Friday briefing: How to understand Credit Suisse, Silicon Valley Bank and fears of a new crisis

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, New York, USA, on 16 March 2023. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Good morning. If keeping the budget, unnerving airborne collisions, and the travails of Gary Lineker straight in your head feels like more than enough for a week, another story has been bubbling away that may be more consequential than any of them: the start of what some fear could be a global, slow-rolling banking crisis.

First, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the US caused jitters in markets that spread across the world. SVB was supposed to be a regional player whose failure would be unlikely to have profound ramifications – but then a longstanding set of problems at Credit Suisse, a far more consequential institution, turned into an emergency. Its shares dropped 24.5% in a day, and £75bn was wiped off the FTSE 100. Premature though it might have been, people started saying “2008”, which is basically Voldemort for financial markets.