Bob Medearis, Roger Smith, and Bill Biggerstaff founded Silicon Valley Bank in 1983. Smith ran the Bank as a startup business in the first decade. Subsequent CEO John Dean restructured the Bank and Ken Wilcox redirected the Bank with a central focus on exclusively serving the tech community. Greg Becker accelerated the Bank, connecting its past to the future. The bank’s assets grew at a fast pace during the pandemic. Becker tripled the size of the bank between 2019 and 2022.

Financial crises have occurred repeatedly throughout history. This chapter starts by exploring the different types of crises: banking crises, sovereign debt crises, and currency crises. A banking crisis indicates that a significant part of a country’s banking sector has become insolvent after heavy investment losses, banking panics, or both. A sovereign debt crisis/default occurs when a government fails to meet interest or principal payments on its debt obligations. Finally, a currency crisis causes the value of a country’s currency to fall precipitously. The chapter provides facts and figures about financial crises, and discusses some theoretical models. A first set of models is related to the liability side of banks. Since banks use short-term deposits to finance long-term loans, they are vulnerable to massive withdrawals cumulating in a banking run. A second set of models looks at the asset side of banks. Shocks to fundamentals (e.g. a collapse in real estate prices or increased bankruptcies in the non-financial sector) can upset the business cycle, resulting in deteriorating asset quality that can trigger further banking problems.