In recent decades financial crises have tended to be fast-moving and violent. They usually revolve around a handful of companies or countries, and often climax over a weekend, before Asian markets open. That template is grounds for hope that the worst of the current turmoil may have passed with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and the forced merger of Credit Suisse with UBS Group AG this month, as well as the federal backstops implemented in response to these events. But another template is also possible: the corrosive, slow-motion crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported. SVB collapsed because of a confluence of structural factors that to a lesser extent afflict many institutions. That could force many banks in coming years to shrink or be acquired, a process that also hampers the supply of credit. In decades past, banking crises around the world routinely took years to unfold. From 1980 to 1994, roughly 3,000 mostly small U.S. savings and loan institutions and banks were closed or bailed out. The S&L crisis began when the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates up sharply to combat inflation. S&Ls and banks found themselves squeezed between low-yielding loans and rising rates on deposits and money-market funds. The current episode began similarly. From 2008 through 2021, the Fed kept interest rates near zero. Banks boosted their holdings of government and federally backed mortgage bonds in search of yield. When rates began to rise sharply in 2022, those bonds’ market values plummeted. While those losses were especially acute at SVB, it was hardly alone. Stanford University finance professor Amit Seru and three co-authors recently estimated that 11% of U.S. banks, around 500 in total, suffered larger percentage losses on their assets from higher interest rates than SVB.