Silicon Valley Bank’s demise on one level is a straightforward tale of a financial screw-up. A massively bad bet on interest rates caused painful paper declines in its investments, forcing the bank to sell securities at an actual loss.
This could have happened to any bank. Once depositors learnt they might lose access to their cash, they panicked and began withdrawing en masse. Poof: Silicon Valley Bank incinerated in two days. In purely technical terms, this had nothing to do with the tech industry clients it served.
