When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last month, the core problem was a giant hole in its bond portfolio. When depositors started fleeing First Republic Bank soon afterward, the concern mainly was about a hole in its loan book, the Wall Street Journal reported. Nearly every publicly traded bank in the country is sitting on loans that have declined in value since they were made. The culprit is rising interest rates, which also slashed the value of banks’ other big asset, their holdings of securities. The overall market-value losses on securities are well known because they are tallied up industrywide by banking regulators. The scale of market-value losses on loans made by publicly traded banks has to be tallied from banks’ securities filings. “Fair values of loans and securities are not qualitatively different,” said Tom Linsmeier, an accounting professor at the University of Wisconsin and former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board. “They measure the same amount: the price at which the asset can be sold in an orderly transaction in the market today.” First Republic’s balance sheet showed $166.1 billion of loans as of Dec. 31, at amortized cost. A footnote said their fair-market value was $143.9 billion. The $22.2 billion difference was greater than First Republic’s $17.4 billion of total equity, or assets minus liabilities.