US banks bid to acquire collapsed First Republic, deal expected Sunday
The FDIC hopes to seal the arrangement by Saturday before markets open on Monday.
Large US banks, including JPMorgan and PNC Financial Services, are set to submit a bid to buy out failing First Republic Bank, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) hopes to seal over the weekend, sources familiar with the matter said.
The US banking system continues to raise concerns after shares of First Republic plummeted over 50% on Friday. The bank's first-quarter reports on Monday revealed that over $100 billion of deposits were withdrawn over customer fears.
The Fed aims to see the deal finalized before markets open on Monday, in an attempt to calm concerned investors before another bank crashes.
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The FDIC had set up to receive proposals from potential bidders earlier this week, and asked for interested parties to notify the agency by Friday at most, the sources said, adding that the FDIC desires to approve final offers by Sunday.
Some of the options currently considered by the FDIC are putting its hands on the bank or selling its assets to other financial firms.
The agency is expected to take the bank into receivership simultaneously with the sale process, sources said earlier. But the issue might change over the weekend given the uncertainty regarding the bid outcome.
In just the past few weeks, and right after the SVB collapse, First Republic lost 97 percent of the value of its shares.
A consortium of 11 US private banks, two of which are JPMorgan and PNC, injected $30 billion worth of capital in the bank in mid-March to stabilize its exposure caused by the flight of deposits.
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Action dilemma
So far, it is still unclear what steps the US government would take.
In normal cases, the Fed only covers depositors up to 250,000 in small and mid-sized banks.
But following the bank collapses last March, the Fed and FDIC decided to guarantee deposits that exceed the $250,000 mark in attempts to fight contagion fear across the banking sector.
However, former FDIC Chair Sheila Blair said the government "ill-advisedly created an expectation that for any future bank failures, uninsured deposits would be protected."
Nonetheless, if the government did not take this action this time, "I do worry that that's going to surprise people and could be disruptive," she added.
First Republic is the latest in a series of bank crashes the United States has been witnessing lately.
Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), New York's Signature Bank, and Silvergate Bank, which marked a historic failure in the US banking system, many have attributed the collapses to soaring interest rates.
In March, former Lehman Brothers executive Lawrence McDonald revealed that 50 more US bank collapses could be underway if the US government does not address structural issues.