u/Longjumping-Ease-353: How can financial journalism be improved to prevent future black swan events? Like Enron, theranos, maddoff, SBF, we work, Lehman bros and SVB?

Sam here: Great question. Victoria and I were talking about it offline. On the one hand the Theranos story was a product of tremendous journalism.With that said, a lot of it has to do with building up knowledge around finance, markets, regulation, policy etc. That takes time and commitment to the profession. The other thing to remember is that the media landscape's wider and thinner than it was when there were multiple daily papers competing for the same market. Markets are much larger, but journalism's shrunk. Time and investment is the only way that improves.

u/boazg: Are we expecting a chain reaction of more banks collapsing due to the global nature of panic these days?

The Fed has intervened to insulate open banks against liquidity concerns related to the open banks. Preventing a contagion likely played a role in invoking these systemic risk authorities for banks that are otherwise not central to the financial system. Crisis-fighters largely lost their authorities after the 2008 financial crisis to protect individual banks from contagion without first closing them. So, responding so forcefully to these relatively insignificant banks' failures so forcefully hopefully limits contagion to any banks that may actually be more prone to spreading financial wildfire.
the other thing worth noting is that this has primarily been a run on one kind of business model: banking tech/VC/Silicon Valley - which itself is facing belt-tightening as the Fed has raised interest rates steeply. We have not seen signs of contagion large, diversified banks - which are actually experiencing deposit inflows. — Steven

u/SockPuppetsUnite45: Does this mark the beginning of the end for bank deregulation legislation that is framed as 'right sized or tailored regulation'?

Unlikely. Tailoring as a broad and general concept is something that seems pretty logical: a community bank with less than $1 billion in assets and does mostly just basic lending shouldn't face the same type of regulations as a megabank with $3 trillion in assets. How exactly that all shakes out is very complicated (and, as you implicitly suggest, offers a lot of room for mischief). But certainly, this has likely made both lawmakers and regulators much less sympathetic to arguments from banks, say, between $100 billion and $250 billion in size, that they don't pose risks to the economy. — Victoria

u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9: What are SVB's assets? Does the depositer's refund come from bank reserves or the FDIC?

SVB's assets are largely longer-term Treasuries and government-backed mortgage securities. These securities have little risk of loss if they're held to maturity, but they lost paper value as interest rates increased - so when SVB lost deposits and had to sell assets, they had to bear those losses.
While depositors have immediate access to their funds—which may needed to be funded in the short-term by the FDIC—the FDIC will only lose money if its sale of the assets (and/or liabilities) of SVB is less than enough to cover all the depositors. And, if the FDIC's insurance fund dips below what it determines to be sufficient coverage for the system - it will levy the banking system for the shortcoming. — Steven

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