A boarded up Silicon Valley Bank branch in San Francisco, March 13, 2023. Credit: Jeff Chiu via AP Newsroom
No two crises are alike. That is true of recent financial upheavals – the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the dot-com crisis of 2000, and the global financial crisis of 2008-09. It is also the case with crises sparked by geostrategic shocks, such as wars, pestilence, famine, and pandemics.
Today, we are witnessing a potentially lethal interplay between these two sources of upheaval: a financial crisis, reflected in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and a geostrategic crisis, reflected in the deepening cold war between the United States and China. While the origins of each crisis are different, in one sense it doesn’t really matter: The outcome of their interaction is likely to be greater than the sum of the parts.
The failure of SVB is symptomatic of a far bigger problem: a US financial system that is woefully unprepared for the return of inflation and the concomitant normalization of monetary policy. SVB risk managers were in deep denial of such an outcome, a
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