When Big Things Fail

Whodunnit Part One: Banks

Photo by Jon Vio on Unsplash

I believe that just about any large failure typically has multiple contributing factors — that pointing the finger at one event, or one person, is usually short-sighted and just plain not good enough.

Take any large failure you can think of. Here, I’ll help with some recent examples, and we’ll see if my beliefs make sense.

Part One is banks. Part Two will be about trains, and Part Three about insurrection.

Banks

One of the most recent big failures in the news is the spectacular crash of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and later closure of Signature Bank two days later. I saw an interesting MSNBC segment about this, which included a neat graphic I’ll share:

Screenshot by author from MSNBC segment, accessed 3/14/23

That’s right, this recent failure of these two banks ranks right after our country’s biggest prior bank failure in 2008. Whew!

I’m not a savvy financial guy at all, so needed a little help in understanding how and why this occurred. I got a little help from an article from The Hill. Here’s an excerpt that seemed pertinent to my search for reasons — at least it began that way (original links left…