Seemingly every day, somebody, somewhere, publishes a new postmortem on last month’s turmoil in the US banking sector.

Humanity’s perverse fascination with calamity, which I lament at regular intervals, means all market mishaps are monetizable events.

That doesn’t mean all financial journalism is a manifestation of the profit motive, but then again, what else is there at the end of the day? If you have any overhead or non-trivial fixed costs (and I don’t, by the way), keeping the proverbial lights on isn’t cheap. Catastrophes, collapses and crashes pay the bills and the margins on disaster coverage are usually fat.

Pulitzers are great, but good reporting requires a lot of time and investment. Sure, you could change the world, but you have to tie up resources, often for quite a while. There are usually legal risks involved, and depending on what kind of story it is, and where your journalists have to go to get it, people could die, in a worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, any new grad from a decent journalism program can write another superfluous sequel to an extant body of crisis coverage, particularly if there’s an easy hook. It won’t cost you anything beyond their meager salary, and it can be done and published in a day.

That’s not to disparage incremental Silicon Valley Bank coverage, but… well, mistakes were made at SVB and also around SVB. There’s plenty of blame to go around. We’ve established that by now, and I’m not sure there’s much utility in reapportioning the blame every 12 hours.

In fairness to the media, I suppose “exposing” each and every oversight in the oversight process (if you will) is useful to the extent it could make relevant parties more vigilant in the future, although I’d point to the recurring nature of crises and the commonalities between them, as evidence to the contrary.

On Monday, in one of the latest backward-looking exposés, the Wall Street Journal informed us that when KPMG gave SVB “a clean bill of health” a mere two weeks prior to the bank’s implosion, the audit opinion “flagged potential losses on loans as a critical audit matter [but] was silent on [the] unrealized bond losses and ability to hold them given a reliance on potentially flighty deposits.”

The linked article is worth reading, particularly on a slow financial news day. And yet, I can’t help but feel like everyone is ignoring the central problem at the heart of last month’s drama, because if we acknowledge it head on, we’re admitting that the system is a house of cards.

The Journal quoted a University of Michigan professor who described KPMG’s process as an example of missing “the fire in the basement or the box of dynamite on the first floor,” even as the audit opinion was keen to “point out the peeling paint on the flower box.” But the real issue is that SVB, like all banks, was built on a shaky foundation.

Banking is a business that relies on maturity and liquidity transformation, which is just a sophisticated-sounding way of saying that only a fraction of the money banks say is readily available to depositors actually is. The rest of it is tied up somewhere, and often for a very long time.

Yes, everyone with even a passing interest in finance knows that, and sure, a majority of the educated public knows it too, but we do tend to ignore it as a matter of course, and not just because of the FDIC and what we assume is the government’s aversion to saddling bank depositors with losses. We ignore it for the same reason most of us don’t go around all day pondering what death means — it’s terrifying, so we don’t think about it.

We habitually describe SVB’s deposit base as “flighty” and “concentrated,” where the former is an oblique criticism of the bank’s depositors and the latter is a criticism of management. But if we put aside any visceral aversion to venture capitalists (and frankly, we shouldn’t treat VCs as a monolith to be uniformly demonized), how much sense does it make to blame (implicitly or otherwise) depositors? If you put your money in a bank, and you want it all back, are you “flighty”? Maybe. I guess. But really, you’re just someone (or some company) who thinks it’s your money, and therefore it should be available to you whenever you want it, in its entirety.

But it’s not. Available to you, at any time, in its entirety, or at least not if everyone else comes wanting their money too, and at the same time you want yours.

SVB’s bond portfolio wasn’t a problem because of the unrealized losses, it was a problem because if everyone suddenly called bulls–t on the maturity transformation charade, those losses might have to be crystallized, opening the door to insolvency.

It was an anarchist’s dream come true, albeit not at the scale necessary to bring about actual anarchy. Not all crypto fans are anarchists, of course, but, as JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote, “For crypto supporters, the US banking crisis exposed the weaknesses of the traditional financial system given banks’ maturity mismatch is susceptible to runs.” He went on:

Crypto supporters have been arguing for a long time that the crypto ecosystem is superior not least because deposits are held in entities such as stablecoins which as a digital form of money market funds are 100% backed with high quality liquid assets and are thus less susceptible to runs. The US banking crisis and the intense shift in US bank deposits to US money market funds is viewed by crypto supporters as a vindication of the crypto ecosystem.

It’s supremely ironic, in that context, that Circle (the sponsor of the USDC stablecoin) briefly lost its peg due to short-lived ambiguity around more than $3 billion in deposits held at SVB.

Of course, without the maturity mismatch, the credit creation mechanism at banks would be severely impaired, and if you forced all depositors into term deposits, many of them would balk given that such an arrangement would effectively rule out transaction accounts.

As discussed here on any number of occasions over the years, without credit, there’s no growth. Credit is, in essence, just a manifestation of faith in the future. Without credit, there’s no future. Credit isn’t an all or nothing phenomenon. Between ultra-easy credit and no credit, there’s a continuum. The harder credit is to obtain and the more onerous the terms, the less growth there’s likely to be. That’s part and parcel of the current US macro zeitgeist in the wake of SVB’s failure.

At the end of the day, SVB’s real “problem” (note the scare quotes) was the same problem all banks have: If everyone wants their money at the same time, it’s over. But the paradox is that if banks can’t borrow short to lend long, there’s no growth. Then we’re back to the pre-modern dilemma: Growth is generally a function of credit creation, and without credit creation, growth is constrained, and the more constrained growth is, the less willing people will be to extend credit.