Presenting the BestEvidence spreadsheets of $100B banks

[NOTE: THIS POST PROVIDES LINKS TO SPREADSHEETS THAT HAVE BEEN CORRUPTED. FOR LINKS TO ARCHIVAL, ORIGINAL VERSIONS OF THESE SPREADSHEETS FOR DOWNLOADING, PLEASE SEE THIS. THANKS, JT]

Originally, I was going to attach documents—spreadsheets—to this substack post. Substack claims it’s just a drag-and-drop process.

It is not. It simply doesn’t work, and I’m not going to shoot my Saturday in the head trying to figure out how (only to find out substack disabled the functionality for whatever reason).

Like so many other big-alt media platforms, substack is totally full of it. Consequently, I’m going to use google drive so you can access the spreadsheets with links. I’ve already put earmuffs on, so feel free to join the chorus of kneejerk anti-google ninnies baying like beagles over this unpardonable infraction.

The working spreadsheet (Are these banks safe 4Q2022?.xlsx) is the what I used while researching the $100B banks. It's also what I used to generate the cosmetic-only spreadsheet (Deep Diving the Fed's Killer Whale Crisis.xlsx). The latter is what I screen-recorded while producing the video.

The cosmetic version, though prettier than its working forebear, lacks two crucial features of the working version--all formulas, and work-product, i.e., stuff that was part of my research but that didn't make the cut for the video.

Sidebar: My avid, Swiss-army-knife-like use of MS Excel for 30+ years came to a halt the second Microsoft went to a subscription-only model for its software. That's a hard nope with me, so the day Microsoft insisted that its software be rented rather than purchased, I migrated to Apple Numbers. Numbers is a materially inferior product to Excel, but it does offer the ability to both open Excel files and (crucial here) export native Numbers spreadsheets in Excel format. And it comes pre-installed on Apple computers, so I'm saving the $120 or whatever the MSOffice suite ran me. That's how the spreadsheets here were generated. Well, that and… gasp… google drive.

I looked at a ton of data before I even started writing the video. There were a lot of false starts and busted theories as to the best predictive metrics for the three dead banks. Two of these are worth discussing here because they're reflected in the working spreadsheet.

First, I noticed that there was a lot of activity in $250K+ accounts between 3Q2022 and 4Q2022. What really caught my eye about SIVB was the decrease in the number of those accounts--from 37,604 to 37,466. Despite the fact that that's only a decline of 138 accounts, the amount of money that departed SIVB inside those accounts was huge, $28.5MM per account. To me that looked like the bigger (but not the biggest) whales might've gotten a heads-up about what was coming.

Not a bad hypothesis, but it falls apart with First Republic, where the average $250K+ account that left the bank during 4Q2022 was less than the accounts that remained.

So that theory, sexy though it is, was a loser.

The double-delta calculation is shown in purple in Column A.

The second theory I explored relates to the increase in the size and number of $250K+ accounts from the 3Q2019 (just before Pandemic QE got rolling) to 4Q2022. I hypothesized that the bigger the increases, the more likely the bank would have mega-whales and/or be targeted.

However, a lot of the action between 2019 and late 2022 was simply PANDEMIC!!!-related. A lot of people moved south, for example. That shows up big-time in banks headquartered, say, in North Carolina. First Citizens, Truist and even Bank of America show big increases in $250K+ accounts (as well as accounts generally) simply because a million people (rough guess) moved down here during the lockdowns and mandatory masking nonsense. That geographic movement involved a lot of money action that isn't related to deposit increases coming from Fed asset purchases.

So that theory, reflected in a lot of red-colored cells, was a bust as well.

Other notable things.

There are two Morgan Stanleys, and neither one's numbers are credible insofar as $250K+ accounts are concerned. In certain places they're borderline impossible. I'll leave the joy of discovering how ridiculous to enterprising readers. But if I were looking for where oligarchs stash their dough, not a bad place to start sniffing around.

Also, there are some smaller banks at the bottom of the working spreadsheet that got there because they got mentioned by some financial person I respect like Chris Whalen or Marc Cohodes. Cross River Bank is especially comical given the number of delinquent loans it self-reports. I think Cohodes said on twitter the bank had "man-sized problems," and I'd have to agree with that. Wow.

Finally, in the cosmetic spreadsheet, I've got a page/tab called Frankenwhales that sorts the banks by average size of $250K+ accounts (shown in the lead substack post image).

For reference, most of the data in the spreadsheet comes from the FDIC and can be accessed here:

https://banks.data.fdic.gov/bankfind-suite/financialreporting

The data for accounts larger than $250,000 can be found in Form RC-O for an individual bank starting here:

https://cdr.ffiec.gov/public/ManageFacsimiles.aspx

Have fun...

JT

As a reminder, ycan help out me and BestEvidence by sending cash or check (or just a postcard to say hey) to…

John Titus

9660 Falls of the Neuse Rd.

Suite 138, No. 241

Raleigh, NC 27615

If anyone’s got ideas on how someone outside the U.S. can send money without going through an electronic snare (illumintated so well by Justin Trudeau with the truckers), I’m all ears. Does monero truly a solution?