This whole thing feels like Toilet Paper Crisis 2.0 - purely created by consumers acting irrationally.
They failed because they over invested in near 0% interest US treasuries, and then the Fed rapidly hiked rates to 5%, quickly collapsing the value of those low interest treasuries on the market.
The investments themselves, and the promised return, were always "risk free", but the house of cards collapses when everyone demands their money now. And when people are looking at their savings interest rate of 0.1%, and seeing other banks offering 4%, it becomes very easy for a bank run to start as people simply move their money chasing yield.
The problem seems multi-faceted and complex, and like most complex problems, true blame is likely diffuse and shared amongst everyone, the customers, the banks, and the Fed. This is usually the kind of situation where societies elect a scapegoat to murder so they can all go about their business pretending to solved the problem and purged the evil from amongst their ranks.
Shouldn't they have been ready for that scenario and hedged against it though?
A big lesson there, beyond don't fight the Fed, is don't trust the Fed.
These banks were not hedging their duration risk, which means that they were in fact making risky investments. Their failures lie solely on the bank management and fund managers.
Long terms bonds are risky and they knew it.
You make it sound like they were funding Musk's purchase of Twitter, when in fact they simply had too much of their money locked in treasury bills (typically considered the safest possible investment) to face off a sudden and massive run on their bank.
If you don’t, then clearly you’re irrational and everyone who did get out first was of course a terrible person (per the discussion).
Like a classic ponzi scheme I guess?
Same thing happened for other items like flour. Suddenly everyone was baking at home and restaurants weren't buying 50lb sacks of flour anymore. Plenty of flour, improperly packaged.
In retrospect, I'd say that the first wave of people overstocking TP weren't totally irrational.
The bank's only moral imperative (a misnomer for a bank, I'm aware), per their agreement with you, is to have your money safe when you come for it (even if "you" is everyone).
The TP company, they want to use just-in-time inventory, and that works 90%+ of the years, fine, but don't go blaming the consumer because they did too much of a good thing for you, and your workflows were too fragile to scale up.
I laughed. I know you weren’t talking about customers shitting, but that’s where I went.