Cooking The Books

Each week BusinessDesk and the NZ Herald’s Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it’s a banking expert on how safe savings are in New Zealand and Australia. Hosted by Frances Cook. A bank collapse is the stuff of nightmares, with the potential to wipe out hard-earned savings, or a business’s ability to pay staff.This nightmare has become reality in the US, with a run on Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, that led to the bank collapsing. It’s a big deal because SVB is, or was, the 16th largest bank in the USA. It’s the second biggest to fail since Washington Mutual’s collapse during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.For context, it’s a bigger bank than ANZ here in New Zealand, which is our biggest bank. SVB had assets of US$209b, while ANZ NZ has assets of US$120b (NZ$195.6b).It’s been followed by a couple of other worrying developments. Credit Suisse was Switzerland’s second largest bank – but it’s being bought out in an emergency rescue deal by the country’s first biggest bank, UBS. UB