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When a package of emergency measures following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank failed to stop the plunge in US regional banking stocks this week, Washington’s officials turned to Jamie Dimon, the last remaining veteran of the 2008 banking crisis still heading a large lender. Over multiple phone calls on Tuesday, US Treasury secretary Janet

Investors have funnelled cash to US money market funds over the past week amid concerns over the safety of some bank deposits after the collapse of two large lenders. The funds had more than $120bn of net inflows in the week to Wednesday, according data from the Investment Company Institute, the largest net weekly inflow

Total usage of the Federal Reserve’s lending facilities swelled by $160bn in the week ended March 15, underscoring the pressure facing financial institutions following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Banks flocked to the Fed’s discount window, which offers a standing facility for banks to access support, tapping it for $148.3bn. That sent it to

Emmanuel Macron, president of France, failed a critical parliamentary test on Thursday and chose to override lawmakers to pass his unpopular plan to raise the retirement age, risking a political crisis and backlash on the streets. The decision shows the government was unable to convince opposition MPs to back the reform to raise the retirement

Credit Suisse’s bonds slid further on Thursday, leaving them firmly in distressed territory even after the beleaguered lender turned to the Swiss central bank for support and said it would buy back SFr3bn ($3.2bn) in debt. A Credit Suisse dollar bond maturing in 2027 gave up gains from earlier in the session to trade down

One week, two very different banking crises on either side of the Atlantic. The travails of Credit Suisse, the 167-year-old behemoth that has lurched from scandal to scandal, look poles apart from those of Silicon Valley Bank, a US lender considered until very recently the darling of the tech world. SVB began the month with

The $54bn lifeline Credit Suisse negotiated from the Swiss central bank on Wednesday night was meant to act as a “circuit breaker” on the stricken lender’s woes, according to people involved in the talks. But by close of play on Thursday, the bank’s shares still traded 11 per cent below where they started the day

JPMorgan Chase has been sounding out US banks about assembling an industry-backed solution to shore up First Republic Bank, as Wall Street lenders try to contain the fallout from the collapse of two major financial institutions in the past week. Shares of First Republic have plunged and its debt rating has been downgraded in the

When Silicon Valley Bank slid into a death spiral last week, Peter Thiel, the (in)famous libertarian, shot into the spotlight. The reason? Last week, his Founders Fund reportedly pulled its business accounts from SVB. That led to angry accusations that Thiel and other venture capitalists had sparked a bank run. This will provoke plenty of

The market volatility triggered by the failure of three banks in the past week has spooked traders in economically vital US mortgage-backed securities, leaving other lenders, usually important buyers, on the sidelines. The $11tn market for bundles of US home loans was already feeling the strain of last year’s soaring interest rates, which pushed up

The European Central Bank has raised interest rates by half a percentage point, sticking to its goal of fighting inflation despite financial turmoil caused by US bank failures and worries about Credit Suisse. The ECB’s decision to lift its benchmark deposit rate from 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent was in line with what

The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed site about European start-upsTechnology, they say, is about turning the magical into the mundane. A decade ago, digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Cortana seemed like astonishing inventions. Nowadays, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, dismisses them as “dumb as a rock”. How quickly will today’s much-hyped

Chaos theory proposes that a butterfly flapping its wings in one place can cause a tornado in another. Similarly, the recent failure of a niche California US tech lender this week pushed an unrelated Swiss bank close to collapse. Time for central bankers to acknowledge that with risks unpredictable, rate policy must be more cautious.

Financial journalists only know two quotes from literature. There’s the Hemingway one about bankruptcy, and the Tolstoy one about happy and unhappy families. In recent reporting on Credit Suisse, most reporters have been choosing the wrong quote. Silicon Valley Bank’s failure might have made it seem like all bankruptcies happen gradually then suddenly but, in

Every now and then a country has a nationwide debate that produces actual learning. It happened in the UK about two years after the vote for Brexit, when many people belatedly found out about the workings of the European single market. I’ve spent much of this winter following the French debate about the right retirement

Credit Suisse shares rebounded sharply on Thursday after the lender revealed plans to borrow up to SFr50bn ($54bn) from the Swiss central bank and buy back about SFr3bn of its debt in an attempt to boost liquidity and calm investors. The Swiss National Bank had said on Wednesday it was willing to provide a liquidity

When Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, most of its 8,500 staff were still working remotely. “Some people worked from Miami, some moved to Las Vegas or a cabin in the woods and did the digital nomad thing,” said one former banker. SVB’s total embrace of remote working was just one way in which the

For those of us not in attendance at the great private-jet-powered, sustainability-obsessed meeting of minds that was Davos this year, there was one buzzword brought back by attendees that has really stuck with me (or in my gullet, to be precise): “mattering”. Supposedly, the “secret to management in a new hybrid-working economy” is not honouring

Good morning. On Tuesday, we asked if another bank would fall. We were thinking about America, not Europe. Yet it is Credit Suisse that is teetering. In the early hours of Thursday morning in Switzerland, the bank said it would “pre-emptively” take up to SFr50bn ($54bn) from the Swiss central bank’s just-announced liquidity backstop. The

European bank stocks rallied on Thursday after Credit Suisse was offered liquidity financing by the Swiss National Bank, sparking a rebound in the bank’s shares. The recovery in the banking sector fuelled a broader rise across European indices ahead of the European Central Bank’s monetary policy meeting. Credit Suisse shares jumped 30 per cent at

Fitch and S&P Global cut First Republic’s credit rating, in the latest sign of how the failure of Silicon Valley Bank is rippling across the broader US banking sector. First Republic’s deposit concentrations “are now viewed as a ratings weakness”, Fitch said on Wednesday, as it cut its rating on the lender to BB from