. From Matt Levine’s Money Stuff:
But today at the Wall Street Journal Hannah Miao, Gregory Zuckerman and Ben Eisen have the actual, horrifyingexplanation, which is that the Fed’s computers go to bed at 4 p.m. and you can’t wake them up until the next morning
The point I stressed before on government bonds was right: SVB could have borrowed against them. But it seems like I was wrong: it could have borrowed against Agency MBS, too.
I suspect it is true that they’re haircut less generously, but I do not believe that any part of SVB’s trouble looked like “well, if only we could haircut our Agency MBS like our Treasurys, we’d be fine...”
The relevant fact about them for the SVB story is that their credit is insured (by the government, except with extra steps), so ultimately they’re like a slightly-weirder interest-rate play, which was exactly the firearm which SVB needed to shoot its own foot. The weirdnesses don’t add much to the story.
[E: People just say “SVB had too much gov bonds”] is evidence consistent with [H1: people haven’t read the reports closely enough to know the actual holdings] and [H2: people have decided that Agency MBS is adequately described in the category “gov bonds”]. The update that I make, on seeing the evidence that Agency MBS dimension not much discussed, doesn’t re-weight my ratio belief between H1 and H2, and I continue mostly believing H2 for the reasons I believed it before.
It turns that the truth is more bizarre. From Matt Levine’s Money Stuff:
The point I stressed before on government bonds was right: SVB could have borrowed against them. But it seems like I was wrong: it could have borrowed against Agency MBS, too.