https://thespectator.com/topic/great-comeuppance-economy-silicon-valley-bank/
You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in the café car. So the train is always full of strivers, working their cell phones. On Tuesday morning, the phone chitchat was anxious. Even in Washington, where analysts and economists had been working all weekend to contain the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the reeling of the financial system when markets opened on Monday caught people by surprise.
It shouldn’t have. The last time bankers ran off with the savings of their compatriots was only fifteen years ago. A lot of people at the time asked: “How could we have been so gullible?” But really, Americans, Englishmen and other finance-dependent peoples had reason to be trusting. The young bankers in all those photos from the time may have looked ridiculous — standing with their backs to the plate-glass windows of a Lehman Brothers conference room to receive their walking papers, or lined up with cardboard boxes to cart their office possessions home. But what strikes us now is that they were so numerous. There were whole skyscrapers full of them, devising their multivariable hocus-pocus and bragging about their sailboats to young women in wine bars after work. Few liked them as a group. But they seemed the product of a real, stable, indispensable service industry. By contrast, whenever SVB has been mentioned in recent days, you see a lot of B-roll of automatic teller machines. You wonder if they have any employees. Whenever the cryptocurrency-focused Signature Bank is mentioned, you see empty shop fronts in malls. You wonder if they have any customers.