I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand.

It's time for some money rehab.

When Silicon Valley Bank or SVB collapsed on Friday, March 10, the government spent the

weekend scrambling to find a buyer.

At first, there was a general feeling that it wouldn't be too hard.

While SVB had badly managed their interest rate risk by having a lot of long-term, low-interest

investments and high volatility startup clients, both of those were valuable assets on their

own, even if they were toxic together.

But there were two big problems with selling SVB.

One was simply that the banks that can easily afford that massive price tag were already

large enough.

At the end of last year, SVB had $209 billion in assets and $175 billion in deposits.

That's not money you can just find in the couch cushions, right?

Even after the collapse, they were still an expensive little fixer-upper of a bank.

But the federal government isn't interested in the large banks like Bank of America, who

could quickly come up with the cash for getting even bigger because, you know, monopolies.

The second problem is that these sorts of acquisitions come with risk.

When JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns in 2008, it ended up paying $19 billion in fees, which

it hadn't anticipated when it bought the company.

The deal went so badly that the CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Diamond, has made it very clear

that he would not buy the next Bear Stearns, aka SVB.

JP Morgan got burned so badly on the deal that Diamond doesn't even think the board

...