The Circle Debacle - Silicon Valley Bank and the Failure of its Management

As is now well-known, Circle's USDC went through a panic over the weekend when it was revealed that US$3.3 billion of their reserves were sitting inside Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) when that bank failed.

Roughly what happened at SVB is what you'd expect to happen if a car mechanic was appointed head of maintenance at an airline: the planes will crash because the mechanic cannot use the tools properly.

And then we are going to work through what this means, in turn, for Circle. Circle made some basic mistakes here that should never have happened. And none of this is coming from perfect hindsight: these are well-studied problems in finance with long-settled solutions.