Small wonder that most Americans are stunned and confused by the sudden fall of Silicon Valley Bank. How did a cornerstone of the dynamic venture capital community, the nation’s 16th largest lending institution that until recently, enjoyed the growth worthy of the tech startups it served, fall so hard, so fast? Is its failure the legacy of poor practices specific to SVB, or is the Fed’s policy of drastically hiking rates that hammers the value of banks’ investments endangering fellow mid-sized lenders? Even if bad management destroyed SVB, why didn’t its top regulators, the Fed and the California banking authorities, see this runaway train wobbling on the tracks, and force the drivers to throttle back before it derailed?
I thought of just the expert to skirt the usual dense jargon, and provide easy-to-grasp answers. He’s Douglas Diamond, professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for Economics with his research partner Philip Dybig of Washington University in St. Louis, and former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. The Diamond-Dybig research that captured the Nobel stressed that banks are inherently fragile and vulnerable to “runs,” because if customers exit en masse, the lenders may need to sell their bonds or loans, that would have fully paid off on maturity, at fire-sale prices. Hence, a panic can unnecessarily ruin an otherwise healthy bank. Diamond and Dybig emphasize that both sound regulation and prudent management that broadly diversifies the risk in both the loan and investment portfolios, and makeup of customers, are essential to instilling client confidence required to keep America’s banks out of harm’s way.
