Shares of Japan’s biggest banks dropped sharply on Tuesday as global markets reacted to a US banking sector sell-off and uncertainty over interest rates in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Traders in Tokyo said they were expecting a second day of massive equity market support from the Bank of Japan to
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TikTok has been accused of mishandling allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment against a senior manager in London, highlighting longstanding concerns about the working culture at the fast-growing social media platform. Steve Ware, former head of TikTok’s UK ecommerce studio operations, made inappropriate sexual comments and advances to young female staff members and clients, including
The writer is managing partner and head of research at Axiom Alternative Investments Of all the ways a bank can die, the route pursued by Silicon Valley Bank on the way to implosion appears to have been one of the most reckless. Banks exist to take and manage liquidity, interest rate and credit risks. It
Large US banks are being inundated with requests from customers trying to transfer funds from smaller lenders, as the failure of Silicon Valley Bank results in what executives say is the biggest movement of deposits in more than a decade. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and other large financial institutions are trying to accommodate customers wanting to
China will resume the issuance of tourist visas to foreigners, as the government removes one of the final remnants of its three-year closure under zero-Covid. The Chinese embassy in Washington said that in addition to processing new visas from Wednesday, existing visas from before March 2020, when it closed its borders due to the pandemic,
Just hours after Wall Street opened for trading on Friday morning, US regulators had seized control of Silicon Valley Bank, which had imploded under the strain of depositors pulling out their money en masse. What at first seemed like the failure of a one-of-its-kind lender with deep ties to the technology industry quickly appeared as
Venture capital firms are working on a long-shot plan to preserve parts of Silicon Valley Bank so it can keep serving clients in the technology sector, according to people briefed on the effort. Since late last week a group of more than a dozen VC firms have been in talks about how to enable SVB
Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel hedge fund, says the US central bank’s rescue package for Silicon Valley Bank shows that American capitalism is “breaking down before our eyes”. Griffin told the Financial Times that US taxpayers should not have to bail out institutional investors, following the decision by the US Federal Reserve to intervene to
How could regulators have missed the risks at Silicon Valley Bank? That is the question many shocked investors were asking on Monday. After all, the fact that SVB was sitting on a massive, unhedged portfolio of long-term Treasuries was no secret; last year, JPMorgan circulated shocking calculations to its clients (which were recirculated this week)
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
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,
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
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
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