Better for whom?
It seems to me that institutions that serve the public should do so with transparency. The idea that “the experts” know better than “the public” is a dangerous and elitist one. The suggestion that “the experts” be allowed to hide their math while they fumble at the economy trying to make a buck is absurd
Given this fact, should experts say things that may cause this panic?
If so, it's unlikely that more obfuscation is the solution.
1. Keep deposit rates near zero, in which case depositors would progressively realize that they could be making 4.5% on their money elsewhere and withdraw their funds. This ends up being exactly the same as the bank run that happened, just in slower motion.
2. Raise deposit rates, in which case, they would start losing money until they were forced to sell assets to pay depositors their interest. Those HTM assets would then be marked to market and the bank would be officially undercapitalized and taken over by the FDIC.
3. Raise capital or sell the bank. They tried raising capital unsuccessfully. Given this, it's questionable whether they would have been successful at selling the bank because it's unclear whether the bank had a positive value.
That’s why there’s a distinction because it gives an invalid view as well. Plus there’s a footnote in the 10K that gives the value at fair value.
Source? A report by JP Morgan contradicts your claim
https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/ins... (see "Impact of unrealized securities losses on capital ratios", all banks are comfortably above water).
Now, what could be quibbled with is who is actually an expert. Having a lot of money and having founded a successful tech company 25 years ago does not make you an expert at everything.
I like to say that, too, but it's not technically true. It's confusing median with mean.
Human intelligence (usually IQ) is not something that can be measured in a vacuum, so it is generally measured in comparison to the whole. So scores are adjusted on a bell curve such that the mean and median score are the same. For IQ that is 100.
So in the case of measuring intelligence, mean always equals median.
But if we were talking about income, then of course you would be right. Way more than half of the world is below the average income.
Not necessary
In a perfect world, exactly half of a population will be (equal to or) below any average when frequency is a normal distribution. Like IQ scores. So when they say "half of the population is below average [IQ]", it's not complete nonsense.
While that is a very vaguely defined term which is hard to measure accurately, it seem likely that it does not follow a normal distribution but is rather has a bulge at the lower end and have a long tail at the upper end. If this hand-wavey distribution is accepted, that would likely mean that fewer than half are above average. But again, that is contingent on the distribution and not a necessary truth.
> the median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution
If we're including private companies, how far does that go? Should I be allowed to look at the financials of local restaurants?
I think you mean something different, but SVB went public in 1987.
Transparency in publicly-traded companies is obviously important.
SVB was subject to all of the usual reporting and disclosure rules.