Commentary
In the most recent failure in the banking sector, earlier this week First Republic Bank collapsed, was placed into Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) receivership, and had most of its assets sold to JPMorgan Chase. With some $232 billion of assets, this marked the second-largest U.S. bank failure ever, only surpassed by Washington Mutual in the early days of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Notably, three of the four largest U.S. bank failures of all time—First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank—have occurred within the last 60 days.
These extraordinary events are not just shocking but alarming, in the sense of the word that they should be raising alarm bells for all of us. Yet government and corporate leaders, along with much of mainstream media, are taking great pains to say that the banking system is stable and that there is nothing much to worry about….