Not to me. All I see is corporations that accept money, do god knows what with them and cause the money to evaporate into thin air. It doesn't really matter how much the government "approves" of the reserves and investments of banks. They're still all the same: literally one bank run away from insolvency.
B: "We bought a house for the founder's parents while they advised ways to hide it and threw millions of dollars at the insolvent-by-design crypto fund of somebody in the boss's polycule."
You: "No difference detected."
For real?
A: "We take customer money and risk it."
B: "We take customer money and risk it."
Just because one puts the money into "safe" investments does not make them any different. It's still a bank doing fractional reserve banking.
SVB: our shitty compliance department bought bonds (a government requirement) with too long of a maturity date to sell in a bank run.
One is incompetent and the other is malicious.
Also fractional banking is literally required by law.
SVB didn’t break laws, just as you said, didn’t properly manage risk. If there was no run, they’d have made it through, just with low earnings expectations.
FTX took customer money, gave it to friends, and used sticky notes and slack channels for accounting. FTX spent customer funds on beach houses and political ads and god knows what not on government bonds with a slightly too long maturity.
“Real” banks, government approved ones, have laws governing how much cash to keep on hand, and how to “invest” the excess, etc. SVB did everything by the books and they’d probably have made it through to the other side if there wasn’t a bank run. They just had underwater investments if sold (but they’d be fine if held to maturity).
FTX was literal fraud and they didn’t protect money. They gave it to friends, and sister companies, and made a lot of bad decisions with it. There’s a big difference between that and SVB.
Oh and of course everyone was made whole in the end after SVB