Modern Prosperity in Commercial Banking
Because I came out in '97, but then become CEO until 2001, I became CEO in April of 2001 when we officially recognize that the recession had begun. The first thing my team did was decide what we were going to do with the massive unused deposits because we didn’t want to lend them the real estate developers. We didn't want them to lend them to underserved niches, but we had to do something with them. So we got this brilliant idea. In retrospective, it's still sort of brilliant. And that is instead of letting people put these things on our balance sheet, we would open a broker-dealer. And we have two operations. We have our commercial bank and we have our broker-dealer and we would tell people, "Put some money on our balance sheet so you can pay your bills with your checking account. Take the rest of it and put it in the broker-dealer where we'll buy money market instruments for you, you know, things like CDs and commercial paper and stuff like that, and everybody is better off because you'll get a higher rate of return in the broker-dealer and it will be safer. It's always safer to lend money to General Motors than it is to give it to us and let us lend it to technology companies." Well, that was true once. Today, that's probably not true, but you get the idea. And then we told them to put just enough on our balance sheet so they can pay their bills and their checking account and it would be just enough for us to fund our loans so that we wouldn't have excess deposits on our balance sheet. And that has actually worked miraculously well. That broker-dealer is just fantastic. We're a $7 billion bank. The broker-dealer has 22 billion in it and it makes a lot of money. It makes clients happy. It makes shareholders happy. It makes all of us at Silicon Valley Bank happy. So that was a good idea. Pretty much, I could get into the sell-aways in which it wasn't brilliant, but no. Save that. That's the history of our strategy. Now, I'd like to give you the four...
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