AUSTIN, Texas — Former Speaker of the House and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi talked to Evan Smith, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and co-founder of the The Texas Tribune, about the state of our democracy at a panel at the South by Southwest Conference on Sunday morning.

However, before getting into the panel’s assigned topic, “The Future of Global Democracy,” Smith took advantage of having the former speaker to get her perspective on the crisis with the Silicon Valley Bank, and to ask her how the bank’s collapse could have happened.

“I was speaker when we wrote the Dodd-Frank Bill to make sure that what had happened before, we would be protected from,” Pelosi said. “The previous president to this one, when he was in office, he advocated for reducing some of those protections. And that happened in his tax giveaway bill to the top 1%...83% of the benefits going to the top 1%... but, at the same time, he removed many of these protections. And that… if they were still in place, and the bank had to honor them, this might have been avoided.”

Going further, the speaker emerita speculated on the future of Silicon Valley Bank, and what might happen to the money the depositors placed within.

“I don’t think there’s any appetite in the country for bailing out a bank. I do think that we know that we must honor the depositors, with FDIC up to $250,000. That is what the law is. We actually try to make that higher, for protection of small businesses and the rest.”

Pelosi went on to say, “The Republicans refused to do that, because the big, big banks wanted to be able to attract those depositors. In any event, we have a, shall we say, a little bit of a difference of perspective about who we’re there to protect.”

“In terms of the bank, what we would hope to see, by tomorrow morning, is some other bank to buy the bank, so this is not taxpayer money bailing out a bank.“