How many bank failures before America learns its lesson?

Regarding “Thiessen: Big Government set stage for bank’s collapse,” (March 16): Marc Thiessen trots out the worn-out shibboleth that the scariest sentence in the English language is “I am from the government, and I’m here to help.” Whom would Mr. Thiessen call if his house catches fire? The fire department, of course. Oops, it is the government. The police department is also a government agency. Did Mr. Thiessen support the call to defund the police? Of course not! He is a law-and-order conservative, and he has objected vehemently to defunding the police.

So it seems that getting help from the government is not that scary after all.

Mr. Thiessen expresses objection to the monetary intervention by the Federal Reserve Bank during the 2008 financial crisis. He probably prefers the no-intervention policy of the feds in 1929. Oops. That non-intervention brought about the Great Depression. Mr. Thiessen also objects to the FDIC guaranteeing deposits in the Silicon Valley Bank beyond the $250,000 limit. By his own reasoning, he should object to guaranteeing any deposits. Let depositors buy their own deposit insurance. Oops. Mr. Thiessen probably has his own bank deposits that he would not like to lose.

Governing is hard. It is done by fleshand-blood human beings who make mistakes. We need a smart debate about the proper relationship between state and markets. But parroting old slogans, as Mr. Thiessen does, will not get us anywhere.

Moshe Y. Vardi, Houston

Regarding “Krugman: Silicon Valley Bank Isn’t Lehman,” (March 16): Here we have two fundamentally different perspectives on the SVB failure. One from Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist. The other from Marc Thiessen, a political hack who once wrote a book defending torture. Readers will judge for themselves which commentary is less painful to get through. Personally, I’d prefer waterboarding to reading an entire book written by Thiessen. But I digress.

How many times in American history do we have to see a financial crisis immediately preceded by financial deregulation to acknowledge that there might be a causal trend? After the Great Depression, the savings and loan crash in the 1990s, the Enron debacle, the 2008 crisis and this most recent failure, one would think it would be pretty obvious. While I’m definitely no economist, I suppose it’s fair to take issue with the FDIC stepping in to insure above and beyond the $250,000 limit. But pretending that lack of oversight, with the greed and speculation that followed, didn’t play a part? Pure delusion, sliced to pieces by Occam’s Razor. Blaming it on “Big Gubment” is almost as dumb as blaming it on wokeness.

But that’s Thiessen’s trend: He’s an apologist who, for some reason, contorts himself to excuse bad human behavior.

Robert Campbell, Katy

Regarding the failure of SVB, it is totally irresponsible for the FDIC to fully insure all the depositors’ money. The purpose of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was to protect the deposits of ordinary people, not protect the assets of wealthy people. So now the government is rewarding terrible bank management and imprudent depositing of money. Companies have options for depositing money other than regular bank accounts. How in the world could a supposedly “smart” company like Roku have roughly $487 million deposited in SVB? The fat cats now benefit from the gains, and the government will step in and protect them from their losses. Just what we need from our government. Robert Hemphill, Houston

Regarding “Fed criticized for missing red flags before bank collapse,” (March 14): I spotted something in this article from the AP. The CEO of SVB lobbied Congress for oversight relief of his bank category, and he served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the branch of the Federal Reserve which was responsible for oversight of SVB. Lobbying Congress is considered legal (though maybe ethically murky), but sitting as a board member on the very institution that is supposed to regulate his activities regarding the common good just has to be a clear conflict of interest. How in-bed is the banking industry with its regulators in the whole “independent” agency artifice called the central bank? Shouldn’t it be illegal, even a felony, for such conflicts to knowingly exist? I have recently said to myself “at least there are grown-ups regulating the financial system” whenever the politicos go off the deep end, but if this sort of behavior is common, then we are in trouble! The independent Fed was created by law, and the law can be changed to prohibit and penalize this kind of unseemly conduct. Walt Lind, Nassau Bay