In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed almost overnight, becoming the second-largest bank failure in American history and forcing emergency federal intervention to contain the damage. A report now confirms what many suspected: Federal Reserve staff had seen the warning signs — the interest rate exposure, the fragile deposit structure, the structural fault lines — and yet did not act. The failure was not one of knowledge, but of courage; regulators, fearing the embarrassment of overreach, chose the quieter risk of doing nothing. In the long arc of institutional accountability, this moment