Exactly. It's also unfair to say VCs and depositors should have noticed the problems when regulators didn't see them either. Banking has been a quasi-governmen

Exactly. It's also unfair to say VCs and depositors should have noticed the problems when regulators didn't see them either. Banking has been a quasi-government-operated industry since 1933, and even more so since 2008, and we need to make sure that the government does not dodge blame for the failure of SVB. Government regulators are supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and they didn't prevent it. You can't as deeply involved as the government is in banking and not be complicit in the outcomes of banking. People will try to blame "lobbying" for this but let's be honest, even if regulators were looking at every bank in the US with a microscope no matter how many deposits they held, those regulators probably would have missed this. Hey, government bonds are a great investment! Duration risk is sneaky. Who caused that duration risk to actually manifest as a real problem? The Fed! The same people who are supposed to run the banking system in a stable way have contributed to the instability of the banking system by trying to squash inflation. If the Fed hadn't raised rates so much everyone would be praising SVB for doing so well. People have an impression that banking is a private industry and the government comes in to bail it out, when really the government was involved the entire time. If we don't understand that, we won't be able to actually fix the problems.