My 2 cents: Banks are required by Bale III rules to guarantee the money they lend with a proportional amount in proper assets. Those assets are mostly US treas

My 2 cents: Banks are required by Bale III rules to guarantee the money they lend with a proportional amount in proper assets. Those assets are mostly US treasury bonds (for US banks; EU bonds for EU banks, etc). Treasury bonds from the past few years come with very low interest rates or even zero, or negative ones. As the Fed's rates (and other central bank's rates) have been climbing rapidly in the past few months, new bonds come with quite hefty interest rates. Therefore old bonds with near-zero rates cratered on the second-hand market. And who owns tens of thousands of billion dollars in these bonds? The banks... So each and every bank will try to realise its bonds to pay back the deposits that people hit by SVB's failure are trying to get their hands on, will see its actual value crater, with the compounding effect that an even larger amount of free-falling bonds will flush the second-hand market... So the whole bond market may crater, and all the banks with it, and the whole financial system. Every central banker around the world is currently sweating out a way out of it, if there's any (maybe the cat is out of the bag already). Have a good day :)