IANAL, but a finance guy. Depositing money is lending money. It's presented like some special thing, but at the end of the day you no longer have your dollar,

IANAL, but a finance guy. Depositing money is lending money. It's presented like some special thing, but at the end of the day you no longer have your dollar, you have an IOU for a dollar issued by the bank. Yes, you have a deal with the bank that they will give you your money back whenever you want. Now normally there's no point in mincing words, you have 50K at the bank, whatever. But if the bank fails, you still don't have the money in your hands, you are still owed it. What normally happens when a business can't pay back its debts is there's a bankruptcy procedure and everything is frozen until a bankruptcy lawyer parachutes in to handle things. Now keep in mind they are bankrupt because they don't have a way to pay back everyone, so there are laws about how your IOUs are settled. This is called a haircut, because chances are the creditors will not get back the full amounts they're owed. (In rare cases a bankrupt business somehow manages to sell its assets for more than the liabilities.) If it's a bank, there's insurance schemes in various countries to help out the depositors. But the deal is basically that, you are lending money to the bank, and they are lending to other people eg mortgages, business loans, overdrafts, etc. Getting back to your question, there's not a whole lot of meat on the "what does the law say" bone. SVB is dead, carcass is divided up between the creditors.