SUPERVISORS KNEW A YEAR EARLY — BUT IT WAS ‘PERSONALLY SAFER TO TAKE NO ACTION’ — SO SILICON VALLEY BANK DIED

A bank examiner has one job: watch the bank, and when it turns sick, make it take its medicine. The Fed’s own review, which Bowman ordered and the Starling Advisory Group wrote, says her people flunked it. Supervisors “knew, or should have known” that Silicon Valley Bank was rotten by March 2022, a bank with 94 percent of its deposits uninsured and packed into venture-backed tech, then watched it die a full year later without forcing a single fix. Why? Not weak rules. The report says staff sat still because it was “personally safer to take no action unless they were certain the action was exactly right.” A whole floor of watchdogs, all afraid to bark.

It also takes a hammer to the comfortable story that social media killed the bank: 96 percent of the online chatter came after the bank was already a dead man walking. Read the promise underneath all this. Oversight is a bill the public never signed but pays for anyway. And note who profits from the framing: Bowman ordered this review, and it lays the blame on scared people rather than the light-touch rules she favors. “Transparency is where accountability begins,” she says. Begins. We are still waiting on the rest.