…or cheat
By 
The internal risk-management models showed that Silicon Valley Bank executives were proposing a foolish risk. The response of the executives was to change the models to that they used transparently false assumptions:
Flush with cash from a booming tech industry, Silicon Valley Bank executives embarked on a strategy in 2020 to juice profits that quickly triggered an internal alarm.
In buying longer-term investments that paid more interest, SVB had fallen out of compliance with a key risk metric. An internal model showed that higher interest rates could have a devastating impact on the bank’s future earnings, according to two former employees familiar with the modeling who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential deliberations.
Instead of heeding that warning — and over the concerns of some staffers — SVB executives simply changed the model’s assumptions, according to the former employees and securities filings. The tweaks, which have not been previously reported, initially predicted that rising interest rates would have minimal impact.
We can argue about whether depositors should have been made whole, but the shareholders and the executives had to be wiped out.