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Allowing the financial institution to borrow against the par value of assets is exactly what the Federal Home Loan Bank Board encouraged near the tail end of the S&L crisis. It did not end well.

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Re-emerging comment that I deleted instead of editing. Doh.

I think I must have missed something in the many changes since Basel II. As interest rates went up, SVB moved its long-dated federal bonds into hold-to-maturity classification. But I thought that the point of mark-to-market was to create transparency on assets that are reasonably easy to value -- like federal bond holdings. But no one is saying that it was inappropriate to classify these bonds as HTM, so that must be Ok. What am I missing?

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HTM is a scam. It is similar to what the FHLBB encouraged that raised the cost of that bailout

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Aha. I didnтАЩt miss something after all!

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