US regulators move to protect depositors amid concerns of broader fallout from second-largest bank failure in history.
The United States government has announced it will guarantee deposits at the failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVP), as financial regulators rush to alleviate fears the tech-focused lender’s collapse could spark a broader financial crisis.
In a joint statement on Sunday, the US Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and FDIC said Sunday that all customers would be protected and be able to fully access their funds following the bank’s implosion.
“Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the US economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system,” the agencies said in a joint statement.
“This step will ensure that the US banking system continues to perform its vital roles of protecting deposits and providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth.”
The statement said depositors would have access to all of their money from Monday and no losses would be borne by the taxpayer.
US regulators have been scrambling to find a buyer for Santa Clara-based Silicon Valley Bank since seizing the bank’s assets on Friday following the mass withdrawal of funds by depositors.
The bank’s financial health had been under scrutiny following its announcement of plans to raise $1.75bn in capital after the loss-making sale of bonds.
Silicon Valley Bank, whose business heavily catered to technology workers and venture capital-backed companies, had approximately $200 billion in assets at the time of its collapse. The bank’s failure is the second-largest banking collapse in US history, after the 2008 implosion of Washington Mutual.
In an indication of spreading financial fallout, regulators said New York-based Signature Bank had also failed and was being seized, marking the third-largest bank failure in US history.
Regulators said a “similar systemic risk exception” would be extended to Signature Bank to guarantee all deposits at the lender.
Financial markets rose in early Asian trading following the announcement, although questions about potential buyers for the banks remained unanswered.
Some observers had warned that bank customers could make runs on other financial institutions and spark a broader financial crisis if the government did not intervene to reassure depositors.
However, Campbell R. Harvey, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, caution against making comparisons between Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and the failure of Lehman Brothers before the 2007-08 financial crisis.
“If you think about the global financial crisis, there were a number of banks that were at risk at the same time and we started to learn about them and these were not small players – these were big players and there were all highly correlated,” Harvey told Al Jazeera.
“This bank is different. It’s not in the top tier. Most people never heard about it but it’s been focused on tech investors in Silicon Valley… so I don’t see the similarities with 2007 at all.”
Harvey said that while multiple banks were extremely over leveraged in the runup to the 2007-08 crisis, SVP had failed due its over reliance on the tech sector, which has lost trillion in dollars in value over the last year.
“SVP is a story about an undiversified loan book,” he said. “That’s different.”
