Good point, although this is also included in your link:
> This leaves about $90 billion in securities and other SVB assets in the hands of the FDIC, and an estimated cost of the failure to the Deposit Insurance Fund of about $20 billion.
This doesn’t make sense. You’re adding deposits (liabilities) to assets. $56bn deposits doesn’t mean $56bn of cash in a vault, it means $56bn owed to depositors.
> doesn't make sense that SVB would need a bailout if they had 50B in liabilities and 90B in assets
Deposits aren’t all SVB’s liabilities, though they were most of them. Their balance sheet changed between failure and disposition. And the FDIC is giving the acquirer some guarantees on the assets, which are being acquired for substantially less than $90bn.
It's more likely that the 50B number doesn't represent the full FDIC coverage for deposits. For instance, this article claims that the bank was about to have 100B withdrawn the day the FDIC took over: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/28/svb-customers-tried-to-pull-...
I think most likely is that the FDIC has had the bank for a number of weeks and allowed a large number of withdrawals. Those withdrawals are counted as part of the 18B cost to the FDIC, but aren't part of the 50B that was sold.