> Hence a balance sheet that doesn't mark the losses is a more accurate picture. But only IF you never need those bonds for liquidity. I grade this as a fail o

> Hence a balance sheet that doesn't mark the losses is a more accurate picture. But only IF you never need those bonds for liquidity. I grade this as a fail of a hypothetical CFO interview I’m running. Sorry. > Note that liquidity crunches can ruin balance sheets even without this bond-specific feature. For example if you own 10% of a company stock, and need to dump all of it, the price will drop by a lot. Of course, but that’s an unrelated effect. I can lose money by buying something that loses value. I can also lose money by buying something that is hard to sell without paying large spread or causing a large market impact because I sold it. These are entirely orthogonal — I could buy securities that go up and lose some or all of the gain due to a forced sale. SVB’s bonds went down, in an NPV sense or a mid-market sense or any other sense that considers what they’re actually worth today.