John Lothian: Week in Review February 17th-21st, 2025

Two years ago, the US was on the brink of its most serious set of bank failures since the financial storm of 2008. A clutch of regional banks, some the size of Europe’s larger lenders, hit the skids, including Silicon Valley Bank, whose demise came close to sparking a full-blown crisis. SVB’s crash had several immediate causes. Its bond holdings were crumbling in value as US interest rates pushed higher. With just a few taps on an app, the bank’s spooked and interconnected tech customer base yanked out deposits at an unsustainable pace, leaving multimillionaires crying out for federal assistance. The swift crisis-cauterising skills regulators forged in the fire of 2008 helped avert a broader financial contagion. The grim episode should loom large in the minds of US President Donald Trump’s trigger-happy, anti-regulation financial sheriffs. After all, the US Federal Reserve identified the lighter supervisory burden placed on smaller banks like SVB in his first term in 2018 as a key ingredient in its failure.

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Vanguard is one of the world's largest investment management companies and the largest mutual-fund company in the U.S.[1]

It is one of the "Big Three" asset management firms, along with BlackRock and State Street.[2] [3] On February 18, 2025, Vanguard became the biggest exchange-traded fund issuer after it beat both BlackRock's iShares and State Street's SPY ETFs.

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