Menendez says he’s not ready to offer Silicon Valley Bank a bailout ‘by any stretch of the imagination’

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) on Sunday said he’s not ready for the federal government to offer Silicon Valley Bank a bailout after its collapse shook the tech sector last week.

“I’m not ready to offer them a bailout by any stretch of the imagination. We have to see exactly everything that is pertinent to the specific set of circumstances and to see what else is out there – if anything else is out there – that we should be thinking about,” Menendez said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The broader question will be, ‘Should the regulators have been on the ball to ensure that this bank could not have had this risk? And what else is out there, in this regard?’ As someone who sat in 2008 in the banking committee when we met with that last crisis, the goal is to try to avoid a crisis, not to deal with it,” the senator said.

The bank’s shutdown on Friday constituted the second-largest bank collapse in U.S. history, after the 2008 financial crisis. Executives said they’d move to raise more than a billion dollars in capital, prompting customers to make a bank run.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) also said on the Sunday show circuit that she doesn’t support a bailout, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen essentially ruled it out.

“Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out … and the reforms that have been put in place means that we’re not going to do that again,” Yellen said in an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

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