Commercial banks were supposed to be big beneficiaries of rising interest rates, but that assumed they managed their balance sheets sensibly. Silicon Valley Bank did not. As a result, the Californian lender to start-ups on Friday became the second-largest bank collapse in US history. Signature Bank, the third-biggest collapse, followed within hours. Authorities on both
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As a planned $2.25bn capital raise at California-based Silicon Valley Bank started to unravel on Thursday, nervous venture capitalists and start-up founders began to bombard executives at the lender’s British arm with questions about the safety of their funds. They received soothing answers. “The entirety of your founders’ deposits are safe with SVB,” Michael Kruse,
As Silicon Valley Bank was gripped in a crisis last Thursday, General Catalyst boss Hemant Taneja gathered a group of fellow venture capitalists in a last-ditch attempt to avert disaster. Over the previous few days, some VC funds had leaned on portfolio companies to retreat from the tech scene’s favourite bank, with Peter Thiel’s Founders
Shares in First Republic and several other US regional banks plunged on Monday as investors worried that regulators had not done enough to stem deposit outflows following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. First Republic was down by two-thirds in early afternoon trading in New York, having fallen as much as 75 per cent in
Cryptocurrency prices have soared as investors breathed a sigh of relief that US regulators moved to bolster the US banking system after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Bitcoin and ether, the two most widely-traded coins, have surged by a fifth since their lows on Friday as traders were reassured by promises from US authorities
Within three days, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and state regulators in California and New York took control of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and guaranteed all their deposits, beyond the usual $250,000 federal insurance limit. The Federal Reserve also announced a new lending facility, backstopped by the US Treasury department, that other banks
Banks are international in life and national in death. But finance isn’t the only place where success is global and failure is a decidedly local problem. The tech sector has got the same idea. The UK start-up fraternity has just had its second emergency government rescue in three years. As the world shut down in
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank has torn into global markets, with investors ripping up their forecasts for further rises in interest rates and dumping bank stocks around the world. Government bond prices soared on Monday, with two-year US Treasury yields recording their biggest one-day drop since 1987, as fund managers ramped up bets that
The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed site about European start-ups As the 16th largest bank in the US, Silicon Valley Bank was not big enough to rank as a systemically important financial institution. But, if many of its distressed depositors are to be believed, the collapsed bank still counted as a technologically important
Life can come at you pretty fast. One week ago, Silicon Valley Bank had a market capitalisation of $6bn. Today that figure is essentially zero. US regulators have stepped in with a guarantee for all deposits for SVB as well as Signature Bank, which was closed at the weekend. The latter had a concentrated exposure
HSBC on Monday averted a crisis in Britain’s tech sector by rescuing Silicon Valley Bank’s UK arm, a dramatic fire sale concluded after all-night talks led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Bank of England. HSBC emerged overnight as the leading white-knight bidder for SVB UK, paying a symbolic £1 for the bank. HSBC
European stocks tumbled at the open but US futures rose on Monday as regulators in the US and Britain rushed to prevent the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank from spreading into the wider economy. The region wide Stoxx 600 was down 1.8 per cent while Germany’s Dax lost 1.9 per cent. France’s Cac 40 lost
Xi Jinping has pledged to strengthen China’s security and build the military into a “great wall of steel” to defend the country’s interests as relations with the west reach the lowest point in decades. The Chinese president’s speech on Monday to the nearly 3,000 delegates of the National People’s Congress came at the close of
US regulators are facing questions over whether they missed signs of mounting problems at Silicon Valley Bank, the tech lender whose implosion last week fomented fears of contagion across the banking sector. As the government fought to contain the fallout from the failure of SVB — which on Friday was taken over by the Federal
The writer is vice-chair at Oliver Wyman and former global head of banks research at Morgan Stanley What are the implications of the rapid demise of Silicon Valley Bank? That is arguably now the most important question in global finance. What can financial history tell us about what may happen next? First, Silicon Valley Bank
Good morning. It will be an interesting day in markets today. Did the US authorities do enough to quell worries about bank runs? It looks like it to us, but the situation remains tense. Emotion, not reason, may rule the day. Send us your worries, conspiracy theories and trading strategies: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com. Silicon Valley
US regulators unveiled emergency measures on Sunday to shore up the banking system and took control of another bank, as they moved to stem contagion from the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank. The Federal Reserve announced a new lending facility aimed at providing additional funding to eligible depository institutions to ensure that “banks have the
There’s no word yet on bidders for Silicon Valley Bank (or other parts of SVB Financial), but regulators have decided that depositors will be fine. From the Federal Reserve, FDIC and Treasury on Sunday: Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system. This step
Business confidence in the UK rose to its highest level in 12 months, according to a quarterly index monitored by Accenture and S&P Global. A reading of plus 43 per cent, the net balance of manufacturing and service sector companies expecting activity, marked a boost in sentiment from the plus 18 per cent registered in
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has vowed to use his Budget on Wednesday to set Britain on the “hard road” to becoming one of Europe’s richest countries but warned that big tax cuts will have to wait. Hunt is expected to use his limited room for fiscal manoeuvre to offer tax breaks to encourage companies to invest,
BBC executives are increasingly confident they will find a way to hold on to Gary Lineker, the corporation’s star sports presenter who was taken off air after breaching impartiality rules, as pressure grew on chair Richard Sharp to resign. Lineker, a former striker in the England men’s team and presenter of Match of the Day,