I just saw recent footage of 40-50 people standing in line outside an SVB branch waiting for service (withdrawals most likely).
I would surmise that the news spread fast among the tech demographic the bank services and the run is really bad.
And in this case, tech savy individuals are willing to send $XXM in 6 clicks, 3min after getting a slack message. That's a pretty quick kind of run relative to old-school 'stand in line for your personal life savings' kind of run.
It doesn't really work this way. It takes time to set up acquisitions, even by the FDIC, and the "FDIC stormtroopers sell bank overnight" is apocryphal. They do weeks of legwork leading up to the actual handover of the bank.
We don't know the timeline here, but speculating that "it must be bad" because things didn't happen overnight isn't really responsible.
During 2008 crisis it worked exactly as described. Most failures resulted in the failing bank’s acquisition being decided before the seizure happened. The way this happened is very rare
I think those actions worked out of hours because the bank's bosses let the FDIC know they were insolvent before a run happened, though? This time the bosses thought they could hold on.
If so, then the difference doesn't imply much about the banks asset level, just the idiocy of its bosses.
I mean...I think we're describing the same thing? So sure, it worked "exactly as described", but I think most folks on HN have no idea what "as described" means, in this context.
A lot of folks (like the top of thread) want to suggest that because it didn't play out like the 60 minutes story, it must mean something significant. That story barely touched on the weeks of leg-work the FDIC did for that particular bank, for example. If you weren't paying close attention, you'd miss it.
Even WAMU (a huge FDIC action) was done after banking hours closed on the west coast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Mutual