Congress will hold hearings this week on lessons from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Some lawmakers are calling for the financial stampede that brought down SVB to be followed by a political stampede of new, restrictive laws and regulations. We can learn much from this episode, but not if we move heedlessly in reaction to the loudest, most partisan voices. Several politicians have called for rolling back the carefully calibrated regulatory changes stemming from the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act of 2018—a banking-reform law enacted by strong bipartisan majorities. As Wolfgang Pauli once said of a fellow physicist’s hypothesis, that’s so nonsensical, it isn’t even wrong.

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