This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 4th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Federal Reserve's assessment of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank is out,

so who is to blame in the Fed's telling?

Cato's Norbert Michelle explains and offers some advice for policy makers seeking to reassure

depositors while making the banking sector more robust.

Michael Barr is the Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision.

He recently issued a report on the failure of

S. V. The sort of high profile Silicon Valley Bank

that has since been

is it resolved? Is that the right word? We can go with resolved. Yeah, it's okay.

It's been wrapped up. Dissolved. Dissolved definitely. Resolved quite possibly.

So the Federal Reserve essentially blames the failure on management and inadequate supervision.

And Barr himself has called for more supervision I guess

potentially more regulation of a

what do you basically based on what you know of this report what are your takeaways?

Well, I think it's positive in the sense that he didn't simply blame any kind of red herring and didn't just put all the blame off onto the private sector, onto the banks.

He is pretty open or the report I should say. The

report's pretty open in terms of saying, hey look, regulators screwed up here.

You know, that's, I'm paraphrasing but but they did the

report does admit that it doesn't go as far as I would like. It refers to certain failures that they had and says, well, we don't really know why. We can't really tell why. It's hard to say why. And that I find baffling.

The feds regulated S. V.

...