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And Kessler isn’t the only one pushing this narrative. Republican Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs pushed the “woke mind virus” bull in a Monday tweet, saying “[SVB’s] resources should have not been blown on woke/DEI initiatives instead of actual financial management.”

We’ve come to expect this rhetoric from the far right at this point, though of course the Journal is going to make it out to be personal failures rather than institutional issues why such a bank went under. To be clear, it’s not hard to find examples why SVB made the wrong decisions, and when. The speed of Silicon Valley Bank’s sudden decline was on par with recent crypto exchange failures, and it’s emblematic of just how little anyone was really paying attention.

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Longtime consumer protection hawk Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote in a New York Times piece that SVB CEO Greg Becker was “one of the many high-powered executives” who lobbied to end the Dodd-Frank Act. That law was passed after the 2008 financial crisis to increase transparency at banks. In 2018, Congress voted to roll back parts of Dodd-Frank, leaving just 10 banks subject to strict oversight. Guess what, Silicon Valley Bank was just the 16th largest in the U.S.

Kessler usually has some pretty dry opinions on tech business, at best. Other times, his column reads more like your average tech libertarian offering his best excuse for why we should just let the multi-billion dollar companies complete massive mergers that don’t have any real benefit to consumers because, uhhh, “innovation.” At other times, he’s had some very wrong opinions about climate change.

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Everyone agrees something was rotten with SVB, but no, diversity wasn’t a part of it. Everybody loses when nobody’s making sure banks aren’t screwing people over. You now have folks selling SVB swag at insanely inflated prices on eBay, so at least a few folks are making something out of the debacle.