Until the self-identifying “transgender” murderer in Nashville and then the indictment of Donald Trump knocked it off the front pages, the big story of March was the banking crisis heralded by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. All three stories were, of course, instantly politicized. What you thought about them stood virtually no chance of being determined by anything other than which side of the ever-widening political divide between Left and Right you stand on. What, we may wonder, is the point of paying attention to news or comment if everything that happens is instantly slotted into a preexisting narrative? This must be why ordinary people are increasingly tuning out the media, leaving that arena to become the playground of fanatics and obsessives seeking only for confirmation of and fellowship in what they already know.

Those of us whose memories reach back to the last banking crisis may remember the economists’ term of art: “moral hazard.” Or we may not, since most of those in public life who backed the bailouts of financial institutions in 2008—which was nearly everyone—didn’t like to be reminded of what, besides financial and job security for the bailees, the hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars (it seemed like a lot of money at the time) were buying. And what they were buying, as the new bailouts make plain, was a tacit assurance that risky and imprudent and foolish and corrupt behavior in the future on the part of people entrusted with other