Economy

Again, SVB wasn’t a mom and pop bank serving middle class depositors. They existed to generate venture capital for risky tech start ups, and they gamed the system to allow them to raise the stakes to their investors without government oversight.

Without bailouts, maybe those libertarian tech gamblers will cry out for more regulations to proactively protect them, rather than taxpayer funded bailouts after the fact.

When a bank fails due to mismanagement or corruption, people will suffer. Individual depositors under $250k($342k) should always be protected, but the others must deal with the consequences of “small government”.

Edit- I grew up in Silicon Valley before it was known as that; in 90’s-early 2000’s, I had many friends, as well as clients’ families (I was a therapist) who were affected by the high stress, high risk culture of the tech world, especially after the dot com bust of 2000. Moving past that crash, the naïveté of most folks had worn off, and they knew what they were getting into by working for a startup.

The benefits could be huge- one of our closest friends worked at Yahoo in the (my dates may be off, going from memory)late 90’s/ early 2000’s as a facilities manager (making sure the job sites were clean and all the light bulbs got changed), but got laid off after, I think, the dot com crash. They had two kids, and struggled for a bit until he got a job as facilities manager at Home Depot. That struggle ended about a year or two after he was laid off, when his Yahoo stock options matured, and he cashed them in.

They became instant millionaires (not mega-multi-millionaires, but millionaires nonetheless) and quit their jobs not long after.