« The famous ‘it’s legal to help rich people, but illegal to help poor people’ doctrine, » one activist wrote on social media.
The federal government’s response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has prompted some online to compare the situation to the student loan debt crisis.
SVB, a regional bank based in California’s Silicon Valley tech corridor, collapsed on Friday after its customers initiated a run on their deposits. Worth over $200 billion as of last year, it was the 16th biggest bank in the country and ended up becoming the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history.
In the aftermath of SVB’s failure, roughly $150 billion in deposits were left uninsured. On Sunday, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) jointly announced that the U.S. government would be backing deposits past the federally insured ceiling of $250,000 and that the bank’s senior management would be removed.
