The 2008 financial disaster led to regulations on banks which largely seem to avoid the need for govt bailouts of the big banks, but these regulations only patched up the type of issue 2008 posed, in particular working for banks where the majority of holders have below $250K.

In the cases of SVB you have a totally different kind of bank with 90%+ of the capital in accounts well above $250K. And the size of the bank was right below where regulations kick in, so the issue here is not that the bank in itself was too big, if anything it was too small, it's that if this previously top notch regional bank failed in a way that hurt depositors, a slew of other regional bank runs would follow.

Not sure what the long term solution is, but there will probably be additional regulation to patch up this kind of issue and at the least any VC will ask startups to prove that their capital is diversified as a condition for investment.

Not sure what SVB's total assets were but in 2018 Congress changed up the asset size requirements in which Dodd-Frank regulations kick in [1]. Seems like the sensible thing to do is to rollback those changes and put Dodd-Frank back to its initial state.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/6/17081508/se...

Their point entirely is the opposite - that a pull of deposits on Monday would have destroyed banks that are small. and deposits would get consolidated into the big 4 "too big to fail" banks.

If I can paraphrase: "the risk would have been that banks that are too small would have been emptied, because a clear delineation would have been set between those that are too big to fail, and those that are not. This hazard induced by the existance of too-big-to-fail banks makes it hard to have small banks. Therefore, the solution to declare small banks somewhat too-big-to-fail and bail them out beyond legal obligations is reasonable."

It is reasonable, you are not wrong! But this slope is getting slippier. Something needs fixing, even if this bailout is the right thing to do.

I don't want to argue against this bailout, I want to argue against a system that forces everyone's hands into bailouts every so often.

to add, note SVB did "fail". investors, shareholders, executives (bar the insider selling) lost everything. so clearly they weren't "too big to fail".