Sometimes journalism moves the collective understanding of an issue forward by leaps and bounds. Sometimes it advances our knowledge just inches. Sometimes we’re gaining mere millimetres. This post is concerned with millimetres.
Silicon Valley Bank was a bank until earlier this year it died. A big part of the story of its death was the miraculous resurrection of the uninsured deposits held at the institution by its treasury-management-deficient customers.
In March, after SVB’s collapse, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, Martin Gruenberg, gave Congress some outline figures about SVB’s largest customers: “The ten largest deposit accounts at SVB held $13.3 billion, in the aggregate.”
Deposits at US banks are federally insured only up to $250,000, so the sums deposited by SVB’s ten largest customers underlined the concentrated losses that may have been felt if the US government had not taken action to make all of SVB’s depositors whole.
So, let’s advance our knowledge by a millimetre or two. FT Alphaville obtained from the FDIC, through a Freedom of Information Act request, the following anonymised breakdown of the amounts deposited by SVB’s top ten customers:
The document appears to indicate that Circle, the stablecoin issuer, was the biggest depositor at SVB. Circle has previously disclosed that it held $3.3bn of its stablecoin reserves with the bank at the time of SVB’s collapse.
Please send any tips on the other nine to [email protected]
This post was originally published on Financial Times
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