At least part of what went wrong at SVB is that the bank invested too much in long-term Treasury and mortgage bonds. These are normally super-safe investments, in the sense that they won't default. But when interest rates rise, they lose their value temporarily. At SVB, that situation scared depositors, who pulled their money out en masse, ...

We Americans love a good twofer. We hunger for a free lunch. Two (or three) birds are always better than one, and so on. Unfortunately, this approach has infected our industrial policymaking, too, sticking taxpayers with lots of big, expensive, larded-up programs that try to achieve everything, a little bit. However noble the aims of ...