Ask HN: Who / is anyone going to jail over SVB catastrophe?
The short answer is no one knows yet. However, I do think asserting &quot;it looks like a clear case people made reckless actions&quot; is premature. You&#x27;re making pretty broad assumptions in the absence of sufficient evidence. Just because a bank fails doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean any individual has committed a criminal act.<p>I posted the following in one of the main SVB threads in response to a question:<p>What will probably happen:<p>- Regulators will sell SVB to a bigger bank at a greatly reduced price which makes it worthwhile for the buyer.<p>- Depositors will be able to withdraw up to $250k cash starting Monday (the FDIC insured amount).<p>- Funds above that will eventually be recoverable in phases with the first chunk available by the end of next week (because SVB does have billions in cash, the issue is with the long-term value of their investments not meeting regulatory requirements.)<p>- If the system works properly, it&#x27;s highly likely depositors will get 100% back. It may just take a little longer.<p>- There will be an investigation of the bank and its board&#x27;s Risk Committee. Things aren&#x27;t looking great for the CEO and the former Chief Risk Officer who unloaded some of their stock but that&#x27;s more of an &#x27;insider trading&#x27; beef against those individuals (ie unrelated to the bank&#x27;s failure). So far, in terms of risk management, it doesn&#x27;t appear SVB did anything out of bounds or even unprecedented.<p>Arguably, as conditions changed last year they chose a particular investment strategy which would normally have worked out but instead hit a pretty unlikely perfect storm of external factors including the Fed raising rates really fast. We don&#x27;t have all the info on who knew what and when but my guess is: if there&#x27;s &quot;wrongdoing&quot; here, it&#x27;s probably more stuff like not taking the corrective steps they took this week sooner. They may have been hoping to &quot;play through&quot; the rough patch and it could have worked - but this time it didn&#x27;t because there was a run by their unusually close-connected depositors in the tech startup community.<p>(Note: some folks are arguing that the Fed itself created a volatile situation for this bank (and others) by doing pretty unprecedented things which rapidly impacted the bond markets and other securities tied to Fed rates. I find this argument not entirely unreasonable. We won&#x27;t know root causes until regulators unwind this.)