Taking to Twitter on March 17, investor and renowned short-seller Bill Ackman said Bank of America has plans to step in and acquire distressed U.S. Signature Bank, one of the banks that went into forced receivership after a crisis in the U.S. banking sector last week.
Back of America to Signature’s rescue?
I am hearing that @BankofAmerica is going to buy Signature Bank on Monday. Unless and until we can protect uninsured deposits, the cost of capital is going to rise for smaller banks pushing them to merge or be acquired by the SIBs. I don’t think this is good for America.
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) March 17, 2023
On March 15, Reuters reported that the FDIC told potential bidders of Signature they must “give up” crypto aspects of the business.
However, a CoinDesk report from March 17 denied that to be true.
On March 17, Ackman proclaimed that Signature will soon find itself in the hands of Bank of America, one of the world’s leading financial institutions, worth an estimated $222 billion.
In response to earlier reports where Barney Frank, a board member of Signature Bank and a co-sponsor of the Dodd-Frank Act during his tenure in Congress, suggested that the regulator’s actions might have been politically motivated by anti-crypto sentiment, a spokesperson from both the New York Regulator and FDIC more recently stated that the regulator’s loss of confidence in Signature bank’s leadership stemmed from a recent bank run and the lack of “reliable” information, not any specific connection to crypto.
