With SVB It Takes a Village...To Mess Things Up This Badly

Disclosure alert: SVB bought my business in 2001 and I worked there as a senior executive for 2 1/2 years. I’ll offer a little insight into what went wrong….if that doesn’t interest you, hit delete now. Any bank has three main actors; the bankers, the customers (depositors and borrowers, which often are the same), and the regulators. Let’s start with customers, who in this case had to be incredibly naïve and irresponsible to believe deposits in any bank above the insured limit of $250K are riskless.