US Regionalbanken - Silicon Valley Bank pleite

Why Signature Bank Failed

It can happen fast.

Signature Bank SBNY –22.87%  (ticker: SBNY) failed over the weekend. The bank’s connections with cryptocurrency seem to have spooked depositors after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, prompting a run on the bank’s deposits which, in turn, prompted action from regulators.

Signature was taken over by New York Department of Banking Services on Sunday. The FDIC, Federal Reserve and Treasury Department said all depositors at Signature, as well as Silicon Valley Bank, would be protected.
Both banks had above-average levels of uninsured deposits and some atypical business uncertainty. That combination is turning out to be too much for bank investors.
Signature, which lent primarily to private equity and commercial businesses and had former congressman and co-author of the Dodd-Frank Act Barney Frank on its board, ended 2022 with about $110 billion in assets including $74 billion in loans. Deposits finished the year at about $89 billion with bank equity at $8 billion.
Signature also had a cryptocurrency business. While Signature didn’t have loans backed by cryptocurrencies or hold cryptocurrencies on its balance sheet, it had a payment platform for processing crypto transactions. But deposits associated with the crypto platform had been dropping, prompting some concern from Wall Street.
Before SVB’s failure, there wasn’t too much concern. Signature had 10 Buy ratings out of 17 analysts listed on Bloomberg following earnings reported on Jan. 17. The average analyst price target was about $145 a share.
As the crisis at SVB mounted, Signature stock fell about 50%. The company reported deposit balances of about $89 billion and loan balances of about $72 billion on March 8.
The bank was closed “apparently due to similar funding pressures as it related to the company’s crypto banking,” wrote D.A. Davidson analyst Gary Tenner in a Monday report. He said deposits started to leave the bank, similar to what happened at SVB. Like SVB, roughly 90% of Signature’s deposits were uninsured, Tenner said, meaning balances held by individuals or businesses were above the $250,000 insurance limit guaranteed by the FDIC. The mounting run on those deposits is what closed the bank.
Someone could have stepped in to buy the bank, but that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen for SVB, either. In that case, uncertainty over SVB’s loan portfolio seems to have kept buyers away, Ironsides Macroeconomic founder Barry Knapp told Barron’s.
That doesn’t appear to be the case at Signature. SVB had roughly $91 billion in securities it was holding to maturity at the end of 2022. That was out of $212 billion in total assets. That’s more than 40% of assets. Signature’s held-to-maturity portfolio was about $8 billion, less than 10% of assets.
Potential acquirers might not have liked Signature’s exposure to private equity businesses. Signature had roughly $28 billion in loans to private equity out of a total loan book of roughly $75 billion. Signature also lent to commercial real estate businesses and other borrowers.
And Signature Bank’s “ties to the crypto industry” might have limited its appeal to other banks, wrote J.P. Morgan analyst Vivek Juneja on Monday.
A lack of capital wasn’t a concern. Signature’s so-called Tier 1 capital cushion was about 11%, putting it in the middle of the pack for large U.S. banks. JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM) has a Tier 1 capital ratio of about 15%, as did SVB.
The failures are hurting regional bank stocks. The iShares U.S. Regional Banks ETF IAT –14.42%  (IAT) is down 13% in afternoon trading. The S&P 500 SPX –0.15%  and Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA –0.28%  were up 0.7% and 0.5%, respectively.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

Quelle:
https://www.barrons.com/articles/signatu...e-a0adf63f