Starting in March 2023, depositor runs quickly led to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank. In the wake of higher interest rates, uninsured depositors of these banks had lost confidence in their business model of taking in deposits and investing the...

We ask whether banks use interest rate swaps to hedge the interest rate risk of their assets, primarily loans and securities. To this end, we use regulatory data on individual swap positions for the largest 250 U.S. banks. We find that the average bank has a large notional amount of $434...