Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Timeline: The 48-Hour Run That Shook Banking

The Fed reorganises supervision 2026

On 6 October Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman announced that bank supervision would be regrouped into five geographic regions, each with a single regional leader, following state lines rather than Reserve Bank districts. She cited the independent SVB review’s finding that examiners were slow to act because no one clearly owned the decision.

Senator Elizabeth Warren opened an inquiry into reports that private parties saw the Fed-commissioned SVB report before its public release, a sign that the politics of the failure are not over three and a half years later.

An independent review rewrites the story Review

Bowman presented the first findings of the review she commissioned from Starling Advisory Group. Its conclusions: Fed staff knew, or should have known, of SVB’s vulnerabilities as early as March 2022, a year before it failed; a long-standing culture of risk aversion made examiners feel safer doing nothing than acting and being wrong; and the 2018 ‘tailoring’ law that eased rules for mid-sized banks did not cause the delays.

Most strikingly, an analysis by Charles River Associates for the review found that social media did not trigger the run: 96% of social media chatter about it appeared after SVB’s failure was already inevitable. The report was published as a public exposure draft on 21 September, with further reports to come.

A judge says the run was ‘foreseen’ Court

In the long fight between the FDIC and SVB’s former parent over cash it held at the bank, a federal judge ruled the FDIC does not have to hand back $1.71 billion. She found that officers of both the holding company and the bank breached their fiduciary duties by loading the bank with interest-rate and liquidity risk, removing partial hedges, and approving a $294 million dividend to the parent in December 2022 while the bank was in ‘dire financial condition’.

‘The evidence presented at trial established that the risk of a bank run was not only foreseeable but in fact foreseen,’ Judge Freeman wrote.

The FDIC sues 17 former leaders Court

The FDIC, as receiver, sued six former officers and 11 directors for gross negligence and breach of fiduciary duty, calling SVB ‘a case of egregious mismanagement of interest-rate and liquidity risks’. It alleged they bought long-dated, unhedged securities, changed risk-model assumptions to hide limit breaches and paid the parent a ‘grossly imprudent’ dividend.

In October 2025 Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California refused to dismiss the case. It was still pending in October 2026.

Emergency lending ends Rescue

The Bank Term Funding Program, created the weekend SVB failed, stopped taking new loan requests on 11 March 2024, as the Fed had announced in January. It had let banks borrow for up to a year against Treasury and agency securities valued at par, not at their depressed market price, removing the forced-sale trap that sank SVB.

Paying the bill and winding down Rescue

To recover what it spent protecting uninsured depositors at SVB and Signature Bank, the FDIC adopted a special assessment of about $16.3 billion, charged mostly to the largest banks rather than to taxpayers or small community banks.

SVB’s former parent, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 17 March 2023, had its plan approved in August 2024, leaving SVB Financial Trust to pursue a claim of about $1.9 billion against the FDIC.

The Fed blames itself, too Review

The Federal Reserve’s review, led by Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr, found that SVB’s board and management failed to manage basic interest-rate and liquidity risk, that supervisors did not fully appreciate the vulnerabilities as the bank grew, and that when they did identify problems they did not push hard enough. It also argued that the post-2018 shift to lighter rules for mid-sized banks contributed.

It noted SVB had not tested its ability to borrow from the discount window and lacked the collateral arrangements to do so quickly. California’s regulator published its own review days later.

Contagion: First Republic falls Risk

SVB’s failure set off weeks of bank stress. New York regulators closed Signature Bank on 12 March. In Europe, Credit Suisse was taken over by UBS on 19 March. In the US, First Republic Bank, another lender with many uninsured, wealthy depositors, was seized on 1 May and sold to JPMorgan Chase.

First Citizens buys the bank Rescue

The FDIC agreed to sell Silicon Valley Bridge Bank’s deposits and loans to First-Citizens Bank and Trust Company of Raleigh, North Carolina. First Citizens bought about $72 billion of assets for a $16.5 billion discount, with a loss-share agreement on commercial loans, and received equity appreciation rights worth up to $500 million to the FDIC.

About $90 billion of securities and other assets stayed in receivership. The FDIC estimated the cost to its insurance fund at about $20 billion.

The bridge bank opens Rescue

On Monday morning SVB’s offices reopened as Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, a temporary national bank run by the FDIC. All deposits and substantially all assets moved across, and customers could access every dollar. Many moved money out anyway, to big banks they considered too big to fail.

Washington protects every depositor Rescue

On Sunday evening, before Asian markets opened, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg said depositors at SVB, and at Signature Bank, closed the same day, would have access to all their money from Monday. The systemic-risk exception covered deposits above the $250,000 limit.

Shareholders and some unsecured debt holders were not protected, and senior management was removed. The Fed also launched the Bank Term Funding Program so other banks could borrow against their bonds without selling them.

Closed by mid-morning Event

On the morning of 10 March, before the queued withdrawals could be paid, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation closed Silicon Valley Bank and appointed the FDIC as receiver. The FDIC put insured deposits into a new Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara and promised uninsured customers an advance dividend.

At the end of 2022 SVB had about $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in deposits, making it the second-largest US bank failure at the time, after Washington Mutual in 2008.

$42 billion in one day Run

As SVB’s share price collapsed, venture-capital firms advised portfolio companies to move their cash, and founders did, using online banking to send money out in minutes. By the end of the day, customers had asked to withdraw about $42 billion, roughly a quarter of the bank’s deposits.

SVB could not raise cash fast enough. It had not tested its ability to borrow from the Fed’s discount window and lacked collateral ready to pledge. Overnight, management told regulators it expected more than $100 billion more to leave on 10 March. California’s closure order said the bank ended the day with a negative cash balance.

The announcement that started it Risk

After the market closed, SVB Financial Group told investors it had sold almost all of its $21 billion available-for-sale portfolio at a $1.8 billion after-tax loss and planned to raise $2.25 billion in new stock. The aim was to reposition its balance sheet as clients burned through cash.

Instead, the message heard by markets was that the bank needed capital. The same evening the crypto-focused Silvergate Bank announced it would wind down, adding to nerves about deposit-heavy niche lenders.

Rates rise and the hole grows Risk

The Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in March 2022 to fight inflation. The market value of SVB’s long-dated, low-yield bonds fell, and by the end of 2022 its unrealized losses on securities were about $15 billion, roughly equal to its equity. At the same time, venture funding slowed and startups drew down their deposits.

Supervisors issued findings on SVB’s risk management but did not force it to cut its interest-rate exposure. The bank went without a chief risk officer for much of the year and removed hedges as rates rose.

Deposits triple in a tech boom Risk

Low rates and a venture-capital boom poured money into startups, and they parked it at SVB. The group’s assets grew 271% between the end of 2018 and the end of 2021, against 29% for the banking industry, according to the Fed. With few loans to make, SVB put much of the cash into government-backed mortgage securities with a weighted-average duration of about six years.

A 2018 law, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, had raised the threshold for the strictest US bank rules from $50 billion to $250 billion of assets, and SVB grew through the lighter tier.

A bank for startups Event

Silicon Valley Bank was founded in 1983 to bank companies other lenders found too risky: startups backed by venture capital. Over four decades it became the bank for much of the US tech ecosystem, offering loans, deposits and services to founders and their investors, and later expanding to the UK, Israel, India and China.