I worked in bank liquidity and treasury for the better part of the last decade, and there is one very interesting risk factor from the SVB collapse that I do not think we have ever witnessed before in modern finance, a 🧵:

First, some context. Following the 2008 financial crisis where a massive driver of stress was caused by low quality assets littering the balance sheets of massive institutions, the regulators sought to create a framework to ensure all banks were verifiably sound.

This meant forcing Federally registered banks to conform to capital and liquidity ratios. If they did not comply, they would not be allowed to issue dividends or buy back stocks, hurting the value of their enterprise.

There was the introduction of the concept of RWA, or risk weighted assets. A simple way to think of these ratios is, the riskier your asset base on a weighted basis, the more high quality capital (think cash) you would need to hold to stay in compliance.

Not only were banks required to regularly be in compliance with these ratios as a going concern, but needed to prove they could maintain certain limits when met with a time of stress across a number of incrementally adverse scenarios.