Continuing our season on Silicon Valley Bank, this week Neeraj and Nick are taking a closer look at the history of the second biggest bank to ever fail in the USA, from its founding by two Bank of America managers through to its untimely demise. The events at SVB remain a hot topic, with medium sized banks encouraging the government to shore up depositor confidence and popular commentators such as Balaji predicting wider contagion.

Our hosts expand on the data they plan on using and the questions it might answer. At the recommendation of ChatGPT (GPT-4!), Nick has started to dig into macro-economic data available in the Federal Reserve Economic Data database (FRED). Neeraj has been focussing on SVB balance sheets over the years. More is on the way, but check out our datalore links for initial analysis.

Balaji Tweet

FRED website

FDIC: Industry Analysis - Bank Data & Statistics

Datalore report with macroeconomic indicator plots

Github copy of Jupyter Notebook with macroeconomic indicators

Bank Term Funding Program (pdf)

Annual reports from SVB

The Cloudcast special episode on SVB

List of largest bank failures in the United States - Wikipedia

Thumbnail DALL·E prompt: "A flock of geese trying to get their money back from a bank, cartoon style"

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