The 40-year-old bank with a good reputation was offering deals that were too good to be true, like 4.5% APR on a savings account (other high yield savings accounts are at 3.5% right now, and those are online banks that achieve those rates by having minimal overhead). Naive startup founders aside, the VCs should have known better than to think interest rates like that were coming from a bank that was playing it safe, and for them to now be asking for the taxpayer to make up the difference between the bank's assets and their startups' deposits is weird.

They knew they were advising their startups to put all of their money into a high reward system, but we're supposed to believe that they didn't realize that was also high risk?