Was the SVB crash a one-off, or a warning sign?

By The Big Story

In today’s Big Story podcast, everyone who lived through 2008 as an adult flinched when Silicon Valley Bank failed last week. But was the bank’s crash a unique situation, or something that should make us question our own financial institutions?

William O’Connell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto whose research includes global management of financial crises and the regulation of cryptocurrency markets. He joins us to explain what went wrong at SVB, and its possible ripple effects
through the North American banking system.

“One bank starts to collapse, and then that has a knock-on effect on a different bank … and this tends to cascade quite quickly, and in a manner that has pretty serious effects on the real economy,” he said.

What makes Canadian banks different from banks like SVB? What can we learn about the future of the economy from this failure? And what do we need to watch for in the coming weeks and months?

You can subscribe to The Big Story podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google and Spotify.

You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.

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