Washington (CNN) Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday ruled out a federal bailout for Silicon Valley Bank after its spectacular collapse last week.
“Let me be clear that during the financial crisis there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out, and we’re certainly not looking,” Yellen told CBS News when asked if there will be a bailout. “And the reforms that have been put in place mean we’re not going to do that again.”
Also Sunday, Shalanda Young, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, emphasized in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “State of the Union” that the U.S. banking system overall was “more resilient” now.
“It’s on a better footing than it was before the (2008) financial crisis. That’s largely because of the reforms that are in place,” Young said of “State of the Union.”
Yellen said she has been hearing from depositors throughout the weekend, many of whom are “small businesses” employing thousands of people. “I have been working throughout the weekend with our banking regulators to design appropriate policies to address this situation,” the finance minister said, declining to provide further details.
SVB collapsed on Friday morning after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history.
California regulators shut down the tech lender and placed it under the control of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC acts as a receiver, which typically means it will liquidate the bank’s assets to pay back its customers, including depositors and creditors.
Despite initial panic on Wall Street over the run of SVB, which sent its shares cratering, analysts said the bank’s collapse is unlikely to trigger the kind of domino effect that gripped the banking industry during the financial crisis.
But the collapse has prompted a bailout debate in Washington as lawmakers assess the fallout.
The Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Collins in a separate interview on “State of the Union” that she does not support a bailout “at this time,” but cautioned, “It’s still very early.”
“We cannot keep bailing out private companies because there are no consequences for their actions. People, when they make mistakes or break the law, must be held accountable in this country,” she said.
Although relatively unknown outside of Silicon Valley, SVB was among the top 20 U.S. commercial banks with $209 billion in total assets at the end of last year, according to the FDIC. It is the largest lender to fail since Washington Mutual collapsed in 2008.
CNN’s Allison Morrow and Matt Egan contributed to this report.