When Banks Blow Up: What The Numbers Actually Show

U.S. banks have collapsed 565 times since 2000—that’s nearly 25/year on average. Sounds scary, but here’s the plot twist: most years it’s basically crickets.

The SVB + Signature Bank back-to-back in March 2023? That’s the weird part, not the normal part.

The Timeline That Matters

2001-2007: Boring era, ~3.5 failures/year

2008-2012: Apocalypse, 93/year average (82% of all failures since 2000 happened here)

2013-2022: Chill zone, sometimes zero failures/year. We had TWO full years—2021 and 2022—with literally no bank collapses.

Then SVB died on March 10, 2023, ending a 867-day streak of zero failures. That was the second-longest dry spell since 1933. Nobody was ready.

Why Everyone Freaked Out

SVB wasn’t some random regional credit union. It was the 16th largest bank in America with $209 billion in assets—roughly 2,000x bigger than the last bank that failed before it (Almena State Bank in 2020, which had $69M).

It’s literally the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. Washington Mutual took that crown in 2008 with $307B.

Signature Bank followed 2 days later (March 13). That’s the third-largest failure ever. Both mega-collapses in one week. Of course people panicked.

The Weird Stuff

• 95% of bank failures happen on Fridays for a reason: regulators get the weekend to clean up the mess before Monday money panic. Signature failing on a Sunday? Never happened before.
• Bank failures cluster in Q-starts: January, April, July, October spike
• Geography matters: California (42 failures), Georgia, and Florida lead the list. New York? Only 6 since 2000, despite being the banking capital.

Bottom line: Two mega-banks dying back-to-back was genuinely rare. But 2 failures in a year? Still way below the 2008-2012 average of 93/year. The panic was justified by size, not by frequency.