Insights from Financial-World.org reveal U.S. consumers increasingly went to the web to search for answers on how to keep their own savings safe after two recent bank failures.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) -- the lender to Silicon Valley startups, whose parent is SVB Financial Group -- failed on March 10, in the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual went under in 2008.
Google Trends data reveals that online searches for the query "Is my money safe?" rose 43% as news broke that NYC-based Signature Bank had to close as a result of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse on Friday.
The New York Department of Financial Services took over Signature Bank on Sunday and gave control to the FDIC, the federal agency that insures bank deposits, until the bank can be sold.
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Crypto bank Silvergate collapsed just days earlier. This was the bank that most big crypto firms worked with, because traditional banks did not want to do business with them.
Last night, searches for “What happened to SVB” rose 67% as the news broke, four days after the original spike for the query in searches, as well as increasing searches for “Why banks fail,” which rose nearly 90%.
What happened to SVB? The closure stems from the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds in the last couple of years by SVB using the deposits of its customers, a common practice in the banking sector that sometimes can lead to disastrous consequences, according to the report.
“These investments are typically safe, but their value fell because they paid lower interest rates than what a comparable bond would pay if issued in today's higher interest rate environment,” according to the report. “The bank’s clients, who were mainly start-ups and tech-related businesses, began accessing funds, which inevitably led to the bank having to start selling its own assets to meet customer withdrawal requests.”
The report states that the bank tried to raise additional capital through outside investors,but was unable to find them, causing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to take over the institution and eventually close it down.