The government should “rescue” people who have money in a failing bank. Banking should not be an adventure people seem to be conflating the people who invested in SVB and the people and businesses, who had money there, because they have to move money around or store money to run their businesses or their lives.

Having more money than the FDIC insures is not very hard for any business larger than a few people.

Government should absolutely be in the business of protecting the people storing their money in the bank.

People investing in a bank as a security should be responsible for that risk, yes, because they’ll be getting the profits if successful.

The banks can maintain a central body with insurance to bail out the failed ones which is essentially what FDIC is. That part isn't the government stepping in.

The step in part is what VCs and corps are asking for which is to be made whole. In reality they should have realized -- as sophisticated actors -- that large amounts of money are always at risk. Even if you put them in a bank because it is not a vault. They're investments that you just don't have control over.

If the wish was to secure their millions to billions of capitals it should have been invested by them in some sort of instrument. This is what any treasury in a large corp already does. So it isn't unknown knowledge.

It would be as if they stored their most critical IP in a cloud server. It went down and now they want to be made whole.

You can't arbitrate away large financial risk anymore than you can technical risk. So you must understand it when you're dealing with substantial amounts of it.

FDICs 250K limit works fine for unsophisticated retail customers.

You realize that the "sophisticated actors" here are by and large employers, right? Depending on how much and how fast they get their money back, it isn't just those folks who are going to pay the price. It's the people employed by them who will suffer first, and their spouses and kids (assuming they have them).

This "they should have known better" narrative is garbage. Companies have no choice but to park money in amounts greater than $250K. Some of the companies with SVB (as I understand it) were required to bank with them. There's also the fact that SVB might well have been fine if not for the Thiel-induced run on the bank.

But even if I bought into the idea that primary depositors were at fault, I'm not keen to see all the collateral damage that's going to come out of this and hit workers and their families.

> centralized authority stepping in to regulate and control what goes on, for the "good of the people".

This is just my definition of “government”.

Actually the definition of socialism is social ownership of the means of production. It does not require centralisation or even a state.

It's the same. How you organize "the people" is irrelevant.

Is this really so hard for Americans to understand?

"Socialism" has become a dirty word in the US largely due to historical reasons involving the cold war.

As a result its definition in the minds of Americans is very often something completely different than the actual definition.

Basically it's just the evolution of language. They're two different words now, depending which side of the Atlantic you're on.

Yes, because in America, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are labeled “socialists” even though they are on opposite ends of the political left. Joe Biden doesn’t even support Medicare for All, the most socialist healthcare idea we have; instead, he pushes the ACA, which was originally a Federalist Society (read conservative capitalists) healthcare plan implemented by a Republican governor in Massachusetts. But somehow Joe Biden is a “socialist”.

That should have been clear already when there were the stimulus checks. Type of socialist activity that wouldn't fly in many of the so called socialist countries...

A few tax refunds in a national crisis is not socialism. It would have been socialism if the US government nationalized failing companies (instead of giving trillions in handouts), and transferred ownership of those to the people in some form.

I sold my time to a company owned by capitalists. The money I made was taxed by the government. The government then realized I needed some of that money back and they gave it to me in a stimulus check. I still work at a company owned by capitalists.

The above (true) story happened under a capitalist system, and has nothing at all to do with socialism.

Wrong. Socialism is about social ownership vs. private ownership.

Socialism is not about a (functioning) central regulation, like we have in many countries around the world and many countries based in Europe.

It's the same. How you organize "the people" is irrelevant.

Nope. Lufthansa doesn't belong to the people. Siemens doesn't belong to the people. Infineon doesn't belong to the people.

Yet, even in the health care system the inssurers are private and doesn't belong to the people. It is just regulated how the system works.

Socialism is way more than that...You can't simply take one feature and point to it.

Socialism, by definition, is the public ownership of the means of production. Governmental regulation certainly could be a mechanism for that, but unless I am misinformed, it is not the sole mechanism available.