How does a modern bank collapse? And is it sudden or is there warning? Seems sudden in the news, but I struggle to understand how a bank can lose billions of dollars suddenly, where does it go?
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There are multiple ways a bank can fail.
Some can be sudden but others may have some warning. Depends on the cause of the failure.
In the case of SVB, most of its assets were long term government bonds. As interest rates went up, those bonds lost value on paper because people would only buy them at a discount. That only matters if they have to sell them; unfortunately for SVB, depositors for scared and started pulling their money, so SVB had to sell the bonds at a loss, which caused more people to pull their deposits, and so on in an escalating cycle.
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