The Fastest Bank Run In U.S. History Saw Customers Pull $42 Billion In A Single Day. Now Apollo’s Chief Economist Warns AI Agents Like Meta’s Muse Could Trigger The Next One.
Apollo's chief economist believes AI assistants could drain the cheap deposits that keep banks alive, and one feature already inside Meta's Muse app sits closer to triggering that scenario than most investors realize.
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Apollo (NYSE:APO | APO Price Prediction) chief economist Torsten Sløk has identified a new risk for bank investors. In a note published September 27, 2026 titled Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?, Sløk argued that AI assistants built to manage household money could steadily pull cheap deposits away from banks.
The core of the note is one sentence: “If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”
The 2023 figures in the headline provide historical context. Sløk’s argument concerns a different mechanism: gradual erosion of low-cost funding across the system over time.
How Deposit Flight Went From Sidewalk Lines To A Single Day
Continental Illinois lost 30% of deposits in 10 days in 1984. Northern Rock in 2007 saw physical lines outside branches. Washington Mutual lost $16.7 billion over 16 days in 2008.
Silicon Valley Bank customers withdrew $42 billion in a single day on March 9, 2023, leaving SVB with negative cash reserves of $958 million. Signature Bank lost 20% of deposits in hours that month, while First Republic lost 57% over one to two weeks.
Lines gave way to electronic transfers, then to single-day runs.
Why A 0.1% Checking Account Is Exposed
Fintech platforms offer cash yields of 3.3% to 5.0%, against 0.1% on traditional checking accounts. Banks fund lending with deposits in low-yield accounts. Moving money has required a person to notice the gap, decide to act and complete a transfer. That friction protects the balances.
An AI agent, which 24/7 Wall St.’s The AI Investor Podcast described as “an AI model and algorithm that can autonomously make decisions”, could remove all three steps. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) offers a concrete example. Its Muse assistant can already track spending, negotiate bills and find deals. Automatically sweeping idle cash into higher-yield accounts is a possible extension of those features, and it remains hypothetical. For more on the app itself, see our recent coverage of how Muse became the top AI app.
A Bank Analyst Flags The Margin Threat
Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) analyst Ebrahim Poonawala called this deposit sorting a “real threat to industry net interest margins.” Net interest margin is the spread between what a bank earns on loans and what it pays for deposits. Cheap deposits widen that spread; losing them contracts it.
What Would Make This Risk Show Up In The Data
The evident signal is whether cheap deposits leave the banking system faster than rate differences alone would explain. Investors can track deposit mix disclosures in quarterly earnings reports and whether consumer AI assistants add money-movement features.
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AJ spent 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics, that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.
