This is a developing story. Updates might be posted as news flows in.
Banks in US invest the money that customers put in there. How much can they invest? If you give them $10, they could invest $9 of it. This is called Fractional Reserve Banking. This system is not a problem if the investment is sound, but if the investment is not sound AND a bunch of customers try to cash out at the same time, then the bank has no money to give back. When the bank has no money to give back, it's a liquidity crisis.
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Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which is the goto bank for most startups and venture capital, invested a huge proportion with the belief that interest rates would come down. When the Feds didn't do that, they were stuck holding a lot of bad bets. All the money was tied up in these bad bets.
Concern among founders and VCs investors was palpable last week after Silicon Valley Bank surprised the market by announcing Wednesday it needed to raise $2.25 billion in stock. On Thursday, Peter Thiel asked many of his portfolio companies to withdraw their money out of the bank, and the shares were down another 62% in premarket trading Friday before they were halted. Regulators then shut down the bank and said the FDIC would protect insured deposits. But these insured deposits are unto 250K, so what happens to companies that have millions of fundraised dollars stuck in it? Some experts seem to think the Feds caused this problem but not sticking to the "transitory inflation" case.
Others believe the SVB made really bad bets and taxpayers should not bail them out.
The venture capital community basically created a run on SVB, says Unlimited CEO Bob Elliottwww.youtube.com
Come Monday, we will find out if there are other suitors that are able to buyout SVB.
