A Brink’s armored truck sits in front of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on March 10. Regulators close the bank and say all deposits are backstopped.
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A Brink’s armored truck sits in front of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on March 10. Regulators close the bank and say all deposits are backstopped.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
President Biden speaks Monday morning about the banking crisis that prompted federal regulators to take extraordinary measures to close two banks and guarantee all deposits there.
“I will make remarks about how we will maintain a resilient banking system to protect our historic economic recovery,” Biden said as the U.S. financial system absorbed the second-largest bank failure in its history, at Silicon Valley Bank.
Biden’s brief remarks from the White House began at 9 ET, just 30 minutes before the New York Stock Exchange opened.
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His speech comes as regulators strive to bolster confidence in the banking system and prevent runs like the one that sparked the spectacular collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Again and again in recent days, officials and experts have used the word “contagion” to describe the danger of the unrest spreading to multiple institutions.
In an effort to contain the crisis, the Biden administration announced Sunday that customers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank would have full access to their deposits even if their account totals were above the maximum $250,000 covered by federal insurance.
The crisis poses both economic and political risks as the Biden administration balances the twin goals of mitigating spillovers from bank failures while avoiding the political view of giving a full bailout to Silicon Valley Bank, which caters to tech firms and venture capitalists.
The president said Sunday he was directing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard to coordinate regulators’ response to the banking crisis. The solution they reached, he said, “protects workers, small businesses, taxpayers and our financial system.”