South Africans watching the bank crises that have unfolded in the US and Europe will be doing so through the lens of our own history of bank failures over the past couple of decades.

That history is one of the reasons SA banks simply aren’t vulnerable in the way US regional banks such as Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) were before they collapsed, triggering loss of confidence across the sector. Nor are their regulators likely to let them slide as far as Credit Suisse did before it faced a run on deposits that prompted the Swiss authorities to force a taxpayer-backed takeover by rival UBS. ..

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