# First Republic Bank **First Republic Bank** was a San Francisco–based bank specializing in high-touch private banking and jumbo mortgages for wealthy clients, which failed on **May 1, 2023** — the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history (after Washington Mutual in 2008) and the largest since the [[2008 Financial Crisis]]. It was closed by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, with the [[FDIC]] appointed receiver; its assets were immediately sold to **JPMorgan Chase**. First Republic's collapse was the slow-motion third act of the 2023 crisis. Like [[Silicon Valley Bank]], it had a large base of **uninsured deposits** (wealthy clients well above the $250,000 insurance cap) and a balance sheet stuffed with low-rate, long-duration assets — jumbo mortgages written cheaply during the zero-rate years that lost value when the [[Federal Reserve]] hiked rates. After SVB and [[Signature Bank]] failed in March, depositors fled; a $30 billion lifeline from eleven large banks bought only weeks. By May 1 it held about $229 billion in assets when regulators seized it. JPMorgan assumed roughly $92 billion in deposits, and the FDIC provided loss-share guarantees and $50 billion in financing — at an estimated $13 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund. For the KB, First Republic is the [[Too Big to Fail]] dynamic in microcosm — but with a twist that points the other way. Rather than a public bailout of the failing bank, the resolution **handed the largest U.S. bank, JPMorgan Chase, an even larger one**, with federal guarantees sweetening the deal. The 2023 crisis thus accelerated banking concentration: the policy response to a too-big-to-fail problem made the biggest bank bigger still, with the public backstop absorbing the downside. It completes the 2023 regional-failure cluster — [[Silicon Valley Bank]], [[Signature Bank]], First Republic — that the [[Financial System Timeline]] marks as the largest wave of bank failures since 2008. ## See Also - [[The Banking System]] - [[Too Big to Fail]] - [[Silicon Valley Bank]] - [[Signature Bank]] - [[Financial System Timeline]] - [[Financial System Hub]]