A NEWFANGLED BANK RUN — Treasury Department officials briefed lawmakers last night on the race to contain fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which marked the largest U.S. bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. Congressional leadership and rank-and-file members were on the Sunday night call, which discussed the emergency measures federal entities had decided to take to stem a contagion of bank collapses. The plan: The Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and FDIC made a special determination that failing to back customer deposits at both SVB and Signature Bank risked feeding out and harming the broader financial system. The resulting outcome is that all the deposits of both collapsed banks will be guaranteed by the FDIC, which has a dedicated fund — financed with fees paid by banks — for this purpose. “Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg said last night. The promise: The three agencies vowed that Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors would have access to all their money on Monday. And, politically key, that taxpayers would not be saddled with the costs. (Though WaPo’s Tony Romm is correct that the phrase “no cost to taxpayers” will likely be under a microscope in the coming days.) Official Washington was gripped all weekend by discussion of "bailouts," another flashback to the 2008 collapse and the massive bank bailout approved by Congress in the final months of the George W. Bush administration. The message from all three agencies and the White House: this is not 2008. “Right decision,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) tweeted in response to the news. “I have confidence in our financial regulators and the protections already in place to ensure the safety and soundness of our financial system,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee. (He also called SVB’s collapse the “the first Twitter fueled bank run.”) Romney was on the briefing call, but some of his fellow Senate Republicans, including those on the Senate Banking panel, claim they were not invited. The briefing was hastily planned and two people familiar with the call said the administration acknowledged at one point that they did not get invites out to everyone who should have been included. That is not a slight that will be smoothed over quickly. Especially as some Republicans dish out criticism more broadly for how the crisis was handled. “Building a culture of government intervention does nothing to stop future institutions from relying on the government to swoop in after taking excessive risks,” said South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott, a member of the Banking Committee, in a statement. “I remain committed to bringing accountability and answers to the American people, both from the banks and our regulators. We deserve to know what exactly happened and why.” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) has called for the House Financial Services Committee to investigate the banks’ collapse and how the 2018 legislation to loosen Dodd-Frank regulations “contributed to SVB’s risky behavior and jeopardized financial stability for far too many.” That is of course unlikely to happen under GOP control. Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was on the board of now-collapsed Signature Bank at the time the rollback of his signature 2010 banking legislation was under consideration. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) weighed in with an Op-Ed this morning in The New York Times | 
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