David Dee Delgado/Reuters
Police responded to Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) New York offices on Friday as panicked clients demanded their money amid the institution’s shocking implosion.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized SVB’s $209 billion in assets just a few hours later, ordering the bank closed and taking control of its $175.4 billion in deposits. The massive meltdown marks the biggest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.
SVB, the 16th-largest bank in the country, has been “one of the startup industry’s most important banks,” according to Fortune. But after Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund on Thursday raised questions about SVB’s financial health, recommending that its clients withdraw their funds from the bank, and, in a now-deleted tweet, investor Michael Burry compared SVB to Enron, SVB’s stock immediately tanked, cleaving some $80 billion from its market cap in a matter of hours. While hedge fund king Bill Ackman recommended the federal government bail out SVB if they couldn’t raise enough private money to stay afloat, SVB CEO Greg Becker implored customers to “stay calm,” Bloomberg reported.
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