What SVB, Credit Suisse, and Other Bank Meltdowns Mean for Wall Street

“The nature of bank failures is that they tend to take people by surprise,” Zachary D. Carter tells Nick Bilton (sitting in for Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox) on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive. “Nobody thinks that it’s a crisis until it’s way out of hand, and all of a sudden, things get out of hand very quickly.”

Carter, the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, recently wrote a piece titled “This Bank Panic Should Not Exist” for Vanity Fair. Here, he and Bilton talk through the domino effects of bank collapses—in terms of both human screwups and sheer fiscal luck—and what the ongoing debacle spells for the national and global economies.