The Wall Street Journal‘s editors’ headline and subheadline is on a reasonable track:
Punishing Banks for Regulatory Failure
Regulators want to saddle midsize banks with new capital rules.
The editors the proceed to disparage the regulators’ move, and they’re correct about that. They’re mistaken in their lede, though, and that leads them to the erroneous aspect of their disparagement:
Silicon Valley Bank failed owing to rising interest rates and lapses by regulators, not a shortage of capital.
It’s true that a shortage of capital did not cause SVB’s failure, except as the proximate outcome of the real cause of the failure, an outcome that made the failure inevitable.