> were previously scheduled to be disbursed on March 10. That date ultimately coincided with the bank's takeover by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Okay.
> [FDIC offered] The employees would be compensated 1.5x times their normal salaries, while hourly workers would receive 2x their normal wages for overtime.
Wow. Failure really does pay :)
EDIT: I understand this is absolutely the best move by the FDIC.
At the same time, failure really does pay. Just the reality.
That's pretty common when the government has to take over a business. You basically give the employees an incentive to not start shredding and instead work with and enable the .gov takeover as smoothly as possible. Practically there'll be a lot of extra work and you want the people who know their systems best assisting.
FDIC just took over a failing bank and wants to spin it out quickly. To do that, you need to know where the bodies are buried. With that in mind, it’s better to keep the existing people in place for as long as possible.
Remember, this is a short-term gig and there is no guarantee that there will be a job for them after this has all played out. As an incentive to keep the existing people around, they need a carrot to keep them from getting a new (more stable) job.
The FDIC understands supply and demand. This is a crisis situation and they are trying to track down 200 billion dollars. For this weekend and perhaps the coming weeks, these employees have some of the most valuable information on the planet. The vast majority are probably good employees that had nothing to do with the specific decisions that landed the bank in this situation
The fdic absolutely needs the everyday employees who know the business to show up and be productive. These will be the employees who know the passwords and account info and the day to day work of the bank. They aren’t the executives who made the bad decisions. In some ways, they are the victims of the executives’ bad decisions just like the depositors.
The workers they need are probably not those that led to the failure - at least not most of them - but those that are needed to keep the lights on and the wheels turning. FDIC has a lot of work on their hands going through the books, untangling the messes, deciding who gets what and when - and having some people that know which button to press when and how to fix the system if it crashes is vital. And these people know their employment is at the end - so for them the best strategy is to look for the new jobs ASAP. That's why FDIC is offering them 2x - so that they will take what is knowingly a very short-term job and spend their time helping FDIC instead of spending it looking for the new job. It's not a reward, it's the only way it can work.
I have no problem with compensating employees for work done in 2022.
The problem I might have, and I guess many others, is the incompetence of SVB executives and the board of directors, in relation to how they (didn't) handle this particular risk.
Some of the work they did in 2022 and before likely contributed to them being unable to handle this risk, so why should the be rewarded for running this bank into the ground before depositors and other creditors are made whole?
This doesn't say "executive bonuses." I would not be surprised if SVB employs customer service teller-type-people making $60k/year with an annual $5k bonus, and this headline would be consistent with such people getting their scheduled bonuses paid on time. The headline says nothing about what the compensation level or responsibility of the people getting paid bonuses was.
It seems like a bad way to run a bank if these kinds of large risk decisions (buying ~$80b in 10y bonds at ~1.5%) are solely driven by a few execs and the BoD, while everyone else in the bank is just a drone.
If employee comp (yearly and even historic bonuses) was tied to the bank's catastrophic risk levels, I bet you'd see banks restructure their operations to curtail these kinds of catastrophic risk factors. Smart people wouldn't join banks where they didn't have a say in that. Instead, we get short-termism where the longest timeframe people care about is 'this years bonus'. Banking is too important to be that stupid.
I think you're misinterpreting what the GP is saying. It's an organization, and those at the top bear responsibility regardless of how decisions are made internally (and there's no way those executives are making decisions without a huge lift from the rank and file). Sure it's hard to stay on top of everything—executives are human and will make mistakes–but that's why they get paid the big bucks! At the end of the day anything short of full accountability from those at the top is a huge moral hazard and recipe for disaster.
Most of executive compensation is likely in stock, and by some reports, there were a lot of selling just before the collapse. That would be something worth looking into, and maybe also for some shareholders and SEC to consider suing about.
Bonuses are often calculated months in advance, and employees are also normally told about them weeks or more before they are paid (they're often even in contracts).
Despite the guy on Twitter calling the SVB issues in January, and arguably long term mismanagement that led to the downfall, the actual issues happened rapidly, over a matter of days.
These just didn't happen on the same time scale, and bonuses can't be undone in a matter of days with employees expecting them and even contracts demanding them.
There's a lot of reasonable takes on this whole terrible situation, but implying or suggesting that the bonus payouts were part of it or that employees are to blame for taking them is a terrible take.
Sure they could. To put it in perspective, thousands of companies are unable to pay their employees and vendors this week due to the SVB collapse.
It does not seem unreasonable that SVB employee bonuses for "great job done in 2022" should have been delayed given the clear evidence on Thursday that the bank was imploding.
The perspective is not lost on me, I just think it's completely unrealistic on multiple fronts: it's a tiny fraction of the money, it's executed on a very different timeline and potentially not possible to stop (certainly not easy, HR may not even talk to treasury), and it may be against their contracts.
In jobs like this bonuses are also not just "great job" money, they're a predictable part of compensation that people depend on.
It's not always that simple. Making several thousand payments totalling as much as $100m is not "clicking a button". The process of making those transfers could be days or even weeks long. Payroll processes and the actual transacting involved typically take at least a few days.
I clicked that "Pay Now" button in my business. Nothing really that complex there, once the amounts are calculated (usually by automated programs). The rest is just regular ACH transfers, which take 2 business days to clear.
No reason at all, obviously after bankruptcy is declared contractual obligations to pay mean nothing until the courts decide on what they mean ... which is never 100%.
Those contracts are with a company that doesn’t exist anymore… so I’m not sure that’s a good argument.
I get that this is part of the compensation that people rely on (I’ve seen Christmas Vacation), but it’s a really bad look. Paying out bonuses right before your company is taken over by the Feds is a horrible PR image. Regardless of if it is the right thing to do or not.
I appreciate the complexity of the unwind, and that many employees may not have had a direct hand in the risk that SVB accrued, but I think there's a bigger picture at play.
Banks are supposed to be one of the bedrocks upon which the economy rests and they are given certain privileges (like access to low interest rates ordinary people cannot get) as part of that role. Its clear the financial sector needs to have an extremely close eye on it to not cause all sorts of destruction across the economy, which it still manages to do pretty regularly out of a fun mix of short-termism, stupidity, and greed.
So from a signaling perspective, if the org is sitting on a lot of risk and employees may have benefitted during the accrual of that risk, shouldn't they also face consequences? Wouldn't that cause each employee in a bank to pay some more attention to the fundamentals of the org, to put pressure on any situation where large risk accrual happens? Wouldn't that cause the internal structure of banks to change so that more eyes were on these large risk accrual moments, because talented people wouldn't join unless they knew their livelihoods weren't at risk by one bad decision? Regulations can't be the only form of pressure for banks to not fuck up.
In the U.S. there used to be a system called "double liability" where bank shareholders could be assessed up to the par value of their stock for money needed to make depositors whole in the event of a failure.
HR, especially in places where they don’t talk to treasury, may have the power to request for payments to be made but they aren’t likely to have the ability to approve or authorize payments.
no mismanagement was weeks not days. When the FED change interest rates commercial Mortgage securities were hit and SVB had exposure to that financial product.
Since I hear a lot of people calling out the Fed, Let’s be perfectly clear about who is to blame.
SVB chose to invest in 10-year duration MBS that was yielding only 1.5% when higher rates were known to be just around the corner. The risk/reward in no way made sense.
>These just didn't happen on the same time scale, and bonuses can't be undone in a matter of days with employees expecting them and even contracts demanding them.
Exactly.
Only withdrawals by account holders, regular bank employee salaries, and corporate salaries depending on the bank can be undone in a matter of minutes. Never executive bonuses.
> bonuses can't be undone in a matter of days with employees expecting them and even contracts demanding them
If the executives running payroll knew there was material risk of insolvency, this is fraudulent conveyance and could (and should) be flawed back. Those employees’ claims then go into the stack with other creditors.
That said, the FDIC probably signed off on this because what will zero the value of the franchise is every employee who earned a bonus jumping ship over the weekend.
The notion that bankers who make large sums by constantly projecting and promising safety and risk mitigation shouldn't be losing their shirts when everything blows up just lays bare the truth. Everything is setup to protect the powerful and the wealthy, and out of everyone it's probably going to be 401ks, taxpayers, and small businesses to get hurt the most.
To people who don't work in finance, maybe it seems reasonable to take away bonuses from employees at a failing bank. It sounds crazy to me. My finance friends are in PE, not banking, but they do soul-crushing work for grueling hours specifically because of that end-of-year bonus.
Yeah, unlike those people working on third party companies depending on the bank for their salaries...
I mean, who works harder and needs the money more, a finance executive waiting for their bonus, or a single mother of two working two jobs, one of which happened to be in a company depending on this bank for its salary payments?
Or maybe just people who understand that banks aren't simply giant piles of money and have such things as "operational costs" that exist outside their holdings for their clients?
It appears you're injecting a lot of details into the situation that were not specified in the article, seemingly to stir the pot. I see no mention of "executive bonuses" specifically - just bonuses, which are common for employees on the lower rungs as well. What makes you think there aren't "single mothers working two jobs" at SVB?
Who to say the bonus isn't going to a single mother of three or four or 18. Who deserves it more logic ends up in no one being deserving enough. Why give any money to these groups when there are people living/dying on the street. Do humans even deserve it, there are many species in worse shape.
SVB has 17 branches, do you think they all are staffed with "financial executives" or more like "single mothers"? You're making it look like only billionaire fatcats work at banks, but if you visit any branch, you'll find it's not exactly the case.
>My finance friends are in PE, not banking, but they do soul-crushing work for grueling hours specifically because of that end-of-year bonus.
I should feel bad for someone who, for the sake of extra money, willingly chooses to have their soul crushed every year, if they don't get a bonus this year?
Sure, but I feel bad for them for completely different reasons.
This is literally showing how parasitic these organizations are. Bankers think that banks exist to make themselves a lot of money, not to serve customers.
This is why organizations like SVB need to fail without any kind of bailout and executives need to go to prison for paying out bonuses if they paid them out knowing they couldn’t meet their fiduciary responsibility to customers.
It's not "parasitic," it's an incentive structure. Bonuses are standard practice in the financial sector intended to reward high effort and good performance.
Unless you believe nearly every employee at SVB down to the entry level is in some way responsible for this, then complaining about bonuses doesn't make any sense.
For the record, I don't think they should be bailed out.
> Bankers think that banks exist to make themselves a lot of money, not to serve customers.
the business of a bank is to make money. If serving the customers make them money, it will happen. If there's some other activity which makes even more money, that activity would be done instead (or as well as).
Does the farmer that grow your food also exist solely to serve you food?
> To people who don't work in finance, maybe it seems reasonable to take away bonuses from employees at a failing bank. It sounds crazy to me.
If the roles were reversed and a tech company had delayed bonuses due to internal financial troubles, the pitchforks would be out against the company.
The article explains that this was really just normal, scheduled payroll processing. It just happened that bonuses were scheduled on the March 10th payroll, which had been scheduled ahead of time.
Basically, they were operating as usual and paying out the money owed to employees as they agreed to doing. They were operating like normal right up until they were taken over.
Withholding employee's earned and scheduled compensation wouldn't have kept the bank liquid.
I think there's a lot of fervor for personal liability at the upper levels of companies that harm others through malfeasance. I agree in principle, though to have a regulatory agency step in and seize pay bank employees are owed without due process is not a power I would like the government to have.
Harsh civil penalties for the decision-makers do seem appropriate though.
From the headline I thought maybe they had accelerated the bonus payout schedule to squeeze money out of the company before the collapse, but the article says it was scheduled long ago:
> What to know: The bonuses were for work done during 2022, and were previously scheduled to be disbursed on March 10. That date ultimately coincided with the bank's takeover by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Furthermore, bonuses that were scheduled later in the month weren't paid out:
> Bonuses for employees in some other countries were scheduled for later in the month, so those haven't yet been paid.
So while the headline sounds bad and is likely going to generate outrage, this really just reads like normal payroll processing was happening on schedule.
Note that payroll would have been coming out of a completely different bucket (e.g. not from customer reserves) and would have been submitted for processing prior to March 10th in order to be disbursed on March 10th. Also note that bonuses are an integral part of compensation, so withholding already-earned compensation from regular employees (the majority of which had nothing to do with the collapse issues) is an unreasonably punitive idea.
So basically, the timing was coincidence unless someone can come up with some weird evidence that bankers delayed the collapse just long enough to get their bonuses, which seems far fetched. The collapse was triggered when they ran out of liquidity due to customer actions, which they couldn't have prevented.
There's a similar outrage-bait story circulating about executives selling stock prior to the collapse, but that was also pre-scheduled sales that were planned long in advance.
From SVB's perspective, customer deposits are liabilities.
So your statement is true about SVB paying its employees. But it's equally true about SVB doing wire transfer for its customers.
When SVB 'sends' money to an account at another bank (whether that account belongs to a startup or to an SVB employee), SVB tells the other bank the amount and the account number. The other bank debits SVB's account at that bank for that amount. The funds don't 'come from' deposits (which are liabilities) but from balances SVB holds at other banks.
Q1 is a common time to pay out last year's bonuses. And TBH, I don't think most of the bank workers share any blame for SVB collapse, and they did work the whole 2022 so I don't think it would be fair for them not to get the bonuses they earned. And given that they'll find themselves out of a job very soon, I don't think it's a bad thing - at least they have some cushion while they're looking for the next job. I mean, if we're talking about C* suite, they probably didn't really deserve any bonus, but if we're looking at line workers in the branches, it's not their fault somebody made mistake with investments.
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