💸 Mnuchin to the rescue

What a wild day for NYCB

View in Browser It was an absolutely wild day for NYCB. Downright loopy. Let's get into it.  By Allison Morrow Dow 38,661.05 0.20% S&P 500 5,104.76 0.51% NASDAQ 16,031.54 0.58% Last updated March 6 at 6:59 PM ET 🏦 MNUCHIN TO THE RESCUE Spencer Platt/Getty Images What. A. Day.   Just when you think the big market-moving news is going to come from the Federal Reserve chair's testimony before Congress, blammo — here comes the Ghost of Banking Crisis Present.   ICYMI: Around noon, shares of New York Community Bancorp, a midsize lender that's been having some issues lately (more on that later), began tanking after the WSJ reported that the bank was nosing around for an equity capital infusion. In other words, NYCB needed cash to help plug a big old hole in its books.    That's a clear sign of distress, and Wall Street reacted swiftly, sending the stock down more than 40% so rapidly it triggered an automatic trading halt on the New York Stock Exchange.    A few hours later, NYCB said it had secured a $1 billion lifeline from a private equity firm led by none other than former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. The bank also announced its second CEO replacement in less than a week.   The cash infusion and the management shuffle seemed to turn the market around. NYCB's shares climbed out of their slump and finished the day up 8% (though it remains down 80% since the start of this year).   My colleague Elisabeth Buchwald has the latest.    What is going on?   Let's back up a bit. NYCB's stock has been spiraling for about a month, ever since the bank released a disastrous financial report revealing, among other things, a surprise loss of $252 million.    That got investors worried about NYCB and other banks with similar portfolios — specifically, lenders with outsize exposure to the increasingly shaky commercial real estate sector. Things got worse last week when NYCB disclosed it had found  "material weakness" in its internal controls, prompting several credit downgrades.   All of this has triggered not-too-distant memories of the 2023 regional bank selloff, which began almost exactly one year ago with the frenzied collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.    What happens now?   The big thing to watch now are deposits. It's not yet clear whether the last month's turmoil has prompted clients to withdraw their money. In an update last month, the bank said that deposits were stable. But the stock has continued to take a beating since then, keeping NYCB's name in the headlines.    The bank last week delayed filing its annual report, citing more immediate issues to deal with. It now plans to release that report by March 15, and that should provide more information on what's happening with deposits.    RELATED Jay Powell assured lawmakers that the Fed is keeping a close eye on the commercial real estate problem: "I think it's manageable."   Empty offices and vacant stores have become a $20 trillion problem for Wall Street. QUOTE OF THE DAY Boeing has not provided us with the documents and information that we have requested numerous times over the past few months ... It's absurd. Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, told US lawmakers that investigators are still waiting for Boeing to turn over a list of workers who were involved in the removal and installation of a 737 Max door plug that blew out mid-flight two months ago.   "There is one team – one team –  that deals with the doors," Homendy said.  "Why we don't have those names today two months later is really disappointing."   Boeing did not immediately comment when contacted by CNN. Read more.  💸 MUSK MONEY Elon Musk made headlines today for two reasons:   He said on X that he isn't giving money to either presidential candidate. A company he is suing put Musk's old emails on blast in an effort to show that his lawsuit is basically a case of sour grapes.  And 2 illustrates why we should not take 1 seriously.   Here's the deal: Musk doesn't need to make political donations to convey where he stands. He already spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and turn it into a platform where White supremacists and extreme-right-wing trolls can mingle. Musk, himself an immigrant, just this week said that he believes the Biden administration is "ushering in vast numbers of illegals" to vote for Democrats — echoing a racist conspiracy theory that the left is orchestrating a plot to disempower White voters.    Point is, he's not exactly subtle about his politics, and he's never been much of a political donor in the past. Maybe he's declaring that he won't donate to either campaign to try present himself as some sort of centrist. If so, we've got a long history of tweets to show that's simply not the case.    That is kind of the same point OpenAI made late Tuesday, when it published several of Musk's old emails in response to his lawsuit claiming OpenAI has diverged from its nonprofit mission.    The emails make clear that Musk himself believed OpenAI needed a lot more revenue to survive. He even tried to sell its executives on the idea that Tesla should buy it — a suggestion that was declined.    Musk wanted to control OpenAI. He got rejected. Started his own rival AI company. And now he's suing his competitor.    "We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we've deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI's mission without him," OpenAI said in a blog post.   RELATED: Leading AI image generators can be manipulated into creating misleading election-related images, according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. A Microsoft employee told federal regulators that the company's AI tool should be removed until the offensive images it creates can be addressed. WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON? 🌱 US regulators approved a rule requiring companies to share how much they pollute. But, after two years of backlash, the final rule was significantly watered down from its original version.   💰 The United Kingdom will scrap a 225-year-old rule that has allowed many of its richest residents to pay hardly any tax on their foreign earnings.   📉 LinkedIn confirmed widespread outages on the site — a day after Meta's social media platforms also went offline.  ✏️ POST OF THE DAY Today's movers SWIN 47.00 135.00% Solowin Holdings MEDS 17.26 107.21% TRxADE HEALTH, Inc. HCMA 7.49 49.80% HCM Acquisition Corp. Class A BIAF 1.50 50.00% bioAffinity Technologies, Inc. EVC 1.79 49.86% Entravision Communications Corporation Class A PHUN 10.27 30.23% Phunware, Inc. Last updated March 6 at 7:00 PM ET   What did you think of today's newsletter? Click here to send us feedback   You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for CNN Business Nightcap. 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