• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

The Last Days of SVB

A double-Goldman scramble, a “wall-cross,” an equity book that wasn’t, a Moody’s downgrade crisis, and a board mulligan: the real story about what went down during the final days of Silicon Valley Bank.

A scrum of security guards, reporters, and customers outside of Silicon Valley Bank a few days after it collapsed.
A scrum of security guards, reporters, and customers outside of Silicon Valley Bank a few days after it collapsed. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
March 19, 2023

The beginning of the end of Silicon Valley Bank commenced on Friday, March 3, when the Goldman Sachs bond trading desk got an interesting inbound call: SVB, the venerable central nervous system of the tech industry, was seeking its assistance to negotiate the purchase, as a principal, of a $24 billion chunk of SVB’s portfolio of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities. The bonds were part of the investment portfolio that SVB had decided to sell in order to meet an unexpected rush of withdrawals from its uninsured depositors, such as venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies.