Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

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Ognistysztorm
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Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by Ognistysztorm » Mon Mar 13, 2023 3:11 pm

Oh btw, Wikimedia Foundation is said to have banked with SVB.

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Cla68
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Re: SVB and the WMF

Post by Cla68 » Mon Mar 13, 2023 6:43 pm

Ognistysztorm wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 3:11 pm
Oh btw, Wikimedia Foundation is said to have banked with SVB.
There probably should be a separate thread on this topic. I wonder how much the WMF and its employees lost in the collapse?

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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by Cla68 » Mon Mar 13, 2023 8:12 pm

So, what's the best way to publicly ask Ms Iskander and the other executives of the WMF how much money they lost with SVB? Do any of them have Wikipedia user pages that they actually use to respond to questions? Who is the CFO of the WMF? Jimbo Wale's user talk page is now semi-protected.

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Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Mar 13, 2023 8:15 pm

Cla68 wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 6:43 pm
I wonder how much the WMF and its employees lost in the collapse?
At most, they will put it in the FY annual report or on the Form 990. We will be lucky if they ever reveal anything. The sleaziest and craziest nonprofits don't reveal any of their major setbacks unless the government forces them to. And I will CONTINUE to classify the WMF under that rubric until proven otherwise.

Jumbojimbotalk routinely gets protected when a WMF financial shitshow happens--as if he could, or would, do anything about it. So don't bother.

Dunno otherwise, but can tell you this: SVB's "libertarian" CEO Greg Becker cashed his stock out before the collapse....
https://www.barrons.com/articles/svb-fi ... r-f5089a4d
Because he's a "speshul snowflake"?

Is Peter Thiel also a "speshul snowflake"?
Because HIS investment fund bailed out of SVB just before the splat HOW CONVENIENT.....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... alley-bank

If you own a Roku streaming box, don't be too surprised if it bricks itself suddenly!
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/10/business ... index.html

You need the Financial Times to point out how hypocritical all of this is! Because most business news outlets are dancing around it very carefully! Ha ha ha!
https://www.ft.com/content/ebba73d9-d31 ... f09ee4a03b

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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Mar 13, 2023 8:20 pm

"BLAMETRUMPBLAMETRUMP" etc. etc.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/svb-fail ... 00186.html

And it gets me that the near-simultaneous collapse of Silvergate Capital was just as ruinous, but it rarely gets mentioned. Perhaps because it was a "crypto thing" that few people understood?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what- ... er-28cd13a

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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by wexter » Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:35 pm

The "article" is absolutely unreadable and totally inaccurate.


I noticed "MXN - Minh Nguyen" pounding the keyboards on the SVB article; a "very very smart" software developer (Post doc?) does not make a qualified editor on the subject matter. "Anyone" can edit Wikipedia?



His Website

http://notes.1ec5.org/

Keynote Speaker at a Wikipedia Conference re Open Mapping

https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2022/Main_Page


Sister projects are the unsung heroes of Wikipedia’s success. Disputes between inclusionists and deletionists led to the creation of Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and more, fueling new contributions to the sum of human knowledge while reinforcing Wikipedia’s culture. OpenStreetMap is no stranger to deletion debates. Nascent sister projects like OpenHistoricalMap offer an outlet for more mapping, creating a more vibrant community than a fork ever could. As always, the hard part is starting from scratch. How can we learn from Wikimedia’s experience with sister projects to build a similar ecosystem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... &limit=250
May 6, 2003
19 years ago
Local pages created 195 (3,914th)
Local edits 36,800 (2,808st)
Global edits 328,094


Hi, I’m Minh Nguyễn (English: Minh Nguyá»…n), a software developer in the San Francisco Bay Area and Stanford Computer Science alumnus[1] originally from Loveland, Ohio, United States.

I volunteer as a bureaucrat at the Vietnamese Wikipedia and Vietnamese Wiktionary, as well as an administrator at the Vietnamese Wikibooks, and Vietnamese Wikisource – and formerly the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, Multilingual Wikisource, and Wikipedia 10 planning wiki. I’m also one of the people who keep the main Wikipedia portal up-to-date. (If you know HTML, you can too!)

Outside of Wikipedia, I volunteer contributions to OpenStreetMap.

For those not using a Unicode-capable browser, you can call me Minh Nguyen. But I'm not related to that Minh Nguyen. Or this one. Or probably any other Minh Nguyen you come across.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mxn
Wikipedia - "Barely competent and paranoid. There’s a hell of a combination."

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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by wexter » Mon Mar 13, 2023 11:02 pm

SVB Simple to Understand and unlike Wikipedia mostly correct!

Of course the analysis below is from a "blog" which is not a reliable source. Perhaps Wikipedia might like that the Blogger is gender-ambiguous; the sex-bits might not be verifiable (or relevant) but the content is?


Image

Very organized and well written (with some excerpts below) she/he/them (who cares) also outlines next steps and possibilities. I wonder if we could create a Wikipedia page for her/he/they

https://wikipediabio.com/lyn-alden-wiki ... h-husband/
Lyn Alden is a 33-year-old investor in the United States. Her specific birth date is unknown, but her birth year is 1987. She’s a transgender woman, though not explicitly admitted by Alden; through her past photos and identity years ago, her previous gender revealed
https://44bars.com/lyn-alden-sexuality- ... net-worth/

https://www.lynalden.com/march-2023-newsletter/
This time the problem is liquidity and duration (interest rate) risk. This is similar to the 2019 repo spike, but more severe. Some of the safest securities that banks own might not have credit risk, but they do have duration risk. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates at the quickest absolute pace in decades (a 4.49% move in one year), and the quickest percentage pace of all time (from 0.08% to 4.57% in one year, or a 57x increase).
In SVB I would also suggest that they had a "quality" problem with their "venture" collateral - with the gravy train of venture capital's exit strategy (to dump junk stock on public markets) running dry.
Silicon Valley Bank was a top-20 bank in the United States by asset size, and a large percentage of venture capital backed startups in the country had a connection with them. In just a two-day stretch between March 8th and March 9th, it faced a bank run and collapsed. Their CEO was also a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which is one of the twelve “bankers’ banks” that make up the Federal Reserve System.
the irony of the situation is that a bank can literally fail even if they hold 100% nominally risk-free assets that are guaranteed to be paid back in full. If a bank uses depositor funds to buy those assets at low interest rates for lack of anything better to buy at the time, and then those assets go on to trade at a discount due to higher interest rates by an amount that exceeds the bank’s capital, and then the bank is forced by a depositor run to sell those assets for a realized loss rather than holding them to maturity and getting their money back as they intended, then the bank is bankrupt.

Silicon Valley Bank had 1) a ton of recent new deposits from one concentrated industry, 2) an unusually high number of large depositors (business-sized accounts) that were not covered by FDIC, and 3) an unusually high ratio of securities with unrealized losses relative to its total capital. Therefore, due to weak risk management practices, it was uniquely vulnerable to this type of depositor rug-pull that made them sell securities at a big loss.
the large regional banks and the huge money-center banks are not reporting major deposit outflows.

On the other hand, any given small or medium-sized bank with unrealized losses on their book is indeed quite vulnerable. It’s easy for deposits to move around and concentrate into the larger banks and money markets, leaving a lot of smaller banks out of liquidity and forced to sell their less liquid assets at a loss.
The FED bailout marked "losing long duration Treasuries" to Par for the purpose of posting collateral. "Bank Term Funding Program - The collateral valuation will be par value. Margin will be 100% of par value." IN the video below Roubini criticizes this turn of events, but it does suspend reality for the purpose of providing liquidity - its similar to backdoor quantitative easing tailored to banks subject to "a run." Frankly, it is a very smart tactical move - which avoids the big problem which Roubini outlines. I don't think "venture company collateral" is subject to BTFP.
Here in 2023, small banks are already back down to cash levels they had at the time of the 2019 repo spike, while large banks aren’t yet. This draining of liquidity has sucked cash out of smaller banks at a faster rate than large banks, which didn’t really happen during the 2018-2019 period of quantitative tightening.

The "bright side" of the story by Noriel Roubini from NYU
"We are in the beginning of a debt crisis in the U.S., we are only in the first few innings," says Dr. Nouriel Roubini, co-founder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics & Professor Emeritus of the Stern School of Business of New York University. "It's very likely the Fed will pivot with the implied risk of a financial meltdown," he tells Daniela Cambone. "There is a doom loop occurring and the Fed is in a position where they will be damned if they do and damned if they don't raise rates," Roubini continues. "The real economy and financial economy are contradicting each other, and the government created a mess of too much debt and now it becomes another leverage cycle all over again," he exclaims. "The Fed has been doing backdoor QE and the financial system is reckless... everything was in a bubble 2 years ago," Roubini continues. "Even in a mild recession, the S&P is going to fall between 30% and 50% and gold has upside in this environment," he says. "We are in a geopolitical depression, Israel is getting ready to potentially strike Iran and cold war between U.S. and China may soon become a hot war," Roubini states. "There is only a certain amount of time before something happens in Taiwan, we are living in a world of geopolitical depression," he concludes.




MXN - Minh Nguyen - needs to stick to programming.

BTW wire instructions at WMF are to Citibank
Last edited by wexter on Tue Mar 14, 2023 12:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Mar 14, 2023 12:13 am

So what; the Greg Becker article didn't even exist until yesterday.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... on=history

Want a BONUS item? I know you do!
As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto. All weekend, they screamed that there would be an economic collapse, that they were concerned about the workers, that the Federal Reserve was responsible, that-that-that … until finally, on Sunday evening, they got what they wanted: the government promising full account access to all Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/si ... ntrum.html

Now you see? Tech bros are, in fact, arrogant fuckheads!

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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by Bbb23sucks » Tue Mar 14, 2023 3:03 am

Cla68 wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 8:12 pm
So, what's the best way to publicly ask Ms Iskander and the other executives of the WMF how much money they lost with SVB? Do any of them have Wikipedia user pages that they actually use to respond to questions? Who is the CFO of the WMF? Jimbo Wale's user talk page is now semi-protected.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MIskander-WMF
"Globally banned" since September 5, 2023 for exposing harassment.

Email: wikipediasucks@disroot.org

Petition to ban Bbb23Wikipedia AlternativeDonate to help French strikers

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Re: Silicon Valley Bank and the WMF

Post by Cla68 » Tue Mar 14, 2023 3:20 pm

I enjoy asking WP and WMF bigwigs direct questions in situations like this because they react so comically angrily and defensively, as if they can't understand how anyone would presume to question how they do business. It's not just them, though, you may have noticed that after Biden announced that his administration was going to bail-out all the account holders (but not the bank itself) that he refused to take any questions.

When people involved in a situation act so defensively and guardedly, in my experience it means that they feel really insecure about the whole situation and don't want to have to answer any tough questions about it. This usually seems to happen when people have big money involved in a house of cards. As some commenters have explained, the entire Western financial system right now is still on unsteady ground because of the way the government handled the 2008 financial crash, and the markets are still unstable because of a number of factors, including that government involvement, which has interrupted the equalizing nature of free market economics.

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