(Bloomberg) -- Private equity firms circling the $74 billion loan book at Silicon Valley Bank may find that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is unwilling to sell the assets — or at least not at bargain-basement prices.

Most Read from Bloomberg

More than half of the bank’s lending program — $40.5 billion as of the fourth quarter — consists of lines of credit to firms backed by capital-call commitments from their investors, according to bank documents. Those loans typically have terms of one to two years, with low interest and default rates, meaning they’re not likely to deliver high-octane returns.

During the 2008 financial crisis, private equity investors negotiated huge discounts on distressed and defaulted assets purchased from troubled banks. That’s not likely to be the case with Silicon Valley Bank, whose performing loan book might not yield the kind of discounts that private equity buyers typically look for, according to lawyers.

The FDIC has a broad mandate to try to sell Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank assets at the best possible price to aid recoveries, whether that’s as a whole or in pieces.

Historically it has a preference for selling a bank as close to whole as possible, said Ken Achenbach, a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner who focuses on bank regulation and corporate risk.

“Any asset is sellable at the right price,” he said in an interview. But assets being marketed by the FDIC in this cycle “should be assets that, in many ways, are less distressed from a credit quality perspective than the assets we saw coming out of receivership in 2008 and 2009.”

Apollo Global Management Inc., Ares Management Corp., Blackstone Inc., Carlyle Group Inc. and KKR & Co. are among the alternative-asset managers looking to buy pieces of Silicon Valley Bank, Bloomberg previously reported. The private equity firms declined to comment.