You can’t make this up, though of course you can, because everything reduces to climate change these days, except for when it can be reduced to racism, but so far the narrative makers haven’t been able to come up with the racism angle to the SVB collapse. (I predict we’ll see it by the end of the week.)
What hasn’t received as much attention is that Silicon Valley Bank was particularly important to the climate-tech sector. More than 60 percent of community solar financing nationwide involved Silicon Valley Bank. . .
Silicon Valley Bank served as a banker to dozens of climate and energy-tech companies, holding their cash on a day-to-day basis and issuing billions of dollars in loans in support of the type of large-scale, one-off projects that are essential to the sector. . .
“The downfall of SVB will launch a thousand tweet threads, but right now our focus is securing payrolls for the Lowercarbon portfolio companies whose cash is tied up so they can keep up their planet-healing work,” Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon Capital, a climate-focused venture fund, told me in an email.
Likewise the Washington Post is properly worried:
Silicon Valley Bank collapse could slow the transition to clean energy
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has created new challenges not just for the nation’s banking system, but also for the Biden administration’s climate agenda . . .
The bank had long been a favorite of clean tech companies because of its deep understanding of the marketplace and sophisticated financing tools unique to the industry.
“Sophisticated” you say? Strange their their interest rate risk management on the asset side wasn’t similarly “sophisticated.”
P.S. Richard Samuelson sensibly asks:
