Last Friday, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the benchmark bank for the technology sector and startups, and the sixteenth largest lender in the United States, went bankrupt. USA In this context, yesterday, the Secretary of the US Treasury, Janet Yellen, confirmed that the Government of that country will not carry out any bailout for said entity, but that it will seek to help affected depositors and prevent their financial problems from spreading to other banks. .
“We are concerned about depositors and we are focused on meeting their needs (…). We want to make sure that one bank’s problems don’t spread to others that are strong,” Yellen said during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The SVB was known for having among its depositors many technology companies, especially startups (innovation-based ventures in that field), and had more than 200 billion in assets. However, after its insolvency problems worsened, it failed in what has been the biggest bank failure since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
The entity’s problems began when its clients began to withdraw their deposits from the bank because they were in need of financing. Such a situation caused the entity to choose to carry out million-dollar sales of bonds at a loss in order to cover withdrawals, something that was noticed by the market and ended up triggering the nervousness of the same clients and investors.
WITHOUT EFFECT
Despite the seriousness that the fall of said bank in the US could have, its effect for Latin America and especially Peru would be practically nil.
In this regard, the head of Research at Renta 4 SAB, César Romero Manchego, explains that what happened should not affect any other bank.
“It is something that is observed at the regional level. None of the Peruvian banks have a portfolio similar to that of Silicon Valley Bank. There are no tech companies that are really locally leveraged. We have large companies but they are developed in other business (items of) and have not been equally impacted by rate hikes or inflation. So, for the moment it is seen as something isolated, ”he explained to Peru21.
The economist and professor at the Universidad del Pacífico Enrique Castellanos took a similar position and, furthermore, highlighted that even in the US the effect could be even more limited due to the fact that said government “is providing liquidity to control that a butterfly effect. “While the bank is large, it’s also not Citi, JP Morgan or Bank of America,” he added.
DATA
-There are startups that were clients of the SVB that, without government help, might not have liquidity to pay their payrolls or even make cuts that they had already announced.
-The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said that he will hold those responsible for the fall of the SVB and another financial institution, the Signature Bank, “to account”.
