The entire Silicon Valley Bank debacle was started by a single blogger in Austin | Hacker News Reader

The entire Silicon Valley Bank debacle was started by a single blogger in Austin

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21 pointsrmason21 comments

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The debacle was started by SVB, I personally find it unfair to blame mismanagement on a whistleblower.

I heard they didn't hedge their interest rate risk. If true this sounds like a rookie mistake.

We have a bad habit as a society of blaming whistleblowers and short sellers for the misdeeds of others.

Or rather, society wants to blame individuals because corporations have been centerpieces in all forums.

Blame? Sounds more like giving credit where it's due.

is the guy who pays for the blue checkmark the same guy who pasted the link to his own tweet?

>Kinda insane that this entire debacle was potentially caused by @ByrneHobart 's newsletter

No. If one blog post can take down your company the issue isn't the blogpost, it's the environment that enabled that blog post to do the damage. This is the equivalent of the "one gunshot caused WW I" logic. Stop blaming the last person to pull a piece out of the Jenga tower

Interesting.. Reminds me of the South Korean financial blogger who was arrested for causing a dip in the stock market with his blog posts. One person, one post, can really cause major things to move.

https://www.wired.com/2009/10/mf-minerva/

Imagine a large rock balanced on the edge of a precipice, it could be a strong breeze, an ice heave, or somebody pushing on it... but none of those agents pushed the rock out on the edge in the first place.

Not sure if it's what OP intended but I signed up to the newsletter.

So what's this, shoot the messenger?

It seems to me this whole debacle was ultimately caused by the fed's aggressive rate rises due to their wrongheaded obsession with inflation.

How can you blame the fed for the bank not having funds to cover the deposits?

Because actions of fed made the bank unstable. By lowering value of things it hold

And then other people attacked it causing a bank run that put it over the edge.

Without the run, it likely could still be operating without too big issues.

The bank chose to make risky investments with the deposits it held. That's on the bank, not the fed.

US Treasuries?

The Fed (the reserve and the FDIC) in addition to The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency regulate banking practices. If banks are failing then it's the lack of proper regulation that's responsible.

Regulation is not to designed to prevent every failure. Banks are private, not owned by the state, as the U.S. is a capitalist system.

Regulation should exist to limit or eliminate the risk of Americans having to pay to cover for bad executive decision making. The whole point of laws and regulations are to protect people and their interests. It is in the public interest to have a stable banking system, and it's also in the public interest to not have to pay premiums for deposit insurance (which we all currently do)

It's only a bad thing if there are shorts on the side from the big whales who started pulling levers. I mean, would ANYTHING be done about it? No.

And if the bank could be propped despite what the evil soloblogger power-tweeted, would the gov't prop it up? Yeah. Oh wait, unless some powerful people influenced the govt not too...

I was just trying to retrace the "Global. Coordinated. Recession." Tweet from a few months back, which got walked back. Is a banking crisis an attempt to make another recession since inflation, rate hikes, etc aren't doing a very good job?

Let's see how govt. handles this. I think if they just stand by, we can maybe assume that this kind of consequence is sort-of a deliberate part of the rate policy.

If only we didn't know none of this would be happening.

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