Depositors fled to the perceived safety of the titans of finance following a pair of bank failures last month, the Wall Street Journal reported. Small and midsize U.S. banks lost hundreds of billions of dollars in recent weeks to their bigger peers and to money-market funds offering higher yields. That is likely to force many of them to increase the interest rates they are paying to avoid losing more customers. The extent of the damage will become clearer when dozens of regional banks including M&T Bank Corp. U.S. Bancorp and Citizens Financial Group Inc. begin to report first-quarter results. Some banks are already jacking up the interest rates they pay savers, with the biggest increases coming from banks with a high percentage of deposits that exceed the Federal Deposit Corp.’s $250,000 insurance cap or whose customers are concentrated in a few industries. Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed after uninsured depositors fled en masse.