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(NEW YORK) — In the wake of last year’s collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the collapse this week of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — representing the second and third largest bank failures in U.S. history — has renewed lingering questions about what role cryptocurrency is playing in financial sector failures.

Signature Bank, which is known for dealing in cryptocurrency, came under fire last year during the collapse of FTX and crypto hedge fund Alameda Research. At Silicon Valley Bank, which is known for serving the tech and startup industries since its founding 40 years ago, the withdrawal of large cryptocurrency deposits added to the fear fueling the bank run that ended in the bank’s collapse Friday.

However, experts told ABC News that cryptocurrency did not play a leading role in the banks’ failures — although the collapses will have ramifications in the cryptocurrency sector.

“I don’t think crypto has much of a role,” said David Yermack, professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “Crypto is more or less a bystander in all of this, just like all the other companies who had deposited money.”

Yermack, who teaches a course on cryptocurrency and blockchains, said that while the situation remains fluid, two main factors appear to have contributed to the failures: The banks that failed were too concentrated in one industry, and the deregulation of banking over the last five or six years has weakened regulations.

“In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, [the concentration] would be the West Coast technology industry,” Yermack told ABC News. “And if you’ve got a group of customers who can’t pay back their loans, and they’re all correlated with each other, suddenly they all can’t pay you back together — that makes those loans a lot less valuable.”

Boston College law professor Patricia McCoy said the bank’s collapse was hastened by its large holdings of the cryptocurrency USDC, which is managed by the financial technology company Circle Internet Financial.

“At Silicon Valley Bank, really, the only role that the crypto industry played was this big deposit by Circle, which was very prone to run risk,” McCoy said. “When Circle became nervous that Silicon Valley Bank was in trouble, its natural response would be to immediately withdraw that entire very large deposit.”

“Silicon Valley Bank did not have the money — the cash — to pay all the withdrawal requests,” said McCoy. “So, the fact that Circle had such a large deposit, and it was a type of client that was prone to panic, intensified the bank run at Silicon Valley Bank.”

On the recent deregulation of banking, Yermack pointed to the banks’ investment of large amounts of capital into Treasury bonds, which are typically very safe. However, said Yermack, “because interest rates changed a lot in the last year or so, those bonds lost value — and under the accounting rules, the banks could still count them at 100 cents on the dollar.”

Simply put, Yermack said, the banks did not have to account for the depreciation in the value of the bonds, which made them look much safer than they really were.

“This gets right to the heart of the issue about how banks are supervised and regulated — that they really should have had to write those bonds down to value in real time, and make the problems more apparent much earlier,” he said.

“As somebody who deals with financial data every day, I think everything should be marked to market value,” said Yermack. “And to the extent it’s not, you run the risk of misleading people, and it seems in this case it was the banking regulators who were misled, and they just said, ‘Oh, those are government bonds. Those are the safest assets.'”

“But government bonds can lose value just like anything else,” Yermack said. “And I think … the regulators were sort of caught off guard and unawares by this.”

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(NEW YORK) — Bank stocks in the U.S. and Europe tumbled on Wednesday as the global financial system continued to reckon with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, the largest bank failure since 2008.

Shares of Credit Suisse fell more than 26% in early trading after a top backer said he would not be able to provide any more cash to support the Swiss bank.

The pressure on the banking industry appeared to strain some of the largest U.S. banks, too.

Citi fell nearly 5% on Wednesday morning while J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo each dropped nearly 4%.

The downward trend hammered the major stock indexes. The Dow Industrial Average fell more than 500 points, which amounts to a 1.3% decline; the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each fell about 1.5%.

The banking sector’s struggles mark the latest sign of fallout from the fall on Friday of Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th-largest bank in the U.S. Two days later, Signature Bank, the nation’s 29th-largest bank, closed its doors, suggesting the financial panic had spread.

Many bank stocks plummeted at the outset of this week but rallied on Tuesday, regaining much of their losses. The broad decline in early trading on Wednesday renewed fears of damage to the wider financial system.

The turn downward follows news on Tuesday that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing the fall of Silicon Valley Bank.

The Federal Reserve Board, the governing body of the Fed, announced a day earlier that it would launch a review of the “supervision and regulation of Silicon Valley Bank, in light of its failure.”

The second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history triggered a major government intervention to protect the financial system.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protects the stability of the financial system, took over Silicon Valley Bank on Friday in an effort to protect depositors.

Fearing a wider spread of the crisis after the collapse of Signature Bank, the FDIC, the Treasury Department and the Fed took further action on Sunday, telling depositors in both fallen banks that the FDIC would protect all of their funds, including those that exceed its $250,000 limit.

Later that day, the Fed announced an emergency lending program to cover the deposits at issue and restore wider confidence in the financial system.

Still, the worldwide fallout in the banking sector appears ongoing.

France’s two largest international banks, Societe Generale SA and BNP Paribas SA, fell more than 10% on Wednesday. Deutsche Bank AG, a top German lender, plummeted 8%.

Some financial institutions were spared, however. Schwab, the eighth-largest U.S. bank, ticked up almost 3%.

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(NEW YORK) — The closures of two of the nation’s largest banks over the past week have put many consumers on edge.

Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th largest bank, struggled as the sharp rise in interest rates led to a decline in the value of the bank’s Treasuries and mortgage bonds. When the bank’s value dropped, its customers, who are mostly in the tech industry, pulled their money from the institution in a so-called bank run that forced Silicon Valley Bank to close for good.

Days later, New York-based Signature Bank, the 29th-largest bank in the U.S., was ordered to close.

After the banks’ closures, even people who didn’t have money invested in Silicon Valley Bank or Signature Bank were left wondering what it might mean for them and their money.

ABC News’ Good Morning America spoke with financial expert Farnoosh Torabi, host of the “So Money” podcast, to break down what consumers need to know.

Are other banks still safe to keep money in?

Yes, according to Torabi.

“Silicon Valley Bank is making the news because it is an anomaly. It is an anomaly event in the financial world,” Torabi said. “It’s our human nature to see events like these and think this is what happens all of the time, or this is going to happen tomorrow at my bank, but it’s really important to put this in the perspective of history. Very few banks actually go completely out of business.”

The banks’ closings have prompted some people on social media to post about taking their money out of banks and storing it at home, which Torabi said would be one of the worst decisions to make at this moment.

“I can assure you that that is a not safe thing to do,” she said. “It is far worse to put your money at home, in a lockbox, under your mattress than at a bank in the United States.”

What do I need to ask my bank to make sure it is secure?

The one step Torabi says every person should take is to make sure their bank has a partnership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, better known as the FDIC.

The FDIC is an independent government agency tasked with keeping the nation’s banking system running.

Consumers can go to the FDIC website to see if their bank is insured, or ask their bank directly.

Torabi said it’s more important than ever, given the number of tech-driven, digital banks on the market, to know who is behind the bank and whether or not they are FDIC-insured.

“There are more choices as consumers, so we have to do our due diligence,” she said. “It’s very important that you do your homework, your background check, on that bank.”

What does FDIC insurance do?

If a bank is FDIC-insured, its depositors are guaranteed protection of up to $250,000 in funds for each different type of account held.

In other words, if a customer has $200,000 in checking and savings accounts at an FDIC-insured bank and that bank goes under, the FDIC will step in and pay the customer $200,000 so they do not lose the money.

Torabi said the FDIC website is, again, a great resource for people to figure out how their accounts are insured and up to what limit. In some cases, for example, a couple that has both individual and joint accounts at one bank may be insured past the $250,000 limit.

In extreme, larger cases, as with Silicon Valley Bank, the FDIC will also step in to cover beyond the $250,000 limit.

The FDIC, the Treasury Department and the Fed have told depositors in Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank that the FDIC would protect all of their funds, including those that exceed the $250,000 limit.

It is important to note that the FDIC does not insure risky investments like stocks, bonds or crypto.

Do I need to spread my money across multiple different banks?

Torabi said this time is a good reminder of the “importance of diversification” when it comes to our money.

“We should always be diversifying not only where we invest, but when it comes to saving, too,” Torabi said. “If you have more than $250,000 in a bank, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not protected, because we know FDIC limits work in different ways, but it’s important to check. It’s important to know.”

She continued, “Maybe what you do is you put some of that money at a different institution, or you take some of it and put it in a joint account.”

Will the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank impact interest rates?

Over the last several months, Americans have been hit hard by both elevated inflation and aggressive interest rate hikes.

One interesting impact of the collapse of the two banks is that it could lead to slight relief for consumers.

While the Federal Reserve is expected to hike interest rates again next week to keep combating inflation, Wall Street analysts do not expect the hike to be as aggressive now because higher interest rates put even more pressure on banks, according to Rebecca Jarvis, ABC News chief business, technology and economics correspondent.

If my money wasn’t in the impacted banks, what should my biggest concern be?

According to Torabi, the economic concern she is most focused on at the moment is layoffs and making sure consumers are prepared for that worst-case scenario.

On Tuesday, for example, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs and will cancel 5,000 open positions.

Torabi said she encourages people to start thinking now about what they would need financially if they were laid off, so they can prepare.

“Doing this sort of pre-emptive crisis management now can allow you to then see, when times are still good, where the holes are in your financial life and start to fill them,” she said, adding that people should keep their resumes and networking up-to-date and ask themselves questions like, “What if I got laid off today? What would I do? Do I know how to collect unemployment? Do I have enough in savings? What would I cut out of my budget?”

Torabi said that same kind of action-oriented thinking can also apply to looking at the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

“As a consumer, as a depositor at a bank that didn’t have any relationship with SVB [Silicon Valley Bank], I think it’s not worth your time obsessing over this,” she said. “Just make sure to dot your i’s, cross your t’s, make sure your money is FDIC-insured and if you have questions, talk to your lender, talk to your bank. They would know better than anybody.”

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(NEW YORK) — OpenAI released the latest version of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model making significant waves in the tech industry, on Tuesday.

GPT-4, the latest model, can understand images as input, meaning it can look at a photo and give the user general information about the image.

The language model also has a larger information database, allowing it to provide more accurate information and write code in all major programming languages.

GPT-4 can now read, analyze or generate up to 25,000 words of text and is seemingly much smarter than its previous model. GPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam. Its previous model scored in the 10th, according to OpenAI.

ChatGPT, which was only released a few months ago, is already considered the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The app hit 100 million monthly active users in just a few months. TikTok took nine months to reach that many users and Instagram took nearly three years, according to a UBS study.

“While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, [GPT-4] exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” OpenAI wrote in its press release, adding that the language model scored a 700/800 on the math SAT.

Though impressive, OpenAI acknowledged the program is still “far from perfect.”

“It is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted.

Artificial intelligence models, including ChatGPT, have raised some concerns and disruptive headlines in recent months. In education, students have been using the systems to complete writing assignments, but educators are torn on whether these systems are disruptive or if they could be used as learning tools.

These systems have also been prone to generate inaccurate information — Google’s AI, “Bard,” notably made a factual error in its first public demo. This is a flaw OpenAI hopes to improve upon — GPT-4 is 40% more likely to produce accurate information than its previous version, according to OpenAI.

Misinformation and potentially biased information are subjects of concern. AI language models are trained on large datasets, which can sometimes contain bias in terms of race, gender, religion and more. This can result in the AI language model producing biased or discriminatory responses.

Many have pointed out the malicious ways people could use misinformation through models like ChatGPT, like phishing scams or to spread misinformation to deliberately disrupt important events like elections.

OpenAI says it “spent months making [ChatGPT] safer,” adding the company is working with “over 50 experts for early feedback in domains including AI safety and security.”

GPT-4 is 82% less likely to provide users with “disallowed content,” referring to illegal or morally objectionable content, according to OpenAI.

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(NEW YORK) — Lunchables are ready for their first day of school.

In tandem with the National School Lunch Program, the ready-to-eat packaged Lunchables kits, made by Kraft Heinz, have been approved to be served in schools for the first time.

“Ahead of the 2023-2024 school year, school administrators are now able to purchase two top-selling Lunchables offerings: Turkey and Cheddar, and Extra Cheesy Pizza,” a representative for Kraft Heinz told ABC News’ Good Morning America in a statement.

The approved kits are made with a specialized recipe that adds protein and whole grains, which is intended to keep kids powered throughout the day. The new Lunchables also have reduced saturated fat and sodium, and a larger serving size.

According to Kraft Heinz, part of being approved by the National School Lunch Program means the lunches will provide “more wholesome options to students for purchase or through the free school lunch program.”

Beyond its debut in cafeterias, Lunchables also announced it is concept-testing adding fruits into products sold in retail stores later this year.

The company also said it recently reduced the salt and oil ingredients in the Lunchables cracker itself.

“At Kraft Heinz, we are transforming from the inside out, with innovation as one of our key drivers of growth. Lunchables K-8 is the latest example of growing and expanding the core of our Kraft Heinz portfolio,” the company representative told GMA. “This new NSLP-approved Lunchables checks both boxes — we renovated the nutrition profile by adding more whole grains and protein and are leveraging new channels to better meet unmet needs.”

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(NEW YORK) — There’s a new sweet treat on the menu at Dairy Queen for a limited time.

The ice cream chain, known for its soft serve cones dipped in a quick-hardening shell, has added a new churro-flavored option to the menu.

For a limited time, customers can order the cinnamon-sugar-topped Churro Dipped Cone, inspired by the popular fried dough dessert, at participating locations.

“The Churro Dipped Cone brings together two classic flavors to bring you DQ’s version of a classic treat,” the menu description reads. “We’re positive you’ll fall in love with the cinnamon sugary crunch of the churro topping with each and every bite.”

The fast casual chain also has festive St. Patrick’s Day offerings this month, like the Mint Brownie Blizzard Treat — which “blends brownie pieces, choco chunks, and cool mint all together with our world famous soft serve” according to a menu description — and the Under the Rainbow Shake, a “parade of magically fruity flavors and rainbow sprinkles blended with creamy DQ vanilla soft serve and garnished with whipped topping and more rainbow sprinkles.”

Additionally, customers can mark their calendars and head to their nearest Dairy Queen location on March 20 for a free small vanilla cone.

According to the Dairy Queen website, “Free Cone Day marks the beginning of ‘Treat Szn’ — the time of year when the weather warms, and the only things that should be cold are sweet treats that come in a cone or cup.”

“We like to think of Free Cone Day as the beginning of our favorite season — treat season!,” Maria Hokanson, executive vice president of marketing for American Dairy Queen Corporation, said in a statement. “As we welcome the first day of spring, we invite all fans to stop by a DQ restaurant, get their free cone and make great memories with friends and family.”

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(NEW YORK) — Silicon Valley Bank’s failure on Friday raises concerns over the potential impacts on the climate technology industry, where SVB was heavily involved.

“They went out of their way to attract entrepreneurs, to attract companies in the technology industry. They were one of the first banks to have a dedicated, clean energy sustainable finance department,” Mona Dajani, Global Head of Energy & Infrastructure at the law firm Shearman and Sterling, told ABC News. “They consciously developed this practice, and they were a well-known source — that’s where you could go because they were willing to lend to higher-risk, new companies.”

Silicon Valley Bank provided financing for over 1,550 clients working on climate technology and sustainability, according to its website. As of December 2021, SVB had committed $3.2 billion to such projects. The bank also claimed to have led or participated in 62% of community solar financings, as of last March.

Dajani said many of her clients banked with SVB and that “despite having their money restored” there is a feeling of skittishness after the failure of the bank.

Long-term, she said the failure of SVB could mean some smaller start-up climate technology companies could be cut off from credit lines if no other bank or entity takes on the SVB portfolio.

While larger “clean tech” companies will likely take their business to larger banks, Dajani said smaller companies and start-ups may have a harder time meeting what will likely be stricter standards for loans, possibly leading to a “slight chilling effect” in the industry.

Kiran Bhatraju, founder and CEO of Arcadia, a tech company focused on combating climate change, expressed concern over the downfall of SVB on Twitter Saturday, writing, “What’s missing from the narrative is SVB is a climate bank.”

“They were strong supporters [of] innovators in decarbonization and clean energy infrastructure – financing nearly 60%+ of the community solar market – alongside companies like Sunrun, Vivint, AES, and Bloom,” Bhatraju continued. “Arcadia is fine, and will be fine through this. But my hope for our industry and planet is someone makes sure funds continue to flow on Monday.”

In the aftermath of the bank’s failure, some Republican lawmakers have blamed its so-called “woke” policies, including ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) for the downfall.

“A point that seems to be getting lost in the conversation around SVB is the failure of the San Francisco Fed to monitor the risks that were growing at Silicon Valley Bank,” Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, tweeted Sunday night. “It is abundantly clear that SVB was terribly mismanaged. Their executives appeared to be more focused on diversity and ESG than managing their own risks. But why didn’t the SF Fed see this before it was too late? Was it because their CEO was on the board of directors of the SF Fed? Or were these regulators just asleep at the wheel? We need answers.”

Banks that utilize ESG policies consider those aspects when evaluating risk and opportunities, and many banks have some version of these policies in place, including Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and others.

While Silicon Valley Bank billed itself as a bank friendly to start-ups in the climate technology space, climate-related start-ups did not make up the bank’s whole portfolio. SVB had notable clients across a variety of business sectors, including finance technology, life science and health care, enterprise software and others.

Sunrun, one of the solar companies banking with SVB, released a statement detailing its exposure on Friday after the bank’s collapse.

“SVB represents a small percentage of our overall hedging facilities as measured by notional value of less than 15%,” Sunrun said in a statement.

Following the news that the FDIC would protect SVB depositors, Sunrun CEO Mary Powell provided additional comment to ABC News, saying, “We are pleased that the federal government acted Sunday to stabilize the banking system, ensuring us access to the less than $80 million we had in deposits at SVB.”

“Sunrun has long-standing banking relationships with a large number of financial institutions, and we remain confident in our ability to replace SVB’s undrawn commitments,” Powell continued. “Sunrun has always believed in strength through diversification.”

In January 2022, the bank announced a commitment to provide “at least $5 billion by 2027” in financing for sustainability efforts.

With SVB’s failure, that commitment, and a potential funding stream for climate tech projects is now void.

“The ones that are going to be hurt the most are the unsecured kind of start-ups,” Dajani said. “But I do feel that it will make the clean energy space as a whole come out stronger because they’ve learned from this and they’re trying to strengthen their foundation to avoid another collapse and look at other options for funding, for capital.”

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(NEW YORK) — The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history, took place over less than 48 hours.

Customers withdrew $42 billion — nearly a quarter of the bank’s total deposits — within a single day last week.

The speedy bank run has raised questions about the fragility of financial institutions in a digital environment marked by easy cash withdrawals and the spread of information on social media and other spaces online, where panic among a few can grow into a stampede for the exit.

Such a possibility, known as a digital bank run, heightens the risk of a sudden, widespread cash withdrawal, especially among a group of depositors who share an industry and social ties — like the depositors in Silicon Valley Bank, experts told ABC News.

“This was the first Twitter-fueled bank run,” Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement days after the fall of Silicon Valley Bank.

The group of depositors in Silicon Valley Bank was made up of a relatively small set of venture capital firms, tech startups and other large investors.

After a woeful financial report last Wednesday set off concern, some of the depositors discussed their reactions in WhatsApp and Slack groups devoted to startups, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, several prominent venture capitalists and other major investors voiced their concern on Twitter, amplifying fears of a collapse.

Michael Burry, an investor best known for predicting the subprime mortgage crisis, warned in a now-deleted tweet: “It is possible today we found our Enron.”

On Thursday, shares of Silicon Valley Bank fell 60% in response to concern about the bank’s distressed financial position.

By the early afternoon, the sudden decline of the bank took over online discussions among startup founders, according to entrepreneur Alexander Torrenegra.

“All of my chats with tech founders in the US light on fire with what’s happening,” Torrenegra recounted on Twitter. “Obviously, we have a bank runoff. Surreal.”

Founders Fund, a venture capital fund led by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, withdrew all of its deposits that day, Bloomberg reported.

Since the bank is FDIC-insured, depositors were guaranteed protection of up to $250,000 in funds for different types of accounts held in the event of a collapse. However, many depositors in Silicon Valley Bank held accounts that far exceeded $250,000, raising the stakes for those who failed to remove their funds before a potential bank failure.

“Because information comes out faster, you get the information in real time, it’s widespread and it leads people to take action,” Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University, told ABC News. “If you’re the first group out, you get 100% of your money and if you’re the last group out, you potentially get zero.”

Hilary Allen, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law who studies banking regulation, said the relatively small and tight-knit community of bank depositors helped accelerate the downfall.

“Virtually all of the depositors were from the same community and a community that was very online,” Allen told ABC News. “If you’ve got something like Silicon Valley Bank, where the vast majority of depositors are in the tech industry and are very connected and all speaking to one another, those are the circumstances in which a panic can really flourish very, very quickly.”

To be sure, investors who fled the bank held well-founded concerns about its financial health.

Silicon Valley Bank had loaded up on investments into long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage bonds, which typically deliver small but reliable returns amid low interest rates. As the Federal Reserve aggressively hiked interest rates over the past year, however, those holdings lost significant value.

A day before the major cash withdrawal, Silicon Valley Bank announced that it had lost $1.8 billion on the sale of those distressed bonds.

“This isn’t purely a bank run,” Itamar Drechsler, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, told ABC News. “The bank had a very fundamental problem.”

Still, the speed and reach of online communication likely accelerated the bank’s collapse, Dreschler said.

“Like a crowd that moves together very fast, if it decides to exit someplace, there’s a problem,” Dreschler said. “If we coordinate more through social media and other information technology, that can cause the crowd to move a lot faster.”

While digital banking allows for quick and easy withdrawals, the availability of such a service likely contributed little or not at all to the bank run, since such technology has existed for many years without significant issue, the experts said.

“People have been talking for a while about whether the speed of digital banking itself would contribute to bank runs,” said Allen, of American University. “My view on that is it has been relatively easy to get your money out for quite a while now. I’m not sure how much of a difference that has made.”

In response to the outcry and fearing wider spread of the crisis, the FDIC, Treasury Department and the Fed ultimately took a major step on Sunday, telling depositors in Silicon Valley Bank that the FDIC would protect all of their funds, including those that exceed the $250,000 limit.

Later that day, the Fed announced an emergency lending program to cover the deposits at issue and restore wider confidence in the financial system.

The spread of panic online may have contributed to the federal government’s decision to take such extraordinary action and prevent uncertainty from seeping further into the financial system, Allen said.

“Was that part of the concern that motivated the Biden administration to step in because it was worried that the very public venting on Twitter might transfer to other banks, as well?” she asked.

On Monday, in a morning address from the White House, President Joe Biden sought to reassure Americans that the banking system was sound.

“Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe,” Biden said. “Your deposits are safe. Let me also assure you, we will not stop at this. We’ll do whatever is needed.”

Biden also addressed the issue that day in a Twitter post.

ABC News’ Libby Cathey contributed reporting.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are probing the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The probes, which are separate, are in the preliminary stages and it is not clear whether any wrongdoing has been committed. It is not uncommon after a large public collapse of a bank or company for the Justice Department or SEC to step in and investigate.

The Justice Department and SEC both declined to comment. The news of the probes was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

In a statement Sunday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler said the agency was focused on “monitoring for market stability and identifying and prosecuting any form of misconduct that might threaten investors, capital formation, or the markets more broadly.”

“Without speaking to any individual entity or person, we will investigate and bring enforcement actions if we find violations of the federal securities laws,” he said.

SVB Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker did not return ABC News’ request for comment.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(NEW YORK) — A New York City woman has gone viral for tweeting about her fight for equal pay.

Kimberly Nguyen, a 25-year-old user experience writer, tweeted earlier this month that she saw a job listing for a full-time position with her company that pays as much as $90,000 more than what she makes as a contractor in the same position.

In a tweet that now has more than 12 million views, Nguyen said that she was able to find out about the salary disparity thanks to a salary transparency law that went into effect in New York City last October.

The law requires companies with at least four employees, at least one of which is based in the city, to include a minimum and maximum salary on job listings, according to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which is enforcing the law.

“My company just listed on LinkedIn a job posting for what I’m currently doing (so we’re hiring another UX writer) and now thanks to salary transparency laws, I see that they intend to pay this person $32k-$90k more than they currently pay me, so I applied,” she tweeted March 7.

Speaking with “Good Morning America,” Nguyen said that when the city’s salary transparency law first went into effect, “I actually started going online and Google searching, ‘How much does a UX writer make?'”

“I started looking at job listings in New York City for UX writers, and seeing the advertised salary as being way way higher than what I was making,” she said.

When Nguyen saw her company’s job posting this month, which listed a much higher salary for a full-time role, she said she took to Twitter mainly to vent her frustration.

“I was so upset,” she said. “To know that [full-time employees] are making anywhere between $32,000 to $90,000 more than what I’m making for essentially the same work felt rude and disrespectful.”

Nguyen said she is also a poet and she expected her tweet to reach her “poet friends” on Twitter, not to go viral.

“I didn’t intend to be the poet laureate of pay transparency,” she said, adding, “All of a sudden, the tweet was blowing up.”

Women make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men

Nguyen has continued to document her fight for equal pay on Twitter since her initial tweet, saying she is now looking for positions with other companies.

Her tweets caught the attention of women in particular, many of whom noted how the salary transparency law in New York City was opening more people’s eyes to the gender pay gap.

“As a woman of color, we inherently KNOW we’re being disgustingly underpaid, but to actually SEE it?” wrote one Twitter user.

“This. When people argue there’s no gender pay gap this is what we’re talking about,” another wrote.

In the United States, women, on average, make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the Pew Research Center. The number has not budged in recent years, and it’s even worse for mothers, women of color and all women as they age, data shows.

This year, March 14 is Equal Pay Day, which marks how far into 2023 some women must work to make what white, non-Hispanic men earned in 2022.

Equal Pay Day for Black women will not come until July. For moms, Equal Pay Day does not come until August. For Latina women, Equal Pay Day does not come until October, and for Native women, Equal Pay Day is not until November, according to the American Association of University Women.

Among Asian American and Pacific Islander women, the calendar varies. According to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, “On average, [Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander] women earn only 75 cents for every dollar that white, non-Hispanic men make.” However, “some AANHPI ethnic subgroups, particularly Southeast Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander women, experience even bigger wage gaps and don’t catch up until much later in the year.”

The impact of the gender wage gap was seen firsthand over the past three years as a crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic pushed more than 2 million women out of the workforce, leaving many of them on shakier financial footing than their male counterparts because of the already existing gap, experts say.

Now as women are returning to the workforce in record numbers, Nguyen said she is among those who hope that pay transparency grows as well in order to help women.

“I hope that people continue to advocate for salary pay transparency legislation because clearly it’s very helpful,” Nguyen said. “Especially as a young woman in the workplace, and especially because my parents are immigrants, I have no frame of reference for anything. I don’t know where to start for what to ask for. I’m just dealing with invisible numbers, so to have concrete numbers in front of me is so helpful and so important.”

At least eight states — including Colorado, California, Maryland, Washington and Nevada — and cities already have laws in place that implement some degree of pay transparency.

Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, a policy organization that fights for gender justice, told “GMA” last year that many of those states also prohibit employers from setting a person’s salary based on their salary in their previous job, which helps women.

“Those salary history prohibitions are important for ensuring that pay discrimination doesn’t follow someone from job to job through their career,” Martin said, noting the prohibitions also help ensure that “the employer doesn’t hold all the cards.”

Tips for women when asking for pay

Here are four tips for fighting for equal pay from Martin and Katie Donovan, a pay equity expert and the founder of Equal Pay Negotiations.

1. Do your research on salaries beforehand:

“In part because of the internet and in part because of these policy changes, we are living in a moment where you can find more information about pay in particular roles and particular companies than you could 10 or 15 years ago, and that is a source of power for workers,” said Martin.

“It always of course is a good idea to do your research in these situations and to learn as much as you can about what is publicly available or what the law requires an employer to provide in terms of pay information,” she added.

2. Be comfortable asking about salary:

“There’s a little bit of culture shift happening with employers where there is more of an understanding that posting a salary range is a good equity practice, so we’re seeing more employers do it even where the law doesn’t require it,” Martin said. “That in turn means that it is a more reasonable question for job applicants to ask of employers, even if employer hasn’t posted it, to ask whether that information is available.”

3. In most cases, you’re protected against giving your salary history:

“Under the Federal Equal Pay Act, a lot of courts have held that salary history isn’t legal justification for paying a woman less than a man in the same role, so you do actually have some protection against pay discrimination based on salary history,” Martin said.

“That’s one reason why if I were in that position, I would try to gently deflect an interviewer by saying something like, ‘It sounds like what you really want to understand is the salary that I’m looking for in this job, and this is what it is,'” she said. “And hopefully that is informed by some data that you’ve been able to find in the world through sites like Glassdoor and the like about what the market rate is for the position.”

4. Ask for more than the median salary range:

“As a candidate, when you’re given a job offer, you say, ‘I’m not accepting median. That’s low,'” said Donovan. “You aim for 75 percentile or higher, because that’s where the white guys are hanging.”

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