Sam Woods’s 20th wedding anniversary was more eventful than he’d expected. The boss of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) had headed to Devon for a celebratory weekend with his wife. But rather than settling in for dinner that evening, Woods had to book an extra hotel room to use as a makeshift crisis centre after US lender Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) suddenly collapsed.
Round-the-clock calls with ministers and City executives followed, but the hours bore fruit. At 7am on Monday it was announced that HSBC would come to the rescue, paying £1 for SVB’s UK operations and averting a cash crunch that could have paralysed Britain’s startup sector.
