2023 United States banking crisis

During March 2023, three large banks in the United States with significant exposure to the technology sector and cryptocurrency have failed.

The first bank to fail, Silvergate Bank, announced it would wind down on March 8 due to losses suffered in its loan portfolio. Following the collapse of Silvergate Bank, a bank run occurred at Silicon Valley Bank, a bank who had lent heavily to technology startup companies, causing the Silicon Valley Bank to collapse and be taken over by regulators on March 10. Signature Bank, a bank that frequently did business with cryptocurrency firms, was closed by regulators two days later on March 12, with regulators citing systemic risks. The collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were the second- and third-largest banks failures in the history of the United States, smaller only than the 2008 collapse of Washington Mutual during the then-ongoing financial crisis.

In response to banking failures, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the United States Department of the Treasury announced in a joint communiqué that extraordinary measures would be taken to ensure that all deposits at the failed banks would be honored, with the Federal Reserve separately announcing the creation of the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFB), a program that would offer loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral.

Background

See also: Cryptocurrency bubble § 2020–2022 cryptocurrency bubble, and 2021–2023 inflation surge

Several large banks within the United States gained market exposure to cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency-related firms prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these banks were Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank, each of which would collapse in March 2023.

Silvergate Bank

Silvergate Bank is a California-based bank that began operations in 1988 as a savings and loan association. In the 2010s, the bank began to provide banking services to players within the cryptocurrency market. The bank sought regulatory approval in the summer of 2014 to do business with cryptocurrency firms. The bank expanded the assets on its balance sheet significantly—doubling its assets in its 2017 fiscal year to $1.9 billion—by servicing cryptocurrency exchanges and other companies who were involved in the cryptocurrency business that could not secure financing from larger, more conservative banks. Despite its rapid growth, the company maintained a small physical footprint; in 2018, the bank had only three branches, all located in Southern California. By the fourth quarter of 2022, 90% of the bank's deposits had become cryptocurrency-related, with over $1 billion in deposits being tied to Sam Bankman-Fried.

In addition to providing traditional banking services to its cryptocurrency clients, the bank operated as a clearinghouse for its banking clients; it involved itself in the business of resolving and settling transactions in real-time through its proprietary Silvergate Exchange Network. The network allowed a client to send payments in U.S. dollars from its accounts with Silvergate to those of another client of the bank without requiring an interbank wire transfer. Due to the relative quickness of the transaction settling achieved on Silvergate's network, a large number of cryptocurreny companies set up accounts with the bank to take advantage of Silvergate's quick transaction settling times.

Silicon Valley Bank

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a commercial bank founded in 1983 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Until its collapse, SVB was the 16th largest bank in the United States and was heavily skewed toward serving companies and individuals from the technology industry. Nearly half of U.S. venture capital-backed healthcare and technology companies were financed by SVB. Companies such as Airbnb, Cisco, Fitbit, Pinterest, and Block, Inc. have been clients of the bank. In addition to financing venture-backed companies, SVB was well known as a source of private banking, personal credit lines, and mortgages to tech entrepreneurs.

Signature Bank

Signature Bank was a New York City-based bank founded in 2001. The bank began as a subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim that took on clients with assets of around $250,000, lending to small businesses based in New York City and in the surrounding metropolitan area. The bank provided financing within the multifamily residential rental housing market in the New York metropolitan area beginning in 2007, though it began to reduce its exposure to the market during the 2010s. By 2019, just over four-tenths of the value of the bank's loans were made to multifamily homeowners in the New York metropolitan area, comprising $15.8 billion of the bank's then-$38.9 billion in net loans.

Beginning in 2018, Signature Bank began to court customers in the cryptocurrency industry, securing hires that were experienced in the area with the goal of moving away from its dependence on real estate lending. The quantity of deposits held at the bank expanded significantly, with deposits increasing from about $36.3 billion at the end of the 2018 fiscal year to $104 billion by August 2022; that month, over one-quarter of the bank's deposits held were those of cryptocurrency companies. Its cryptocurrency-sector clients included large cryptocurrency exchange operators, such as Celsius Network and Binance. By early 2023, Signature Bank had become the second largest provider of banking services to the cryptocurrency industry—second only to Silvergate Bank.

In addition to providing traditional banking services to cryptocurrency clients, Signature Bank opened a proprietary payment network for use among its cryptocurrency clients. The payment network, Signet, had opened in 2019 for approved clients, and allowed the real-time gross settlement of fund transfers through the blockchain without third parties or transaction fees. By the conclusion of 2020, Signature Bank had 740 clients using Signet. The network continued to expand during the in the following years; both Coinbase and the TrueUSD dollar-pegged stablecoin had become integrated with Signet in 2022 and 2021, respectively.

Bank collapses

Silvergate Bank

Main article: Silvergate Bank § Liquidation

Despite conducting the majority of its business with cryptocurrency companies, Silvergate's investment portfolio was fairly conservative; the company took large positions in mortgage-backed securities as well as U.S. bonds. These sorts of assets, while reliable to be paid-in-full through their maturity date, carry risks associated with changes in interest rates; there is an inverse relationship between the mark-to-market value of a bond and the bond's yield. As interest rates shot up during the 2021–2023 inflation surge, the mark-to-market price of these securities decreased significantly. When these losses are unrealized, this does not typically cause the bank to cease operating, as the bank will receive payment-in-full under the original terms of the bond. However, if forced to sell these securities at a lower mark-to-market price, the losses on these types of assets become realized, posing significant risks to the bank's ability to continue to operate.

Silvergate was one of a small number of cryptocurrency-focused American banks that drew regulatory attention in 2023, along with Signature and Farmington State Bank (doing business as Moonstone). In January, two months after the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, federal regulators warned that dealing in blockchain-based assets was at odds with sound banking practice.

Silvergate was hit with a bank run in the wake of the bankruptcy of FTX; deposits from cryptocurrency-related firms dropped by 68% at the bank, with the bank facing requests from its clients to withdraw upwards of $8 billion in deposits. As Silvergate did not have enough cash-on-hand to satisfy the deposit withdrawals, the bank began to sell its assets at a steep loss; the company realized a loss of $718 million on withdrawal-related asset sales in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022 alone. The bank, in a public statement, said that it was solvent at the end of Q4 2022, with an asset sheet containing assets of $4.6 billion in cash and $5.6 billion in liquid debt securities, with $3.8 billion in deposit obligations. Silvergate, facing tight financial constraints in the coming months, borrowed $3.6 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco in order to contain the financial damage caused by the rapid rate of withdrawals, though the bank continued to sell off securities at a loss throughout January and February 2023 to cover additional withdrawals; Silvergate wrote in a regulatory filing on March 1 that the bank risked losing its status as a well-capitalized bank and that the bank faced risks relating to its ability to continue operating.

Facing continued losses from sales of securities at mark-to-market price, Silvergate Bank collapsed, releasing a public notice on March 8, 2023, that it would undergo voluntary liquidation and would return all deposited funds to their respective owners.

Silicon Valley Bank

Main article: Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

Silicon Valley Bank recorded an increase of its deposit holdings during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the tech sector experienced a period of growth. In 2021, it purchased long-term Treasury bonds to capitalize on the increased deposits. However, the current market value of these bonds decreased as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to curb the 2021–2023 inflation surge. Higher interest rates also raised borrowing costs throughout the economy and some Silicon Valley Bank clients started pulling money out to meet their liquidity needs. To raise cash to pay withdrawals by its depositors, SVB announced on March 8 that it had sold over US$21 billion worth of securities, borrowed US$15 billion, and would hold an emergency sale of some of its treasury stock to raise US$2.25 billion. The announcement, coupled with warnings from prominent Silicon Valley investors, caused a bank run as customers withdrew funds totaling US$42 billion by the following day.

On 10 March 2023, as a result of the bank run, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) seized SVB and placed it under the receivership of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC established a deposit insurance national bank, the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara, to service insured deposits and announced that it would start paying dividends for uninsured deposits the following week; the dividends were funded by proceeds from the sale of SVB assets. Some 89 percent of the bank's US$172 billion in deposit liabilities exceeded the maximum insured by the FDIC. Two days after the failure, the FDIC received exceptional authority from the Treasury and announced jointly with other agencies that all depositors would have full access to their funds the next morning.

Experts said that SVB's collapse was unlikely to pose a systemic risk to the U.S. financial system. However, although experts think these effects are temporary, the bank's collapse created hardships among some tech startups, and companies holding significant uninsured deposits and low cash flow faced significant risks.

Signature Bank

Main article: Signature Bank § Collapse

As cryptocurrency prices dropped significantly in 2022, particularly so after the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, depositors in Signature Bank began to withdraw deposits in the tune of billions of dollars; by the end of 2022, deposits in the bank totaled around $88.6 billion, down from $106.1 billion in deposits held at the beginning of the year—a time when over one-quarter of deposits were held by digital asset-related entities. Towards the end of 2022, Signature Bank cut business ties with cryptocurrency exchange Binance, seeking to reduce the bank's exposure to risk associated with the cryptocurrency market. According to Signature Bank board member Barney Frank, Signature Bank was hit with a multi-billion dollar bank run on Friday, March 10, with depositors expressing concern about cryptocurrency-related risks affecting the bank. Investor confidence in the bank was also badly shaken, and the bank's stock declined by 23% on that Friday—the day on which Silicon Valley bank collapsed—marking the then-largest single-day decline of the Signature Bank's value in its 22-year history.

On 12 March 2023, two days after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank was closed by regulators from the New York State Department of Financial Services in what is the third-biggest banking collapse in U.S. history. The bank proved unable to close a sale or otherwise bolster its finances before markets opened on Monday morning in order to protect its assets after customers began withdrawing their deposits in favor of bigger institutions, and shareholders of the bank lost all invested funds. The bank was placed under receivership by the FDIC, which immediately established Signature Bridge Bank, N.A. to operate its marketed assets to bidders.

Federal response

In response to the bank failures of March, the U.S. Federal Government took extraordinary measures to mitigate fallout across the banking sector. On March 12, Federal Reserve created the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), an emergency lending program providing loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions that pledge U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. The program is designed to provide liquidity to financial institutions, following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other bank failures, and to reduce the risks associated with current unrealized losses in the U.S. banking system that totaled over $600 billion at the time of the program's launch. Funded through the Deposit Insurance Fund, the program offers loans of up to one year to eligible borrowers who pledge as collateral certain types of securities including U.S. Treasuries, agency debt, and mortgage-backed securities. The collateral will be valued at par instead of open-market value, so a bank can borrow on asset values that have not been impaired by a series of interest rate hikes since 2022. The Department of the Treasury will make available up to $25 billion from its Exchange Stabilization Fund as a backstop for the program.

U.S. President Joe Biden made a statement about the bank failures on March 13, and asserted that government intervention was not a bailout and that the banking system was stable.

Broader impact

On March 13, shares of regional banks fell. Shares of San Francisco-based First Republic Bank fell by 67%. Western Alliance Bancorporation share price fell 82% and PacWest Bancorp was down 52% before their trading was halted.

The bank failures have led to speculation that the Federal Reserve will pause or halt rate hikes.

See also

• List of banks acquired or bankrupted in the United States during the 2007–2008 financial crisis