First Republic Bank is on the edge of a precipice

The central svbconceit of most zombie flicks, like “28 Days Later”, a film set in an apocalyptic London, is that a terrible disease has spread. It has turned legions of healthy humans into dangerous monsters. These walking dead now stalk the land: from afar it can be hard to discern if they are living or not. A little more than 28 days elapsed between the failure of () and the publication of First Republic Bank’s first-quarter earnings on April 24th—45 to be exact—but the earnings made it clear that American banking has at least one .At the end of 2022 First Republic held $213bn in assets, of which about $167bn were in loans and $32bn in bonds. It was funded by $176bn in deposits, $7bn in short-term funding and $9bn in long-term funding. The bank also had $18bn in high-quality capital. By the end of the first quarter the firm had lost $102bn of its original deposits. This has been replaced by a vast amount of short-term borrowing, which climbed to $80bn by the end of the first quarter, and by $30bn of pity deposits from six big banks, which placed money with the institution to throw it a lifeline.