I just received this from First Republic Bank:

To Our Valued Clients,
In light of recent industry events, the last few days have caused uncertainty in the financial markets. We want to take a moment to reinforce the safety and stability of First Republic, reflected in the continued strength of our capital, liquidity and operations.
Our capital remains strong. Our capital levels are significantly higher than the regulatory requirements for being considered well capitalized.
Our liquidity remains strong. In addition to our well-diversified deposit base, we continue to have access to over $60 billion of available, unused borrowing capacity at the Federal Home Loan Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank.
We are here to fully serve you. We stand ready to process transactions and wires, fund loans, answer questions and serve your overall financial needs — as we do every day.
For almost 40 years, we have operated a simple, straightforward business model centered on taking extraordinary care of our clients. We have successfully navigated various macroeconomic and interest rate environments, and today we have among the industry’s highest rates of client satisfaction and retention.

FWIW...

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/jeremy-grantham-stock-market-bubble-fed-horror-show-interest-rates-2023-3
Business News
Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says the stock bubble is still deflating and the market will go down in 2024 amid a ‘horror show’ from the Fed.
by Alma Winkle March 10, 2023
Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says the stock bubble is still deflating and the market will go down in 2024 amid a ‘horror show’ from the Fed.
Jeremy Grantham said that the stock bubble is still in the process of deflating and the market will not bottom out until 2024.
The veteran investor blasted the Fed’s monetary policy as a 36-year-long “horror show.”
He predicted mild pain for investors in the coming year, while warning of a downturn in equities around April.
The stock market bubble is still in the process of deflating, according to veteran investor Jeremy Grantham, and equities will finally bottom out in late 2024 amid the Federal Reserve’s “horror show” of monetary policy.
In a recent interview on Bloomberg’s What Goes Up podcast, the GMO co-founder reiterated his view that stocks were in a speculative bubble and about to pop, thanks to the end of ultra-low interest rates and ample liquidity in the market. Thanks for those who brought the stock. For circling high during the pandemic.
Grantham also blasted the Fed’s monetary policy in the years since former Alan Greenspan took over as central bank chairman in 1987, calling its effects on the US economy a 36-year-long “horror show”, which has recently Helped build immense wealth over the years. ,
No end in sights until 2024, maybe 17% more downturn
so much pain ahead...

From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: Schwab Has Worst Drop in Years After SVB, Block Trade
From Barron's via Yahoo Finance: Why Charles Schwab Is Taking a Beating Along With Bank Stocks

@linter
I transcribed my grandfather's hand scribbled diaries from two business trips he took to Europe in 1938 and 1940
He was in Vienna March 15, 1938 (Anschluss ) and arguing with the desk clerk at the Hotel Imperial about why they had given his room away to the Nazis when Hitler Goering etc marched right by them, not ten feet away.
He couldn't fly out of Europe in 1940 and had to wait six weeks for a ship in Lisbon, along with hundreds of refugees and Gestapo He kept daily entries describing the faces and characters.
They are both amazing documents
These are accessible because they are limited in words and focused content. While today's world it seems like everyone puts there every thought online, how on earth is anybody going to find the gold among the dross in years to come?

March 10, '23
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-03-11/wall-street-week-full-show-03-10-2023
Ketterer at Causeway is so smart and engaging. But I just don't need small-cap volatility anymore. The other guest, Barbers Reinhard from Voya says you would do well with EM if you can hang on for 3-4 years into the future. Not interested, after EM has burned me so often.

I enjoyed the mildly stated but pointed conflicts between the two women in the early segment. Kettner thinks active management best now. Avoid index funds. Reinhard primarily uses index funds due to low cost. Ketterer likes foreign developed markets which she sees as cheap if measured against the U.S. the past decade. But Reinhard says to reduce exposure to foreign markets which have been hot more recently. Favors U.S. holdings.
Sure, Kettner is more media savvy, younger looking, appears to have her head screwed on straight. Doesn’t mean she’s right on those issues. Interesting that Reinhard was in studio with the host / moderator while Ketterer appeared on a large screen. I’m sure psychologists or communications professors would have a good take on how that plays in to viewer perceptions. But, I haven’t a clue. (Well, I do have a clue, but it’s not worth sharing.)
Zell comes across as an old money-grubbing traditionalist concerned about his bottom line and little else.

i've been a rolling stone contributing-editor writer since 1998 and worked there in different capacities since 1982 and while many folks think rs sold out decades ago, it's shocking to me how truly awful it has become since it was bought by penske media a few years ago. it's mostly all phony opinion put-downs now, with real reporting hardly given a thought. but that's the pressure of the modern online world, too, where 'content' has to be produced at a frantic clip that does away with more fact-based stuff: there's just no time for it ... atho of course there are exceptions.
as to the decline before penske. well, rs did some great work and had some great writers, the late hunter thompson, of course, but also matt taibi. me, i guess i'm part of the decline, what with writing cover stories about clay aiken and that snooki creature. then again, i was the last legit journalist to visit charlie manson in prison and write about him, though i got heat for that just being sensationalist junk, too. ain't no way to really win, not that i ever thought about it or cared.
but man o man do i miss the old days, when i could write 10k-word pieces that showed up in print and seemed to go on forever (for better or worse, ha ha). while i'm still on the masthead, i haven't had a piece published there in a long time. my style of writing -- mainly black comedy of a sort -- no longer flies with the new bosses; plus, i can't do straight opinion and that's what most of it has become.
i'm an ancient fart now, and the whole world has changed around me, and while i think it's all for the worse, so do most ancient farts. my way of dealing with it is to shrug and do something else. right now that means transcribing my great aunt's diaries from 1923, when she was traveling in post-WW1 Europe, and putting em online at this place called substack. feel free to check them out. she really was something else and a far better writer than me even at my so-called best. https://thekathidiaries.substack.com/

I am puzzled by how few accounts were insured. Here's why:
About fifteen years ago, I worked for a small company in the SF Bay Area that was building up cash to purchase a permanent home. Folks on that end of the company were not happy with the treatment they were getting from Wells Fargo. So they went shopping around. They ended up going with Bank of Marin, because it claimed that it could break up the large sum into more than one insured deposit account.
Another example of this would be where I have my taxable investment account. The sweep account is not a money market fund, but an FDIC insured deposit account. While it is not a feature that I have been able to enjoy,

the last time I checked, they advertised that they could break my hoard of spondulicks into multiple accounts if I bought a winning lottery ticket, and needed to park the cash.

So. if this is still legally possible, why wasn't it being done at SVB?
I doubt I have command of the terms of art that would get a meaningful response out of google, but rather an inundation of advertising from banks.

I’m not sure on this, but part of the issue may have to do with who legally owns the bank's assets because the bank is in the private sector, and what the FDIC and regulators are legally allowed to do with those assets in the event of a bank run and failure. It’s one thing for the FDIC/ regulators to sell those bonds immediately in its efforts to pay depositors in its standard insurance role. It is another thing for the government to hold onto those bonds potentially for years until they mature to recoup losses. That sounds like nationalization of the bank, which doesn’t happen in the U.S. historically.
Normally, in a bankruptcy there is a line of creditors with a hierarchy of who gets paid first. I could see there being legal wrangling here if the government held the bank’s bond portfolio after backstopping depositors. The argument could be that the bank investors want to seize that bond portfolio themselves to make themselves whole. A SVB stock or more likely bond investor could argue that the bank’s assets now that depositors are secure belong to investors. The government selling those assets immediately to pay depositors eliminates any potential legal ambiguity, even if that sale is at a loss.
I actually think nationalization of failing banks makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, you end up with capitalism on the way up and socialist taxpayer funded bailouts on the way down. Bailouts here are socialism for the rich. In Sweden when they had a similar banking crisis to our 2008 one in the 1990s, they conducted a structured bankruptcy of the failed banks and nationalized them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_financial_crisis_1990–1994
Krugman recommended the government do the same thing here as Sweden in 2008 but was ignored. Instead, the financial sector got a big taxpayer funded gift with few long-term repercussions for any of the largest companies and the executives involved.
As for options to avoid “government-induced erosion” from rate increases, floating rate debt comes to mind. But then investors are trading duration or interest rate risk for credit risk.

Not much I can add to what Yogi wrote. From the FDIC's press release, it sounds like only the insured amounts are being transferred to the successor bank, Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara (DINB). The rest of the gazillion dollars remain as liabilities of SVB, for which the depositors get receivership certificates (effectively, priority among bankruptcy creditors).
https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2023/pr23016.html
Maybe there will be investors in DINB. But no one will buy SVB's long term treasuries at par - which is what Yogi explained.
We can turn your question around: would the uninsured depositors be willing to lock up their money for 10 years (at a low interest rate) in order to be made whole a decade from now? Unless the depositors were forced to, they would not. They'd lose both the time value of their money and the use of the money for years. They'd rather take pennies on the dollar.

@Old_Joe, imagine that YOU are deep pocket investor called for the rescue. Say, the SVB/FDIC want to unload $10 billion in 2% coupon 10-yr T-Notes. You will own this lousy-rate portfolio that will return you 2% guaranteed in 10 years, not before. So, how much cash you will provide to SVB/FDIC on Monday?
Even if the deep pocket was Uncle Sam, you would be asking it to settle a 10-yr obligation right away and it cannot be at 100%.
Moreover, there is a lack of willing deep pockets. Warren Buffett? Elon Musk? (on Twitter, somebody suggested this and Elon tweeted that he could be interested. He shouldn't joke about things like this - he should have learned from his Twitter experience.)
In situations like this, a deep pocket will demand equity and/or warrants in any successor entity, in addition to the lousy-rate T-Note portfolio, to cover 100% now.

@Hank. Have you ever tried a custom benchmark from however many component ETF’s you choose and assemble to your desired asset allocation. Then put in Portfolio Visualizer. I don’t think it will work for daily but by months it’s fine. Compare with your balance from any start date. Like when you retired to now.

I appreciate your response Larry. I’m not really in search of some performance benchmark. Just wondered how you would go about it. As one who has always eschewed holding cash what I really concern myself with is the inherent short term volatility of the riskier things I invest in. I figure if I’ve invested in what seem to me sound investments with risk offsetting characteristics, than the performance part will take care of itself. (You may assume that like most I keep yearly performance records - now dating back some 25 years.)
Those holdings contain as of now:
6 individual stocks
1 traditional 60/40 balanced fund
1 traditional 40/60 conservative allocation fund
1 non-U.S. equity index fund
1 gold miners fund
1 commodities basket (metals) fund
1 capital allocation CEF using derivatives / leverage
1 infrastructure fund
1 long-short fund
1 risk premia fund
1 global real estate fund
1 EM stock fund
1 GNMA fund
1 global bond fund
1 intermediate HY fund
1 market neutral convertible bond fund
1 inverse S&P 500 fund
- negligible % in money market funds
Friday the entire collection ended down 0.22%. I made 3 purchases throughout the day as a stock was falling, so that number is a bit exaggerated to the high end. That’s reasonable daily volatility. Of course there are occasional off-days when the portfolio falls more than 0.50%. It’s the roughly 8-10% commitment to precious metals / mining that affects volatility the most. Also, individual stocks affect volatility, especially two which represent close to 5% of portfolio each..
If you are beyond 70, and if you hold close to 0 cash reserve, then daily / monthly / year-to year volatility may concern you a great deal. The “close your eyes and invest for the long-run” approach ceases to work at some point.
I know you’ve been looking at a simplified approach. Makes sense. I’d likely recommend that to many our age. Unfortunately, it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I’ve always enjoyed investing. Am reasonably informed. Lived through some horrendous inflation during the 70s & 80s period and came to distrust holding much cash. Other than for ballast, I’ve not liked bonds that much. Albeit - under Paul Volker you could pull 15% or better in money market funds. But it wasn’t always that way. There were stretches where cash didn’t keep up with rising prices. And, as we learned in 2008, some of those money market funds were riskier than we thought.
Re the 3 funds I track daily for volatility: They are all conservative allocation type funds, selected primarily for their diverse investment approaches:
ABRZX from Invesco spreads risk equally among equities, bonds and commodities. It does so largely through the derivatives markets. A stated goal of the fund is “reduced volatility”.
PRSIX is an actively managed 40/60 allocation fund run by T. Rowe Price, one of the best managers in the business - notwithstanding this fund’s recent lackluster performance. Until the bond wipe-out of 2022, it was considered one of the best conservative allocation funds in its class.
AOK is a 30/70 allocation ETF from Blackrock with an appealing 0.15% management fee. It appears to rely partially or wholly on various market index funds. I like that it includes some domestic mid-caps, some foreign equities and even a small exposure to EM stocks. As far as I can tell it’s not actively managed, so the return - for better or worse - represents how the varied assortment of global / domestic indexes perform.
As I’ve stated, I do not own any of the 3 tracking funds above. Just enjoy watching their daily behavior. I did find it unusual - and a bit funny - that they managed to break-even on one of the most volatile trading days I can remember - and with a bank failure thrown in for good measure.

March 10, '23
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-03-11/wall-street-week-full-show-03-10-2023
Katterer at Causeway is so smart and engaging. But I just don't need small-cap volatility anymore. The other guest from Voya says you would do well with EM if you can hang on for 3-4 years into the future. Not interested, after EM has burned me so often.

Following is an excerpt from a current article in the San Francisco Chronicle, a purported* SF newspaper:

A new bank, the National Bank of Santa Clara, has been created by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to hold the deposits and assets of Silicon Valley Bank, and it will begin operating by Monday. But only accounts that fall below $250,000 are insured by FDIC; any winery with funds above that will have to wait an undetermined amount of time to find out if the additional amount will be paid back, partially or in full.

Since two of the few subjects that the SF Chronicle seems equipped to cover these days are food and wine, this article naturally focused on problems that the wine industry may face due to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. The potential problems for safety of deposits in excess of the FDIC 250k coverage limit will apply, of course, to all deposits of that type.
* Having been a reader of San Francisco newspapers for some 75 years, I can accurately report that the current San Francisco Chronicle is barely a faint shadow of what a real newspaper should be, and in fact, of what the Chronicle once was. The Hearst Corporation is evidently targeting readers between 12 and 20 years of age.

@lewisbraham. Ya, that was the problem with the bailouts last time. They should have protected and back stopped the depositors and let the banks etc go under. The one's who didn't leverage themselves to kingdom come would have survived and taken over going forward
Of course, the pension funds would have got clobbered and that would have been another issue
Question. What responsibility did the folks who took out loans they couldn't afford bear. The Ninja loans etc. Who approved those? What was the due diligence etc. I believe the government was almost forced to overlook all that. Similar to the ppp loans in the past two years. Oy vey what fraud!!
Best
Baseball fan

"Although SVB was 50 years old? its hard to know in these situations."
@Devo- Yes, exactly my point. Lehman and Home Savings were big outfits too.

True story. I was online earlier this week looking at JM bullion at bars of gold. Thinking about it, no action yet

RE JM Bullion Bars - They are pretty. Many, many years ago I owned a bunch. Silver’s very streaky. It was actually a silver miner I mentioned this morning that bounced 6% out of the gate. But p/ms are a wild ride. It is quite interesting that the bank fiasco seems to have sparked them.
Speculators are banking on (perhaps a poor choice of words) the grinches at the Fed Reserve backing off on the tightening.
EDIT - Sorry at Baseball_Fan / I mistook the JM bars you mentioned to be silver at first. That’s what I owned years ago. Gold will cost you a pretty penny. :)

Do business with solid institutions. We don't have to try out anyone's latest innovation or gimmick in matters of money. Although SVB was 50 years old? its hard to know in these situations. but explains why JPM is up 2.5% today. when in trouble, everyone goes to papa.

I was taught in a college communications class more than a half century ago: ”A percept is a product.” / While we can mitigate the actual significance of the failure of SVB and put it into proper perspective, the perception out there among the investing public (and perhaps some in the investment community) may be substantial.
PS - Every teacher’s wish is that their students still remember what they were taught 50 years later. :)

Typical FDIC intervention - close the bank on Friday, reopen on Monday under new ownership.
Many confuse similar rescue for brokers (by SIPC) and insurance & annuity companies (by state regulators) - but those may take months or years to workout.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-bank-is-shut-down-by-regulators-fdic-to-protect-insured-deposits.html
https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2023/pr23016.html

@johnN @junkster
What little of CNBC I watched yesterday was when Mayo was on with Scott Wapner, and they talked about financials (I didn’t know the huge financial sell-off stemmed from $SIVB)….mentioning that the largest, multinational banks have been stress-tested annually for several years, and are probably in good shape (C, BAC, WFC, JPM, etc). The banks just under that size, whether super regional or regional, have not been stress-tested. Obviously the worry is contagion.
I have been trading ZION; it’s a conservative UT (redundant? Ha) bank that I have traded in and out of for last 18 months or so. Good dividend growth. But it was down 10-11% yesterday, so I bought more.
Good luck to us….I’m in junkster’s camp that we’ve been in a rally since October, and that was the bear bottom….but man, all these walls of worry keep being built! Ha