Crypto Panic at Silvergate Spawns a New Breed of Bank Run
By Yueqi Yang and Hannah Levitt
When US banks fell like dominoes during the Great Depression, the cause was often a classic run: Depositors withdrew cash en masse amid fears that lenders were amassing huge losses on bad loans and investments. The cryptocurrency era just put a new twist on that — with the depositors running into trouble first….“This is unprecedented, it’s very unusual,” said Karen Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a Washington-based research firm. “Because they were so dependent on crypto funding, they were vulnerable for a run. Given the crypto market has been unstable, they got it.” Bank regulators, she said, will take a closer look at such situations.