The Silicon Valley Bank Bailout Didn’t Need to Happen

Sen. Mike Crapo was a principal sponsor of a bank deregulation bill in 2018.

Silicon Valley Bank's CEO lobbied for banks under $250 billion to be exempted from additional stress tests and heightened capital and liquidity requirements.

The bill was designed in conjunction with four conservative Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee who went around their ranking member to do it.

Silicon Valley Bank had an unusually high amount of its assets placed in long-term government and mortgage securities, creating a mismatch and reliance on short-term funding.

Dodd-Frank was designed to prevent bank runs, ensuring that banks have both the structural funding necessary to carry out operations and emergency funding to handle sudden withdrawals.

The banking system has been utterly transformed overnight to prevent a threat that should have been easily avoided with basic risk management among SVB and its customers.

There are a couple of options: Silicon Valley startups are so bad with money that they never thought of this.

The other possibility is that SVB wanted that money kept with them.