It has aspects of a prisoner's dilemma either way, but what happened to the SVB is indeed different from the classic "It's a Wonderful Life" style bank run. In

It has aspects of a prisoner's dilemma either way, but what happened to the SVB is indeed different from the classic "It's a Wonderful Life" style bank run. In "It's a Wonderful Life", the bank has the money, but not right now. If the depositors all wait, then they'll all get their money. If they do a bank run, then the first movers get their money, and the rest get left with nothing, as good assets get liquidated at heavy discounts in a fire sale. So compared to waiting, the bank run is negative-sum to the depositors in aggregate, and zero-sum to the first movers. (It's positive-sum to Potter, who wants to buy the bank's assets at a discount.) In either a mark-to-market or a net-present-value sense, the SVB doesn't have the money. When interest rates increased, their long-term bonds lost value. The hold-to-maturity accounting treatment saved them from reporting that, but that accounting is a fiction; it's a real economic loss, same as if they'd lent to a bankrupt startup. If the depositors all wait, then they'll get the right number of dollars in ~ten years, but those dollars will be worth less by then. So a bank run is positive-sum to the first movers, who can get their dollars now and buy Treasury bills at five percent (or put them in a better bank, or wherever else). It's roughly zero-sum to the depositors in aggregate. That makes a bank run relatively more attractive. I think there's confusion because in both cases, "if you wait then you'll get your money". They're completely different reasons to wait though, the first economically rational, the second not.