Putting your company money in a bank account should be safe. We should regulate banks like SVB to make it more safe. We should also make sure when the regulations fail the people who use a bank, they can continue doing business.
So no, it's not a depositor bailout for everything greater than $250k.
SVB is a special case -- a bank focused on commercial customer base.
But above that bucket, people/orgs are expected to know and appropriately manage the risks that they're taking with their money or have the float to pay someone who does.
Experienced money doesn't see large bank deposits as safe by nature because they never have been. It's only people new to wealth and chronically blind to tail risk (hello startup industry!) that assume a $5M portfolio can be treated as casually as their personal checking account.
It's also possible that the FDIC might sell the remnants of Silicon Valley Bank to a larger bank that will assume all deposits.
If it was some small bank that was only impacting “regular people”, then probably the government would not do anything.
But that is not the case here. The depositors of SVB are very wealthy and powerful. Also the standard process of selling assets is too slow, and that delay could create a catastrophic domino effect. Famous investors are already calling for the government to fix the issue within 48hrs.
Maybe the government will step in as a temporary lender, letting depositors borrow against their deposits, which they will eventually get back.
If you've got $25,000,000 dollars at SVB, you need 100 accounts. This is not rocket science. I really hope that they find a buyer to make depositors whole but if one cannot be found why should the public reimburse depositors for more than 250K simply because they were too cheap to hire a couple of accountants to manage it?
But doesn't mean it is unreasonable to expect people with this level of cash funds not to have more than one egg basket. Split it in two, three or four. One goes down, you still have money locked up but can use other accounts to take care daily operations and possibly mitigate some of the issues.
Every depositor has 1 account per account type per institution insured up to 250k.
If you had 100 accounts of the same type at the same institution, you're still only getting 250k back from the FDIC.
To do what you're proposing, you'd have to have 100 accounts at different FDIC insured institutions. The logistics there is vastly different, but meshes quite well with designing for fault tolerance/resilience.