Interesting Links for 14-03-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Work to begin immediately on £55m music centre vision for Edinburgh landmark (the old Royal High School on Calton Hill)

(tags:music school edinburgh )

2. Gary Lineker row: All the people employed or used in BBC programming who are outspoken on social media

(tags:bbc twitter socialnetworking )

3. The care worker recruitment crisis is even bigger than the NHS

(tags:jobs Doom care )

4. Why did 250,000 Britons die sooner than expected? (Austerity)

(tags:uk austerity death )

5. Silicon Valley Bank seem to have managed risk unusually badly

(tags:risk banking Technology epicfail )

6. Nabokov was not a fan of many people's interpretation of Lolita

(tags:abuse children rape writing )

7. Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Thing'

(tags:scifi funny music musicals )

8. The Pithiest Critique of Modern Conservatism Keeps Getting Credited to the Wrong Man

(tags:Conservatives politics mistakes )

9. Trams! Invade Leith!

(tags:Edinburgh trams video transport )

10. What's Going On With Red Dwarf?

(tags:RedDwarf TV scifi )

Comments

[nancylebov]

8. I've started listening to Wilholt's music. It seems promising and he's got a premiere coming up not to far from me.

That's a remarkably weird coincidence of names.

Nabokov was not a fan of many people's interpretation of Lolita

[jack]

I've not read the book, but from hearing people describe it it sounds like if you actually consider the question, there's not much room for doubt that it's about how HH abused L and lied to himself about it, but it's about him so if you only look at what HH says, it doesn't explicitly say "and he was lying".

I remember another quote from N saying, the book should have an abstract cover showing a stylised self-absorbed HH, not (god forbid) a cover focusing on L. (And that all sounds plausible, but I haven't checked the evidence that he thought that from the beginning)

But of course, the film de-emphasised "this is wrong" in various ways, and the conception of L seducing HH rather than HH abusing L entered the popular consciousness :( :( :(

Sometimes, things are pretty much what they seem to be.

[hairyears]

The Financial Times has quite a bit to say about the SVB collapse, and they were saying it a month ago.

The short version is that things were exactly as they seemed to be, to anyone with access to a good analyst's reports on the banking sector, and to any competent banking regulator; and this has been known for months.

I'll expand on that: other banks were passing analysts' notes to their clients about SVB's bond portfolio and term risk exposures; and the regulators - both State and Federal - chose to ignore the fact that SVB had been routinely using short-term loans (called advances) from the San Francisco Federal Home Loan Bank as emergency liquidity facility throughout Q3 and Q4 of 2022.

This is supposed to be a red flag for the regulatory authorities, in much the same way that repeated use of the Discount Window would alert the Bank of England (specifically, the Prudential Regulatory Authority).

Best short read: The FT's summary on March 9th

Read this article for it's background information on why rate risk exposure is well-understood and well-run banks manage it by hedging and diversification.

Regulatory context: European officials are seething about their counterparts’ “incompetence”.

Apologies if you're unable to get at paywalled FT articles at work.


The Moody's downgrade note on SVB is particularly damning, but you definitely won't have access to that unless you're a subscriber, or they make it public.

Two key points:

1 Moodys are very critical of SVB management:

The significant change in SVB’s funding and profitability profile over a short time suggests higher tolerance for risk in its financial strategy and risk management than Moody’s had previously incorporated . . . these financial profile changes followed by a significant balance sheet restructure indicate that SVB’s risk governance, risk limits, and balance of shareholder and creditor interests posed higher than average governance challenges.

2 This collapse was precipitated by higher-than-expected draw-downs of tech startups' cash piles:

Rising interest rates and increased macroeconomic uncertainty coupled with declining venture capital investment activity and high cash burn among SVB’s clients have created challenging conditions for the firm. This led to a significant increase in wholesale funding in the second half of 2022

...In other words, it's not 'a run on the bank' at all: increased burn-rates in the companies that formed SVC's deposit base forced the bank to start liquidating it's badly-managed long-term funding base at a loss; and that forced them to reveal their true position and call for extra cash with a rights issue.