NEW YORK CITY: Regulators have barely written the epitaph for First Republic Bank, but investors on Wall Street have already moved onto speculating which bank might be the next to fail. Bank stocks fell sharply on Tuesday, led downward by smaller banks with heavy exposure to uninsured deposits and commercial banks such as Western Alliance Bank, PacWest Bancorp, Comerica and Zions Bank. Shares of Western Alliance dropped 15 percent and PacWest fell 28 percent, with trading of both stocks halted briefly due to high volatility. The second day of bank stock declines comes after regulators closed First Republic Bank on Monday and sold the vast majority of its operations to JPMorgan Chase in a fire sale. It was the second-largest bank failure in US history and the third bank failure in six weeks, following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
