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Tegan Passalacqua spent last weekend in what he’s been calling “anxiety purgatory.”
The acclaimed winemaker and owner of Sandlands in Lodi, California, learned on Friday that his financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank, had collapsed. He spent days weighing worst-case scenarios.
Up to $250,000 of his money was insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC); however, Passalacqua had just released all of Sandlands’ winter wine—and had more than twice the insured amount in his account when the bank failed.
“I’m a growing business, so you have these sales periods when you bring in a good chunk of change and it goes away until the next sales period,” he says. “This is about the worst time for it to happen to me.”
Silicon Valley was the second-biggest bank collapse in U.S. history. It was a favorite of venture capital firms and tech startups, many of which pulled out vast sums of money shortly after the bank revealed its huge losses (the result of short-sighted investments paired with rising interest rates) on Wednesday.
