It seems that SVB declared $212 billion in assets, making it the second-biggest bank failure in the country’s history, preceded by Washington Mutual, whose 2008 failure came as the bank only had $300 billion in assets. Silicon Valley Bank was the 16th-largest bank in the United States.
The ranking was based on all its assets before the collapse. After the tech industry rapidly evolved during the pandemic, SVB’s clients deposited millions, if not billions, of dollars, raising the bank’s assets from $60 billion to nearly $200 billion in only two years.
As deposits rapidly came in, SVB invested in debt, such as U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. However, as the Federal Reserve started to increase interest rates to fight inflation, the value of the Silicon Valley Bank crashed.
Unfortunately, the failure that both SVB and the cryptocurrency bank Silvergate registered sparked many fears of contagion and even drew negative comparisons to the Great Recession.
Some analysts would even agree that the contagion concerns are increased by the idiosyncratic problems at all the other individual banks. Why? It seems that SVB and Silvergate had a lot of business within industries vulnerable to higher interest rates, and plenty of banks have broader customer bases.
