(Simon Black) On Sunday afternoon, September 14, 2008, hundreds of employees of the financial giant Lehman Brothers walked into the bank’s headquarters at 745 Seventh Avenue in New York City to clear out their offices and desks.
Lehman was hours away from declaring bankruptcy. And its collapse the next day triggered the worst economic and financial devastation since the Great Depression.
Here’s an interesting fact: Greg Becker, SVB CEO, sold 3.6 million dollars of company stock less than two weeks before it all went down.
(ZeroHedge) For most people in America, the news that a ‘bank in Silicon Valley’ has failed will be forgotten quicker than a story about soaring shoplifting in their local supermarket.
It shouldn’t.
Reality is that the contagion of the shuttering of the 18th largest bank in the US are widespread.
SVB is in fact the second largest (by assets) bank failure in US history after WaMu.
SVB Was The 2nd largest bank failure behind WaMu in US History (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_U.S._bank_failures)
(Wolf Richter) Silicon Valley Bank, a California state-chartered bank that was uniquely exposed to the massive all-encompassing startup bubble during the Free Money era – a bubble that is now imploding spectacularly amid what is called a mass extinction event among startups – was shut down and taken over Friday morning by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI). In its press release, the regulator cited “inadequate liquidity and insolvency.”
Easy Money 