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I read on Regulators Hold Auction for Silicon Valley Bank (The Wall Street Journal):
Treasury officials confirmed the auction to lawmakers and staff on a call Sunday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter, saying bids were expected by 2 p.m. Eastern Time.
That implies that the auction for Silicon Valley Bank is held privately (by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)). Why is the auction for Silicon Valley Bank held privately? Why not make it public?
"Public" has a particular meaning in a share sale. It means that any investor can purchase shares and comes with lots of rules about transparency.
But what the regulators want is a single, deep pocketed, sophisticated investor, to buy the bank in one go (not selling shares) and take responsibility for its assets and liabilities. This may well not be an attractive investment for someone buying shares, as the liabilities may well be significant. Such a public sale may fail.
So the simple reason that this isn't a public sale of shares is that the regulator doesn't want to sell to the public.
It's not terribly clear what you mean by those terms, but FDIC doesn't sell a failing bank to random Joes (or even to Elon Musk[s] directly), but to other banks, basically:
The FDIC markets troubled institutions to healthy insured depository institutions. The FDIC is statutorily required to resolve failed institutions using the least costly resolution option minimizing losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund. [...]
If an insured depository institution is unable to resolve its issues, the FDIC will implement its resolution process by which qualified bidders may seek to acquire the assets and assume the liabilities of the failing institution.
While qualified bidders participate in the resolution process for a variety of strategic reasons, a successful resolution can provide a seamless transition for depositors and borrowers.
Nor is this unusual/new, except maybe the attempt to sell all of it one auction (which failed--only one offer was submitted by the deadline and that was rejected by FDIC, so they are now selling it in somewhat smaller pieces). As a bit of history that's more the norm:
As receiver, the FDIC typically seeks to sell the loans of a bank in receivership to healthy lending institutions. [...] During the 2008 financial crisis most bank failures resulted in an arranged sale with government assistance and the uninsured deposits were transferred to a healthy bank. In those cases, the sale was arranged and completed almost simultaneously with the appointment of the FDIC as a receiver. In the case of SVB, that has not happened as of the date of this release. However, given the potential impact of SVB’s failure on other regional banks and the urgency of this situation given the large amount of uninsured deposits, based on press reports, the federal banking regulators are soliciting bids to quickly arrange a sale of SVB or it’s assets to one or more banks or to institutions that may be willing to purchase the uninsured deposits only, at a discount, in either case resulting in more rapid liquidity for holders of uninsured deposits.
