First Republic Bank, headquartered in San Francisco, and Western Alliance Bank, headquartered in Phoenix, are on the forefront of the regional banks that haven’t collapsed yet. Their shares continued their plunge today as trading was halted on and off. Other bank stocks got hammered too, but not to this extent.

First Republic experienced an intense run on the bank by the same folks it so energetically catered to: the wealthy. They were yanking their cash out of their bank accounts at First Republic by the millions of dollars at a time – same thing that accelerated the fall of Silicon Valley Bank when cash-rich companies, often pushed by their venture-capital investors, yanked their millions and hundreds of millions out.

On Sunday, the Fed came out with a program to shore up teetering banks like First Republic, by providing additional loans through a new facility. Also on Sunday, First Republic announced that it had received additional funding from JPMorgan, on top of the funding it had from the Fed, and “continued access to funding through the Federal Home Loan Bank.” It said that its “total available, unused liquidity to fund operations is now more than $70 billion.”

First Republic Bank is not a conservatively run bank. It represents the worst excesses in the Free-Money party. During the Financial Crisis, Bank of America ended up with it when it purchased Merrill Lynch, which had acquired it in 2007. In 2009, Bank of America sold First Republic to a group of investors that included private equity firms Colony Capital and General Atlantic. They sold it to the public via an IPO in December 2010. And then the Free Money party began.

Free Money = Toxic Money: First Republic Bank and Western Alliance Bank Make it into my Pantheon of Imploded Stocks | Wolf Street