Local Financial Advisor Discusses Failure of Banks

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023 -- 9:00 AM

(Mike Leischner, WSAU) -A local financial advisor says there's no reason to panic after the failure of Silicone Valley Bank.

According to Mike Leischner with WSAU, Meryl Kelch says the issues that plagued the recently-shuttered institution aren't issues around here. "All the banks around here, we do weird stuff. We make conservative loans to houses that actually exist. Conservatively value the businesses that actually make money. And the bankers live here."

He says there is still a lot to unpack with what went wrong with the bank, but the bottom line is they made some bad decisions and simply ran out of cash. "Somebody announced online that they're having a hard time, so people said, 'hey, we want to get our cash out,' there's a run on cash, they ran out of cash, and they went insolvent just like that. It was done."

Kelch says many of the publicly-traded banks did see their stock prices drop because of the incident, which he blames on "guilt by association," but adds many people won't feel that impact outside of the usual up-and-down of a 401K or other investment account.

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