Tag: Silicon Valley Bank

A consortium of prominent tech billionaires, including Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder, Palantir co-founder, and Founders Fund principal), Palmer Luckey (founder of Anduril and Oculus), and Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir and founder of 8VC), is launching a new digital bank named Erebor. This initiative is a direct response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023, which left a significant gap in banking services for startups.

According to a Bloomberg report, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating withdrawals made from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) before its collapse. The inquiry allegedly focuses on whether private equity firm executives withdrew funds from their personal accounts at the bank before their clients. The SEC has requested the necessary records, PYMNTS reports.

On Monday, First Republic Bank was seized by the U.S. regulators. JPMorgan Chase then acquired all of First Republic’s deposits, including uninsured ones, and a “substantial majority of assets.” First Republic has been under scrutiny as the weakest link in the U.S. banking system since the post-FTX collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank in March 2022. To protect depositors, the FDIC is entering into a purchase and assumption agreement with JPMorgan Chase.

After the collapse and bail out of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the U.S. banking market is not settling. U.S. regulators have requested that banks submit their best takeover offers for First Republic by Sunday afternoon. The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has reportedly asked six banks to bid for the embattled lender. Shares in First Republic plunged from $122.50 on March 1 to around $3 a share last Friday.

First-Citizens Bank, one of the largest regional banks in the U.S., is buying big pieces of collapsed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) more than two weeks after the lender’s collapse sent tremors through the banking system, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) announced. The purchase includes $119 billion in deposits and about $72 billion of SVB’s loans at a discount of $16.5 billion. Some $90 billion of SVB’s securities will remain in receivership. 

Currently, the global banking landscape is in a state of shock. First, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the U.S. followed UBS's incredible bail-out deal for Credit Suisse. Things are bad for banks. So perhaps it's not quite so striking that ING of the Netherlands can't solve its problems with Payvision, which it bought. Thousands of victims have lost their money via Payvision. The European Fund Recovery Initiative (EFRI) has written an open letter to ING's ESG committee.

Times in the global financial markets could hardly be more turbulent. Since 2022, we are experiencing the spreading of the Sudden Death Virus in the financial industry. First, the crypto segment was hit by the collapse of the Terra-Luna stablecoin scheme and the resulting bankruptcies from Three Arrows Capital to FTX. The virus jumped to the legacy banking system and we saw the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the U.S. and now Credit Suisse in Switzerland.

A few minutes ago, Bloomberg announced that UBS is buying troubled rival Credit Suisse for the equivalent of $2 billion in a deal brokered by the Swiss government. The transaction is probably rightly being called hístorical. The Credit Suisse crisis has nothing to do with crypto like the U.S. collapsed Silicon Valley Bank or Signature Bank. Credit Suisse perfectly represents the broken traditional banking system.

Credit Suisse is Switzerland’s second-largest bank after UBS Group, with assets of around $580 billion at the end of 2022, more than twice the size of Silicon Valley Bank (SBV), which failed last week. Over the last few days, Credit Suisse shares and bonds have lost massive value because of nasty rumors. The bank announced it would borrow up to 50 billion Swiss francs ($53.7 billion) from the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to shore up its liquidity.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) said its decision to close Signature Bank had "nothing to do with crypto" but was triggered by "a significant crisis of confidence in the bank's leadership" after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. This contradicts Signature Bank board member and former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, who said that he was the closure of the bank as a very strong sign of the anti-crypto attitude of regulators. The bank would not have been illiquid, he said.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange with 128 million users, had to stop its GBP deposits and withdrawals. This comes a month after the world's largest crypto exchange ceased dollar transfers. This is because, Binance's partner for GBP deposits, FCA-regulated Paysafe, decided to stop offering Binance customers its embedded wallet solution in the UK in a move it blamed on complex regulation.

Last Friday, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was closed by California regulator DFPI due to a bank run and placed under FDIC control. The DFPI stated that SVB had been financially sound until a few days before. The WJS reports that KPMG issued a clean bill of health to SVB just 14 days before. The New York-based Signature Bank went down 11 days after KPMG signed off on its audit. This raises the question of whether KPMG has overlooked something.