[bagacrap]

What's an individual supposed to do, pay for an audit of a bank's balance sheet?

The bank had poor risk management, regulators were asleep at the wheel, depositors are blameless. Although I will say that a startup with millions in the bank should probably have a CFO.

[kasey_junk]

Large deposit holders audit bank balance sheets as a matter of course. It’s a standard risk management function for corporate treasuries.

That it’s apparently news to a bunch of cash heavy depositors at SVB is one of the more revealing parts of the crisis to me.

[phoehne]

If you bank with publicly traded banks, they publish their financial statements and those statements are audited. They are freely available for you to read and contain a lot of good information. You could watch, for example, SVBs interest expense grow unsustainably, quarter after quarter. That's what the shorts picked up on and why some investors built up a short position on SVB.

That being said, two people running an Etsy store won't do that. Nor should they have to. Maybe the insurance should be bumped up, but for either a very limited time, until you write new, official rules. And yes, the CFO should do an appropriate level of due diligence for a large business with lots of money. It makes you wonder what some of the CFOs did all day.

[watwut]

You can insure larger deposits. It costs a bit more and that is about it.