Silicon Valley Bank went broke, but not because it was woke
Passing the buck is an all-American sport | Illustration by Hugo Herrera / The Verge
The culture war has come for the banks, and friends, it is stupid.
There are a wide variety of proposed explanations for the fall of Silicon Valley Bank. For instance, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has suggested SVB’s board “may have been distracted by diversity demands” as I guess it had too many women, too many Black people (one), too many queer people (again, one), and too many veterans (???).
Meanwhile, in The Financial Times, the problem is that Silicon Valley Bank let people work from home. “It is harder to have a challenging call over Zoom. It makes it harder to challenge management,” according to Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University who the FT chose to quote for some reason. “Ideas like hedging interest…
