> The CEO may have made out like a bandit, but the shareholders lost everything, and the next set of shareholders will think twice before retaining a CEO that engages in high-risk activities.

OK, so you can only rip everyone else off massively once.

Yeah, and once you do that, the shareholders at other banks will be asking their CEOs questions, like 'Prove to us that you're not doing the same shit that sunk SVB.'

Yup. And so all the bank failures in the 1930s made sure that no one made the mistake again.

Pretty much. I know you're trying to be sarcastic but the class of "mistakes" that took down banks back then really doesn't happen anymore.

Eh, those mistakes happen still, we just don't let consequences of them happen.

SVB shareholders losing 100% of their investment seems like a consequence. They are probably kicking themselves for not doing more DD over the C-suite.

Sure. The point I was making that the mistakes which caused bank failures in 1930s and bank failures today, is fundamentally the same kind of mistakes. Ergo, we still make those mistakes; they still happen, we just don't let depositors bear the consequences of it anymore.

True, we've invented new classes of "mistakes". It's fucking ridiculous. There's something very wrong with American banks and if the only solution we can come up with is further consolidation we're going to be in for a bumpy ride.

ING, before they bailed on US retail operations, only offered adjustable rate mortgages. They were also the only financial institution I ever dealt with that required the use of separate credentials for external banking integration (e.g. tax prep, quicken, whatever shiny new app).

The 'shareholders' are all 401k fund managers. They make sure their CEO friends come in and get paid. It doesn't matter to the 'shareholders' if one or two companies go bust, they collect the fees anyway, and the losses are socialized across an entire country's retirement accounts.

Yeah, how much did I lose because these fraudsters mixed themselves into broad market indices?

$15.5B market cap Wednesday to S&P500's ~$32.3T. If you held the S&P500, you lost about 0.05% when SIVB got zeroed. In comparison, S&P500 was down 1.45% Friday. (Almost all of the impact to your retirement from SVB's failure will be from indirect effects, like downswings in other bank stocks, rather than direct losses from SIVB. Unless you held a highly concentrated position in SIVB.)

So your saying somebody like SVB would never hire the person at the helm of the Lehman Brothers implosion?