Silicon Valley Bank’s name isn’t just hollow branding. Founded in Santa Clara in the 1980s, in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech cluster, it was a regional bank that served the local economy.
As that local economy became the engine of American growth, SVB – which collapsed on Friday – grew alongside it. It remained a tech specialist, a limitation that allowed it to continue to be regulated as a regional bank and so avoid the stricter requirements piled on larger competitors, but otherwise spread across the US and the world.
