Tag: unique ecosystem
Why Didn’t Anyone Do Anything About Silicon Valley Bank?
On January 18, a prominent financial newsletter noted that if Silicon Valley Bank were liquidated that day, “it would be functionally underwater.” Months before the nation’s 16th-largest bank collapsed, incomplete information provided to regulators indicated that the bank was stable, whereas public signals—such as SVB’s overreliance on longer-term securities hammered by rising interest rates—told a very different story. So why didn’t anyone do something?
To help answer this question, I turned to Natasha Sarin, a lawyer and an economist teaching
Big Tech Founders Are America’s False Idols
My first job out of UCLA was in the analyst program at Morgan Stanley, in the 1980s. Like most of my analyst class, I had no idea what investment banking was—only that we were at the helm of the capitalist bobsled and could make a lot of money. We paid scant consideration to the wider role finance played in society. We were charged with birthing the apex predator of the capitalist species, the public company. Our economic mission, we