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Comment by carstenhag | Hacker News Reader

And SVB means Silicon Valley Bank, which was shut down by a regulatory body some days ago: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-investors-and...

(seriously HN, we non-US people have never heard of your terms)

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I think it is not a US-specific thing, I live in the US and had never heard of SVB until the recent volley of articles here.

It was SV-specific, but now it's US-specific and beyond!

Same here but SVB was the 18th largest bank in the US.

Can you name the 16th and 17th largest banks?

Most of us can think of a few big ones, and a handful of local ones.

Test your knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks_in_the_U... I might have known 50% of the top 20 maximum.

I know 7 from list 1..10 and 2 from list 11..20

When I saw that they were insolvent, I looked up the bank rankings and saw their position. Out of the top 20, I am familiar with probably 14-15.

You think most people don’t know who American Express (17th) are?

Citizens Financial Group (16th) is also quite large but I would be shocked if someone didn’t know of Amex rather than did.

Most know of them, but would have absolutely no idea how large they are.

Off the top of my head, I guess the largest are:

* JPMorgan

* Goldman

* Wells Fargo

* BoA

I’m not surprised to see that American Express is a large bank, but if you’d asked me to produce a list of large banks, I wouldn’t have included any credit card companies.

Of course, a credit card company having a bank attached is not very weird at all. I mean a bank sprouted out of GE that one time, which seems much less on-mission.

Most of the top 20 are household names. Many in the top 50 as well. However, a few are top ranked because they have strong regional presence in tech/finance capitals and Silicon Valley is of course one of them.

Eight of the current HN headlines are about SVB, four of which spell out Silicon Valley bank. Shouldn't be too hard to put it together.

> some days ago

some hours ago

Sounds like you should get up to date on US terms then, since they’re what matter.

Tissemand.

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