奇速英语

突发！美国硅谷银行破产关闭，存款达1.2万亿

Regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday and seized its deposits(存款) in the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever. Regulators announced the takeover after what was effectively a run on the bank. Worried that SVB wouldn’t be able to meet redemption(赎回) requests, depositors rushed to withdraw their money. It was a collapse that sent shock waves across the banking industry, harming shares of other smaller and regional lenders.

▲1._________

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., SVB’s clients included venture capital firms and startups, and it became a big player in the tech sector, successfully competing with bigger-name banks. According to Jared Shaw, a senior analyst, SVB were able to provide all the products and services any of these advanced tech companies, would need.” But it remained little known outside of tech circles — until this week.

▲2. _________

Silicon Valley’s business boomed as tech companies did well during the COVID pandemic, and SVB had about $174 billion in deposits. But in recent months, many of SVB’s clients had been withdrawing money at a time when the tech sector as a whole has been suffering. SVB said earlier this week, that in order to make good on(兑现) those withdrawals, it had to sell part of its bond holdings at a loss of $1.8 billion. As the Federal Reserve(美联邦储备系统) has greatly raised interest rates, and SVB noted it wanted to cut down its bond portfolio(债券投资组合) to avoid further losses. But that spooked the bank’s clients, who got worried about SVB’s capacity of normal growth and development, and then began to withdraw even more money from the bank — a textbook definition of a bank run.

▲3. _________

The run on the bank caused concerns about the banking sector as a whole. On Thursday, shares of all kinds of lenders, including the big banks, fell. People feared that other lenders, especially smaller and regional ones, would suffer the similar problem and would struggle to meet the redemptions.