In the morning of May 11, 2019, a strange queue of worried customers stretched outside the Metro Bank branch in Harrow, a suburb north of London. A message circulated on WhatsApp warning of the risk of immediate bankruptcy of the bank: “Guys, if you have an account or a safe deposit box at Metro Bank, you need to empty them as soon as possible. »
The information was entirely false, but it could seem credible, the small British bank having effectively unscrewed on the stock market for a year. The panic was finally put to rest, with the share price still falling sharply on Monday morning when the financial markets reopened, before finally stabilizing.
The same year, Jens Weidmann, President of the Bundesbank, the German central bank, gave a speech in which he warned of the risks of a “digital banking panic”. A double effect is at work. On the one hand, social networks accelerate the dissemination of information, and misinformation. On the other hand, money transfers, which can be done with a simple click of a mobile phone application, can be extremely fast today.
Nearly four years later, this risk materialized with the fall of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 10. This first “Twitter-era banking panic”, as it has sometimes been dubbed, unfolded so quickly that it took everyone by surprise. SVB did indeed have a real problem: its deposits could, by definition, be withdrawn at any time, but its liquidity was largely locked in long-term bonds, the value of which had fallen sharply over the past year. And social networks and other messaging have snowballed.
Rules to change
The entrepreneur Alexander Torrenegra, based in California, told on Twitter the runaway of Thursday, March 9. At 9 a.m., on a group message box containing just over two hundred start-up creators, concerns about SVB appeared. An hour later, some of them were suggesting withdrawing their money. “10:50 a.m.: I read the messages during a bathroom break. I’m canceling all my appointments.” he continues.
Then begins a marathon to withdraw his personal money as well as that of two of his companies. Even in the age of the Internet, such an operation is not so simple: personally, he has no other bank account; the amounts that his companies can transfer at once are capped and subject to certain authorizations; but he manages during the day to get out his own money as well as that of one of the two companies.
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