What irresponsible behavior are you talking about? Having $4M of operating cash held in an account at a medium-sized bank? A company that can comfortably get

What irresponsible behavior are you talking about? Having $4M of operating cash held in an account at a medium-sized bank? A company that can comfortably get by with < $250k of cash reserves is small indeed. The actual irresponsible behavior here seems to have been on the part of SVB in treating T bonds and excessively correlated business loans as low-risk assets, and on the part of regulators for allowing this because SVB wasn’t quite big enough to have to follow the real rules. But there was no good way for SVB’s depositors to know any of this. Heck, SVB was older than a decent fraction of its depositors and their executives. It’s was an institution around here. You can wander around a few towns and find their branches. What were people and businesses supposed to do? Walk around, point to the SVB branch and say “nope, not those folks — they don’t understand interest rate risk”?