(Yicai Global) March 14 -- After a nerve-wracking weekend, Silicon Valley Bank depositors, mainly venture capital firms and startups, have finally withdrawn their money, including unprotected funds over USD250,000, according to Chinese sources.

“At 5.30 a.m. today, I eventually transferred my money out of Silicon Valley Bank,” an investor told Yicai Global, adding that the California-based bank’s website was inaccessible yesterday. That was probably due to too many depositors waiting to get their money out.

Clients have been able to withdraw funds from their SVB accounts pretty much since yesterday, according to another Chinese source close to the bank.

“Both collections and payments are now back to normal as we’ve been helping customers transfer their funds from SVB to small- and mid-sized banks such as East West Bank,” said an employee in the cross-border finance department of a leading Chinese securities brokerage.

With some fund managers or businesses simply not having a second bank account, the nearly one week required to open a new account has also exacerbated worries, the staffer explained.

“Some large foreign banks actually refused to serve such fund managers or firms in the past, otherwise they would not have opened accounts only with SVB,” the person added.

Andon Health, a Chinese healthcare products firm, said in an announcement today that all of its deposits with SVB are usable and the company has not suffered any losses.

On March 10, the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank shocked the world. The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation decided to shut the lender and appointed Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the two US agencies that insure depositors, as the receiver on the same day.

To prevent the crisis from spreading, the Federal Reserve announced a Bank Term Funding Program worth USD25 billion on March 12 to offer loans with a duration of at most one year to all federally insured depository institutions in the United States. This approach avoided the moral risk of letting taxpayers “foot the bill,” while guaranteeing liquidity.

Although the turmoil at SVB has been temporarily resolved, financial risks have led the market to expect the Fed to halt its interest rate hikes. US investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted a pause in rate rises this month while maintaining its forecast for 25-basis-point increases in May, June and July.

Editors: Xu Wei, Peter Thomas