31 March 2023

By The Numbers - part the thirty second

Regular reader has seen here the observation that all those risk taking, entrepreneurial capitalists are just not. They're, to the manjack, scardey cats who dump lots and lots of moolah into 'risk free' gummint instruments. Early reports of what SVB was doing with its moolah led this manjack to conclude that it was among the large pigs slurping at Uncle Sugar's trough. Investing in the USofA's tech future? Not.

Well, reporting now confirms the tale.
SVB, as Silicon Valley Bank is known, had a massive share of its assets — 55% — invested in fixed-income securities, such as U.S. government bonds.
So, how does that compare to banks overall? The Fed report has some numbers (Table 4 - 15 Mar) fur instance
Bank credit - 16,351.2
Gummint bonds - 4,220.0
Numbers in billions, naturally. The divide equals: 26%. Now, the Fortune report doesn't say exactly how that 55% was calculated, so this could be some bit of apples and oranges, but not more than double.

Forward thinking visionaries, my constipated sphincter.

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