On International Workers’ Day, the First Republic Bank became the second largest bank to fail in US history. The USD 233 billion institution was seized by the government and sold to banking behemoth JPMorgan Chase.
First Republic is the third bank to fail in the US since March, surpassing the spectacular failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 10. SVB’s depositors were bailed out by the US government to the tune of USD 151 billion. Up until May 1, SVB had been the second largest bank failure in the history of the country. Capitalists in the United States did not predict that this title would be usurped less than two months later.
Following SVB, Signature Bank, a New York-based institution with a large real estate lending business, also failed only two days later. Amid the banking crisis panic, First Republic Bank received a USD 30 billion lifeline from 11 of the largest banks in the country. This attempt to stave off First Republic’s failure would prove unsuccessful.
The total assets of the 2023 bank failures now surpass those of the bank failures of 2008, the first year of the Great Recession. The US Treasury Department has
— source peoplesdispatch.org | May 5, 2023