Technology

Exactly. What the banks are doing are selling "loans". Musk has to pay those loans back quote/unquote someday. If the loan is good, you hold on to it as a bank because the interest makes you money. If the loan is bad, you sell it so that you can get some of your money back and make the collection of the loan someone else's problem.

Banks will do this for a number of reasons:

• To manage their balance sheet. Every loan not paid in full is bad and you need to balance good (income/good loans/etc) and bad.
• Generate immediate liquidity. Banks need to have some hard cash on hand, sometimes they sell to do just that, have hard cash.
• Free up credit lines to lend to new borrowers. Banks only have so much resources, sometime you cut losses to get new gains.
• Diversify the risk pool. You want a nice balance between "loans that might default" and "loans likely to not default".

Now for everyone else, what the parent to this comment is indicating is the second option in that list. Having to create some cold hard cash suddenly. Usually, there's a cyclical nature to needing greenbacks by the fistful, but like everything that's not always true. Something can "happen" and you have a sudden need to have cash in hand pronto. Good way to get that cash is to start selling low hanging fruit if you have it.

Something like the Twitter loan is a good pitch for low hanging fruit. Musk is terrible at paying the loan back, Twitter is likely to default one day, but Musk suddenly has direct access to some pretty corrupt as fuck ways to actually pay that loan back. From what I've read in the article, the sell price is something like 90 to 95 cents on the dollar. So not a huge discount, this ain't a fire sale.

But banks might want to offload Musk from their sheets just in case that money is something someone might later investigate. Like that 95 cents on the dollar price is "We think Musk is good for it, but we likely don't actually want his money." So you can make that federal investigation in 2033 someone else's problem, by selling the loan today. The big bank makes about 95% of the original amount back and when Musk goes to pay his loan in Russian Blood Rubles, it'll be to a bank that get investigated that isn't <<insert some large bank that would "NEVER" think to take conflicted money>>.

That's one theory. But there could be something on the horizon. Something that isn't right around the corner, but coming up in the distance that the banks want to have cash on hand for. Usually you see a much larger discount, like 60 cents on the dollar, for "holy shit, this stuff is toxic but we need to offload it discreetly before everyone else wises up."

I don't think point one and three apply to Musk's particular set of loans. But who knows?! Only the bankers do.