BRK.b was down almost 3% much of the day. Finished down 2.44%. Yet, AAPL was up for the day. And BOA BAC only lost 1%. Looks like insurance companies got hit. One I watch was down 3.4%. I’d think the issue relates to interest rates in some manner - which were all over the place today. (And some of the weather phenomena contributed too).
@LewisBraham said: “I wonder if any large institutions in particular were getting out, and if so, why?”
One i watch, GHC , is 65% institutionally owned. It’s dropped like a rock, losing about 15% the past 10 trading days by my rough count. The why is hard to answer. I tend to attribute moves like that to market manipulation more than to fundamentals. Drive the price down and then buy back in later. Or maybe short sellers at work.

$26,400 in U.S. dollars, much more affordable. The competition is real: https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-15/vw-shows-25-000-ev-to-compete-where-tesla-has-left-an-opening?srnd=premium

In the aftermath of 3 US bank failures in 4 days, there is now lot of money shifting from small local and regional banks to BIG banks. One consequence of this is that small/regional banks are forced to offer higher rates for brokered CDs. Just in case you were wondering.
"Today [non-callable]:
1yr CD: 5.35%
5yr CD: 5.00%
1yr T-bill: 4.45%
5yr T-note: 3.78%"
Twitter LINK

Finally a good financial reason to live here ( in MA).
Also worth noting you do not pay state income tax on interest from a MA bank. But my local bank only pays 1% on their MM account, and next to nothing on savings

Didnt it occur to them that the pandemic would not last forever, and their payroll would have to drop back to more normal levels?
NPR's "doubling" figure likely represented the growth of full-time employees from 2019 (44,942) through 2022 (86,482). Data from Statistia. Confirmed by WP:

Between the end of 2019 and its peak headcount in 2022, the company nearly doubled in size to some 87,000 employees.

Data from Statista. Sometimes Statista provides full data w/o subscribing, sometimes not. So here's the data it presented me:
2004: 7
2005: 15
2006: 150
2007: 450
2008: 850
2009: 1,218
2010: 2,127
2011: 3,200
2012: 4,619
2013: 6,337
2014: 9,199
2015: 12,691
2016: 17,048
2017: 25,105
2018: 35,537
2019: 44,942
2020: 56,604
2021: 71,970
2022: 86:482
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/
Rolling three year hiring rates:
2007: 64x (2004-2007, 450/7)
2008: 57x
2009: 8x
2010: 5x
2011: 4x
2012: 4x
2013: 3x
2014: 3x
2015: 3x
2016: 3x
2017: 3x
2018: 3x
2019: 3x (2.64)
2020: 2x (2.25)
2021: 2x (2.03)
2022: 2x (1.92)
Seems pretty "normal" to me. That last hiring rate was not out of line. The rate was not due to the pandemic, but during the pandemic. Parts of the WP piece support the idea that this has to do with tech sector hubris.

The [Meta] hiring sustained its ambitious (and in some cases seemingly ill-fated) projects like its big bet on the metaverse. ...
[T]he deep cuts ... reflect a deeper shift in thinking about the metrics that matter in a tech sector that has long been able to make up its own rules.
During the pandemic, as tech CEOs accelerated their empire building, a massive and growing headcount somehow became equated with a company’s overall health — a sign that it had cash, clout and big ambitions.

that it had cash - cross check that with SVB and why startups were pulling cash out of their bank accounts. Their cash spigots were drying up.

@AndyJ, CDs over 5% for 1 year are still available. It was up to 5.35% yesterday and they are being snapped up quickly.

Let's review the previous FDIC system -
Your individual account was insured up to $250,000.
Your spouse's individual account was insured up to $250,000.
Your joint account was insured up to $500,000.
Seriously, how many couples are keeping $1MM in cash?
The banks pay for this insurance coverage, which means we all pay in some way.
If all deposts are going to be insured, clearly banks will be charged more for the increased coverage.
I suggest banks should recover these extra costs by charging corporate accounts a fee on the basis of average balance, and perhaps a risk premium.

@rforno
+1

@WABAC

But the chance for an average saver to get a safe return of 5-6% on their money will raise Maggie Thatcher from the dead, legitimize neocolonial revanchism, bring back the Cold War order, destroy unions that no longer exist, and, wait for it, throw people out of work.

Never said any of that, merely pointed out as the article did that the Volcker cure for inflation wasn't all that, and had definite negative consequences. Nor can it be said that only one group of people wants lower rates. Most poor people in the U.S. have little to no savings to collect interest on, and actually have more variable-rate credit card debt that increases their burden as rates rise:https://bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-report/#over-1-in-3

Over a third (36 percent) of people have more credit card debt than emergency savings, the highest percentage in 12 years of Bankrate asking this survey question. In comparison, 22 percent of people had more credit card debt in January 2022, while 28 percent of people had more credit card debt in January 2020, before COVID-19 began to affect the U.S.

Ultimately, rate cuts are economically stimulative while raising rates constricts. There needs to be consideration on both sides of the consequences. And you yourself by acknowledging labor has little power today compared to the 1970s have pointed out the reason we shouldn't perhaps be too fixated on raising rates too high.
Given the choice, I would rather see targeted fiscal stimulus than monetary stimulus to help the specific areas of our economy that are struggling via government programs, and tax hikes to constrict things when we get overstimulated. But there are obvious political roadblocks to fiscal stimulus. Interest rates are a blunt instrument that helps and hurts multiple parties.
As for SVB, I am fine with making all depositors whole just so long as the rich people getting bailed out stop complaining about the "moral hazard" of helping poor people. Moreover, the capital standards from Dodd Frank need to be restored and SVB should be nationalized, and the government collect all future profits to give back to taxpayers.

This article goes into more detail than I have seen elsewhere about the politics of the 2018 changes in the banking regs that allowed SVB to escape regulation, and how easily the startups etc could have protected their funds. It also implies that SVB prevented them from using multiple other banks ( with InfraSweep).
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-13-silicon-valley-bank-bailout-deregulation/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
We still dont know how many of these accounts were really “ small businesses”. Roku apparently had half a billion dollars on deposit without any protection
Why should we bail out Roku?

I suppose it could be - SNOXX has to turn over its portfolio faster and could have been acquiring more lower yielding paper. But with rates gyrating by the minute, it's hard to tell.
More interesting to me right now are the inflow rates of MMFs in the past 24 hours. You can find them navigating from the same Schwab page:
https://www.schwab.com/money-market-funds#bcn-table--table-content-89811
There's a huge outflow spike in SWVXX (prime MMF) - normally has inflows, had an outflow 6x the normal inflow rate.
And corresponding inflow spikes in government MMFs:
SNSXX - normally near zero +/-, had an inflow 20x normal magnitude
SNOXX - normally has small inflows, had an inflow 15x
These are to be expected knee jerk reactions. This pattern didn't hold with one MMF:
SNVXX - more erratic pattern with some previous spikes, notably large outflows on a couple of days in January, but also a huge inflow spike Jan 4 just slightly larger than yesterday's inflow
Those were the retail shares of these funds. Similar flows for the institutional share classes ($1M min), except for SGUXX (SNVXX). In the institutional share class, flows have been very sedate, including yesterday, except for one inflow spike (15x-30x normal net flow) on March 9th.

@Andy, overnight the treasury yield fell again from last night. Both 4m and 6m are now below 5%.
https://cnbc.com/bonds/
Please see the other posting for the reason:
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/60810/dow-futures-fall-500-points-as-credit-suisse-shares-drop-more-than-20

Apparently something broke in the banking sector not just in US…
Excerpt from article:

In recent days, a crisis in the financial sector has centered around regional banks as Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed, both casualties of poor management in the face of eight interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in the last 12 months. Wednesday morning attention turned to the big banks with shares of Credit Suisse hitting an all-time low.
Saudi National Bank, Credit Suisse’s largest investor, said Wednesday it could not provide any more funding, according to a Reuters report. This comes after the Swiss lender said Tuesday it had found “certain material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting” for the years 2021 and 2022.
As Credit Suisse dragged down the European Bank sector, U.S. big bank shares declined in sympathy. Citigroup and Wells Fargo shed 3%, while Goldman Sachs and Bank of America fell 2%. The Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund lost 2.9% in premarket trading, giving up its 2% pop on Tuesday.
Regional Banks, whose rebounded helped lift sentiment for the broader market on Tuesday, fell back into the red again. The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE) was down 3% in the premarket, led by losses in Old National Bancorp, Zions Bancorp and Fifth Third Bancorp. To be sure, shares of First Republic Bank were clinging to gains.

https://cnbc.com/2023/03/14/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
From Reuters:

Credit Suisse on Tuesday published its annual report for 2022 saying the bank had identified "material weaknesses" in controls over financial reporting and not yet stemmed customer outflows.
Switzerland's second-biggest bank is seeking to recover from a string of scandals that have undermined the confidence of investors and clients. Customer outflows in the fourth quarter rose to more than 110 billion Swiss francs ($120 billion).

https://reuters.com/business/finance/credit-suisse-shares-drop-fresh-record-low-cds-widen-2023-03-15/
Oakmark funds sold their remaining shares last week.

The point is to avoid getting to the need for a Volcker-style shock. Right now we're at about half of what Volcker was faced with. Let's see if we can avoid that.
Rehashing the favorite arguments of the geriatric right, and left, from the 1970's may be of historiographic interest. But the fall of the Wall put paid to the whole "Cold War order" thing.
Of course no one said that today's labor movement is close to what it was at the beginning of the 70's. My point is that the people that oppose what little is happening now are very much in favor of easy money from the Fed.
OTOH. In this very forum I see people arguing for punishing depositors at SVB without regard to the knock-on effects of failure to pay workers or vendors. Stick it to 'em.
But the chance for an average saver to get a safe return of 5-6% on their money will raise Maggie Thatcher from the dead, legitimize neocolonial revanchism, bring back the Cold War order, destroy unions that no longer exist, and, wait for it, throw people out of work.

@hank, I grew up with the irresolute response to the last inflation. I don't want to spend what could be the rest of my life going through that again

@WABC -You weren’t pleased with Nixon’s 1970 wage & price freeze? :)
I was pretty irresponsible with money 50 years ago, so I doubt any Fed policy would have helped. Fortunately, we had a strong labor union where I worked and so wages kept up with inflation. With annual raises based on seniority, I stayed ahead of inflation. I do not remember a lot of public yelling and screaming about it in the 70s. It crept up on us slowly; started creeping up bit by bit in the 60s. Once we went off the gold standard (‘71) it quickened. For the most part we took inflation in stride as part of life. In Michigan the “Big Three” auto plants were still humming. The unionized workers there did very well. Could afford to own nice new vehicles and suburban homes. Some even owned second homes in the northern reaches of the state.
While I contributed automatically to a 403B from my pay, I wasn’t really attuned to investing. But left alone the global equity fund (run by John Templeton then) did quite well and paved the way for the future. A gold & silver craze developed in the late 70s. There was tremendous media hype as the price of gold soared from $35 a decade earlier to around $800 an ounce. I grabbed off a couple K-Rands near the top and watched it slide to $400-$500 over a few years before selling. It was the best lesson in investing I ever received. And the Hunt Brothers somehow managed to buy enough silver back than to push the price over $50 an ounce - an astronomical height it has never reclaimed.
Whatever we’re facing now by way of inflation is mild compared to the 60s thru 80s period. And I think the Fed for reasons I don’t fully understand is engaged in some serious overkill. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater might apply.
A blast from the past
”With inflation on the rise and a gold run looming, Nixon’s administration coordinated a plan for bold action. From August 13 to 15, 1971, Nixon and fifteen advisers, including Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, Treasury Secretary John Connally, and Undersecretary for International Monetary Affairs Paul Volcker (later Federal Reserve Chairman) met at the presidential retreat at Camp David and created a new economic plan. On the evening of August 15, 1971, Nixon addressed the nation on a new economic policy that not only was intended to correct the balance of payments but also stave off inflation and lower the unemployment rate.
The first order was for the gold window to be closed. Foreign governments could no longer exchange their dollars for gold; in effect, the international monetary system turned into a fiat one. A few months later the Smithsonian agreement attempted to maintain pegged exchange rates, but the Bretton Woods system ended soon thereafter. The second order was for a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to check inflation. This marked the first time the government enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. It was an attempt to bring down inflation without increasing the unemployment rate or slowing the economy. In addition, an import surcharge was set at 10 percent to ensure that American products would not be at a disadvantage because of exchange rates.
Shortly after the plan was implemented, the growth of employment and production in the United States increased. Inflation was practically halted during the 90-day wage-price freeze but would soon reappear as the monetary momentum in support of inflation had already begun. Nixon’s new economic policy represented a coordinated attack on the simultaneous problems of unemployment, inflation, and disequilibrium in the balance of payments. The plan was one of the many prescriptions written to cure inflation, which would eventually continue to rise.”
Source

Inflation can indeed be a real PITA for average people, but not having a job to pay for anything is worse for many people than being employed but having to pay more for everything. A balance of these interests needs to be recognized in the rate discussion. From the article on after Volcker jacked up rates to double digits:

The economic results of this counterrevolution were far from unambiguous. Growth in the early 1980s slumped. Entire industrial sectors were rendered uncompetitive by soaring interest rates and surging exchange rates. Unemployment hit postwar records. It was painful, but on the conservative reading there was, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher liked to say, no alternative. If the struggles of the 1970s had continued, she suggested, the result would have been a slide toward ever more rapid inflation and threats to the institutional status quo. Ultimately, the Cold War order was in peril, and if avoiding that fate required turning monetary policy into a more blunt-force form of political struggle, then so be it. In fighting the mineworkers into submission in 1984-85, she was waging war on enemies within, as she waged war on the Soviet enemy without. The prize was nothing less than a permanent shift in the balance of social and economic power and the exclusion of alternatives to the rule of private property and markets.

As for labor having much power, it is a shadow of what it was in the 1970s:

Well. That's a very interesting article about the 1970's, Bretton Woods, Maggie Thatcher, even the Trilateral Commission, and all that.
Seems to me that it's quite likely that uncontrolled inflation can be a real PITA for average people without framing it in 70's America, Thatcher's England, Weimar Germany, or what is going on in Turkey at the moment.
Today, a lot of people arguing for a soft Fed response are very much the sort of people that ran SVB. And they are in a much better position to benefit from inflation than I am.
At the same time, the push for organized labor is showing more vigor than it has since Reagan crushed PATCO. And the people that oppose that are very much the sort of people that have profited, and grown fat, on easy money from the Fed.

I saw that too. Perhaps he drew his inspiration from here:

In interviews with [Business] Insider, founders and investors acknowledge privately that they are looking to Twitter as a case study of efficiency. (All spoke on the condition of anonymity, to avoid a backlash from their employees.) If Musk can run his social network on half of its previous staff, they say, perhaps their companies can, too. "It's not a bad look to make the tough call, because everyone is making the tough call," says the founder of a large startup whose investors are urging him to cut the fat and slow hiring. "Elon is the most extreme example of that so far, but this is what a lot of smart companies are doing."

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hardcore-twitter-culture-inspires-fellow-tech-founders-2022-12