U.S. Banking System Sound: Yellen

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen offered firm, upbeat reassurances to rattled bank depositors and investors as US financial institutions and European agencies ordered rescue efforts following the second-largest bank collapse in US history.

Photo Insert: Yellen defended the government’s argument that taxpayers will not end up paying the cost of protecting uninsured money at Silicon Valley and Signature.

Yellen told senators at a Capitol hearing that the US banking system “remains sound” and Americans “can feel confident” about the safety of their deposits. By the time her testimony was over, another major institution, First Republic Bank, received an emergency infusion of $30 billion in deposits from 11 banks, according to Treasury, NBC News and the New York Times reported.

And in Europe hours earlier, Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest lender, got a promise from the Swiss central bank of a loan of up to 50 billion francs ($54 billion).

Republican senators laid a big part of the blame for the problems on Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration.

Yellen resisted that scenario, though she said “we certainly need to analyze carefully what happened to trigger these bank failures and examine our rules and supervision” to prevent them from happening again.

She defended the government’s argument that taxpayers will not end up paying the cost of protecting uninsured money at Silicon Valley and Signature.

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