If the bank can’t pay out a competitive interest rate (since they have money locked up in investments that pay a lower interest rate), people are naturally going to withdraw their money over time for higher-rate investments.

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That’s not a bank run, which is something that happens all at once.

But it will still kill the bank.

US Banks Have $620 Billion of Unrealized Losses on Their Books, Most banks are strong enough to withstand the paper losses. Still, their finances could be squeezed for years to come.

The investment losses that helped take down Silicon Valley Bank are a problem, to one degree or another, across the US financial system. In total, the industry ended last year with $620 billion of unrealized losses on its books from investments in low-yielding bonds.

For most banks, the issue is manageable.

Bonds held in investment books represented less than a quarter of the banking system’s $23.6 trillion of assets in December, and unlike SVB, lenders usually have a wide array of depositors who are unlikely to all need money around the same time. For the biggest banks, the risks are even smaller. They are perceived as too big to fail. What’s more, the recent rally in the Treasury bond market — sparked, ironically, by the jitters about the health of the banking industry — is helping to shrink the $620 billion of paper losses. (In the coming weeks, banks will start to post first-quarter data.) Banks’ Equity Could Take Hit If Paper Losses Had to Be Realized For most banks, unrealized losses are a manageable problem. But investors and depositors remain jittery about lenders sitting on huge piles of money-losing bonds

And yet as depositors keep gradually withdrawing their money and shifting it into money market funds and other investments, banks are facing a squeeze. They’re being pressed to pay more for funding while their revenue is limited by the investments they made in low-yielding bonds during the pandemic. That in turn could curb their ability to lend to consumers and businesses, slowing the economy.

“They’re paying more for deposits, and their earnings on bonds are fixed,” said Stan August, a retired bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and a former bond analyst at Bank of America. “That’s where the squeeze is.”

When the pandemic hit, and the Federal Reserve pushed down rates once again by pumping unprecedented amounts of cash into the economy, many banks loaded up on long-term government and mortgage-backed bonds. There were some Treasury notes that promised to pay annual interest of just 0.6% over 10 years.

Then inflation surged and the Fed started urgently driving up interest rates. The value of those bonds plunged, because who would want to buy an old bond paying 0.6% interest when new ones were suddenly paying more than 3%?

Losses on bonds are a risk whenever rates go up, but banks’ holdings were bigger than usual in 2022. All that cash the Fed and the government pushed into the economy quickly found its way into the banking system, giving lenders trillions of dollars to invest. SVB’s domestic deposits, for instance, rose more than 150% from the end of March 2020 through the end of 2022.

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h/t jnads