The daily business briefing: March 27, 2023

1. First Citizens acquires Silicon Valley Bank's loans, deposits

First Citizens BancShares announced Monday that it is buying a large part of failed Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed two weeks ago after a run on its deposits and triggered a crisis that spread across the banking system. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said First Citizens, one of the largest U.S. regional banks, would acquire SVB's $72 billion in loans at a discount of $16.5 billion, $56 billion in deposits, and all 17 of its branches, which will reopen Monday under First Citizens' ownership. About $90 billion of SVB securities remain in receivership. First Citizens will get a line of credit with the FDIC and an agreement with the regulator to share losses, giving it protection from potential SVB losses.

Reuters

2. Elon Musk values Twitter at $20 billion in email to workers

Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter employees over the weekend offering them stock grants valuing the social media company at about $20 billion, less than half of what he paid for it, The Information and The New York Times reported Sunday. Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion in October, made the announcement in an email about a new stock compensation program. Musk said at one point Twitter was four months away from running out of money and still needed "radical changes" like more layoffs to get in better financial shape, the Times reported. "Twitter is being reshaped rapidly," Musk wrote, likening Twitter under his control to "an inverse start-up." Twitter also said in a legal filing that parts of its source code had leaked online.

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The New York Times The Information

3. U.S. considers expanding effort to prop up First Republic

United States authorities are considering expanding emergency lending for banks in a move that would give troubled First Republic Bank more time to get its finances in order, Bloomberg reported Sunday, citing people with knowledge of the situation. Regulators also are working on actions to help prop up two other failed lenders, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Unlike those two lenders, which had to sell off assets at huge losses after customers rushed to withdraw deposits, regulators consider First Republic to be stable enough to keep operating without immediate government intervention. The bank's stock has plummeted by more than 90 percent in March on fears that it could collapse, too.

Bloomberg

4. U.S. stocks get lift from First Citizens deal to buy much of SVB

Stock futures rose early Monday, putting Wall Street on track to start the week with gains after First Citizens agreed to acquire failed Silicon Valley Bank's loans, deposits, and branches. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 were up 0.6 percent at 6:45 a.m. ET. Nasdaq futures were up 0.3 percent. The three main U.S. indexes finished last week with gains even after the Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates another quarter percentage point despite concerns about the banking crisis. The Dow and the S&P 500 rose 1.2 percent and 1.4 percent last week. The tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 1.7 percent.

CNBC

5. Teleworking returns closer to pre-pandemic levels

About 72.5 percent of businesses reported they had few if any employees working remotely in 2022, with about 21 million more workers on-site full-time, according to new figures released by the Labor Department. That was up from 60.1 percent in 2021, and nearly equal to the 76.7 percent of businesses that said they had nobody teleworking just before the coronavirus crisis hit the United States in the first quarter of 2020. Employers are increasingly pushing staff to work more on-site to boost productivity as a possible recession looms, according to The Wall Street Journal. "There's a sense that innovation, creativity, and collaboration can suffer when teams are apart," Mike Steinitz, senior executive director at Robert Half, told the Journal.

The Wall Street Journal