DP18107 From the Saving Glut to Financial Instability: Evidence from the Silicon Valley Bank Failure

• Guillaume Vuillemey
23 Apr 2023

I show that saving gluts spur financial instability. In the US, banks locally exposed to its root causes -- the rise in household wealth inequality and higher savings by intangible-intensive firms -- massively increased deposits since 2000, leading to an unprecedented deposit-to-GDP ratio and to a large increase in uninsured deposits. To causally identify an impact of the saving glut on financial instability, I rely on the unexpected failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023: other US banks with higher local exposure to either wealth inequality or intangible-intensive firms experienced significantly larger drops in stock prices.