Fifteen Years After 2008, Why Do Banks Keep Failing?
By Peter Coy
The weekend rescue of uninsured depositors in Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank was absolutely essential and absolutely frustrating. We have to stop getting ourselves into these messes, people. If the federal government hadn’t given a blanket of protection to all deposits, companies that had deposits in either of the banks above $250,000, the maximum that’s insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., would not have been able to pay their workers. Start-ups that bank with Silicon Valley Bank would have been imperiled. “It could have destroyed early-stage biomedical research in this country for a decade,” said Karen Petrou, the managing partner of the consulting firm Federal Financial Analytics, who sits on the board of a biomedical research foundation…. “It could have destroyed early-stage biomedical research in this country for a decade,” Insuring all bank deposits would make banks look more like public utilities, Petrou told me. She said she’d prefer relying more on market discipline, as originally intended. But that ship may already have sailed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/opinion/silicon-valley-bank-fdic.html