Implosion.

The bank of start-ups shuts down.

1. Bloomberg:

Investors and depositors tried to pull $42 billion from Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday in one of the biggest US bank runs in more than a decade, according to a Friday regulatory filing. 

At the close of business on March 9, the bank had a negative cash balance of $958 million, according to an order taking possession of the bank filed Friday by California’s bank regulator, the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

The order shines light on the scale of the bank run faced by the lender, which was placed into Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. receivership by the state regulator. The scale of attempted withdrawals was so large that the bank ran out of cash and ways to get it.

When the Federal Reserve sent its cash letter — a list of checks and other transactions for the bank to process - to SVB, it failed to pull together enough currency to meet it, according to the California regulator. (Sources: bloomberg.com, dfpi.ca.gov)

---

2. Erin Griffith:

The implosion (of SVB) rattled a start-up industry already on edge. Hurt by rising interest rates and an economic slowdown over the past year, start-up funding — which had been supercharged by low interest rates for years — has shriveled, resulting in mass layoffs at many young companies, cost-cutting and slashed valuations. Investments in U.S. start-ups dropped 31 percent last year to $238 billion, according to PitchBook.

On top of that, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank was especially troubling because it was the self-described “financial partner of the innovation economy.” The bank, founded in 1983 and based in Santa Clara, Calif., was deeply entangled in the tech ecosystem, providing banking services to nearly half of all venture-backed technology and life-science companies in the United States, according to its website.