“First Republic Seized, Sold to JPMorgan,” reads the headline on page A1 of May 2’s Wall Street Journal. First Republic’s collapse—the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, according to the story’s authors, Rachel Louise Ensign and Ben Eisen—quickly lost half of its deposits ($100 billion) in the wake of the unraveling of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March.
JPMorgan Chase is by far the largest American bank, booking about $2.3 trillion in deposits, more than 10 percent of the national total (see “Deal Fuels Concern over Size of Banks,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2023, p. A1). Bank of America
